Conference of the Birds: A Seeker's Journey to God

Rating:
Summary: A wonderful work but this isn't the best English version.
Review: The Conference of the Birds is a marvellous book--a sufi treatise on the spiritual life written in Persian rhyming couplets. This translation is not in poetry, but in rather dull prose. In addition the translator leaves out a number of the stories that make up the bulk of the work. He mistranslates at a few crucial points.

I would recommend instead the extraordinary translation by Dick Davis and Afkham Darbandi. With great skill the whole work is translated into rhyming couplets like the original. Davis' rhythm and rhyme carry you through the work at a cracking pace, unlike the plodding prose of this version. Davis and Darbandi's translation is in the Penguin Classics series, ISBN 0140444343, also available from Amazon, where you can see a sample of their work.