My association with my friend, Ali, goes back quite a few years by now - in fact, I have actually lost count. We began a working friendship when Ali read a little handout of mine on my literary website about Henry David Thoreau's Walden. He then asked me to help him with some difficult passages in the original, because he was making a translation of this American masterpiece into Persian. From then on a friendship ensued. We have worked together on a number of different projects, not the least of which is Ali's translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. His English translation of this work has now been published in Iran with an introduction that I wrote for the book myself.
This is my first post here. And it's a kind of introduction. I aim to write more posts here in the future, both about the vicissitudes of learning English, and about aspects of literature - English and American and, of course, literature in other languages as well. I hope this blog will have many readers in due course, and I hope it will be a success.
Dr. Steven C. Scheer
