Firdausi

Abu'l-Qasim Firdausi (also spelled Ferdowsi, Firdusi), born near Tus in Khurasan around 940, was the great epic poet of Persia. He spent some thirty years, until about 1010, composing the Shahnameh, the Book of Kings, a poem of some fifty thousand couplets that follows the legendary and historical kings of Iran from the first king, Kaiumers, to the Arab conquest.

By tradition he dedicated the poem to Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni and felt himself ill rewarded, and the satire attributed to him is one of the best-known stories of Persian literary history, though its details are legendary. He is thought to have died around 1020 in Tus. The English version here is James Atkinson's 1832 abridgement, which renders the most famous episodes in verse and links them with prose summary; it is in this form a free adaptation, not a literal translation. The archive also holds the Warners' complete blank-verse translation (1905-1925), of which volumes I–VIII are given so far.