Richard (Dick) Davis (born 1945) is an English–American Iranologist, poet, university professor, a vocal dissident critic of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and award-winning translator of Persian verse, who is affiliated with the literary movement known as New Formalism in American poetry.
Shortly before graduating from Cambridge University, Davis was left heartbroken by the suicide of his schizophrenic brother and decided to begin living and teaching abroad.
After teaching in Greece and Italy, in 1970 Davis decided to live permanently in Tehran during the reign of the last Shah.
As a result, he taught English at the University of Tehran, and married Afkham Darbandi, about whom he has since written and published many love poems, in 1974.
Davis is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has been called, by The Times Literary Supplement, "our finest translator from Persian."
"[6] Davis has credited the English master at the Withernsea school, John Gibson, with instilling in him a love of poetry.
Davis adds that by the time he "went up to Cambridge," he had, "pretty well read the entire canon of English poetry."
Gibson once urged Davis to read John Milton's Paradise Lost over summer break.
He commented, "Somehow I discovered Dickinson, which was strange back then because American poetry was never taught in English schools.
I loved the epigrammatic aspect of her work – poems that were short, sharp, and to the point, and I thought to myself: 'That's the kind of poetry I want to write.
'"[9] Davis attended King's College, Cambridge,[10] where he was introduced to Persian[11] and Indian literature through his friendship with E.M. Forster[8] and to San Francisco LGBT poet Thom Gunn.
[10] When asked if he had ever attempted to write free verse, Davis replied, "I tried it for a very short time, less than a year, when I was about eighteen.
He was a very unhappy child, and he was diagnosed as being mentally unstable – as a schizophrenic – and he spent a lot of his adolescence in and out of institutions... my years at Cambridge were shadowed by my brother since he was often ill.
'[13]According to Davis, "I left Cambridge in my early twenties, and I taught first in Greece and then in Italy, but I was feeling the urge to go somewhere outside of Europe, and a friend of mine who'd been working as an archaeologist in Iran said it was a wonderful country and that he was planning to teach there for a while.
At the time, we had a couple of friends who were Indians who lived on a back street, and they said, 'Why don't you come and stay with us until all this quiets down?'
So we moved in with them for about three weeks, but it soon became clear that it wasn't going to quiet down in the foreseeable future, so we made arrangements to leave the country.
More than any other English poet of his generation, Davis has created a distinctly personal voice, an accomplishment all the more impressive because he has chosen to work in a controlled, classical style.
He never cultivates idiosyncrasies, and yet one can always recognize a Davis poem by the intensity of his imagination and the deceptive simplicity of his words.
"[20] After also highly praising the epigrammatic quality which Davis had learned from the poetry of Emily Dickinson,[21] Gioia concluded by writing, "This obsession to condense experience and language into tight, controlled forms is matched by Davis' need to establish a moral dimension in his poetry.
Some readers will clearly resist a sensibility so certain of its mission, but a mind that can recreate and evaluate a scene in a few memorable lines deserves attention in this garrulous age.
"[22] Davis also made a translation with Afkham's assistance of Attar of Nishapur's The Conference of Birds, which was published in 1984.
Since then, Davis has published literary translations of a collection of medieval Persian epigrams in 1997, Ferdowsi's The Shahnameh, Iran's national epic, in 2006, and Fakhruddin As'ad Gurgani's famous love story Vis and Ramin in 2009.
The collection includes many poetic laments written after the Royal House of Inju was overthrown in 1353 by warlord Mubariz al-Din Muhammad, an Islamic Fundamentalist, who imposed Sharia Law upon Shiraz, closed the wine shops, and forced the women of the city to wear the chador and be confined indoors unless escorted by a male relative.
"[24] In 2015, Davis published a collection of translated poems by Fatemeh Shams, an award-winning Iranian female poet and vocal critic of the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
[25] According to literary critic Cynthia Haven, Davis first learned of Shams during a visit to Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, a fellow scholar of Persian literature, in Leiden, in The Netherlands.
As Davis was ready to turn in for the night, Seyed-Gohrab urged him to read through a sheaf of poems by Fatemeh Shams.
Prison poems begin during the same era in Persia as well – Mas'ud Sa'd (1046–1121) starts the sad tradition, and it continues to this day.
"[28] While speaking of his fascination with the life stories of other immigrants and exiles, Davis spoke about how many he encountered while he and Afkham were living in Santa Barbara, California, "I was always coming across people, who, with very little prompting, would tell me about their journeys from China or Iraq or Vietnam.
Many people claim that America is very hard on foreigners; but, in fact, it's much more welcoming than anywhere else, and I find that a very noble aspect of American history.