A beautiful quote from Thoreau

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

Henry David Thoreau
US Transcendentalist author (1817 - 1862)

Dear Sue,
Thank you very much for correcting my errors, they are very useful for me.
If you have time, say me my mistakes, please.

Sue, I read a short story in English, I saw 2 words, forest and jungle.
What is a difference between them?
I heard that forest is artificial and jungle is natural, is it true?

Take care, Faranak

Two Wolves Within

One evening an old Cherokee (an American Indian Tribe) told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, "My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, and lies.
The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth compassion and faith."
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, Which wolf wins?" The old Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed."

I have often thought that I would love to teach a human relations course, analyzing the impact of these wolves within each of us. They all accompany us on our path of life.

A site for English teachers, translators and Students of English in Iran

This site helps Iranian students to learn English. By answering their specific questions, it also provides support and advice to English teachers and translators in areas of difficulties. It is also useful for those who simply want to stay in touch with English and prevent it from evaporating from their minds.

Sue Petrovski is a western writer who loves Mowlana Jalal Od-Din Mohammad, known as Rumi in the West. She is also in love with Mowlana’s country and culture. That is why she is generously and so graciously with us, with Rumi’s fellow countrymen and women, to help us grapple with the vicissitudes of learning English as a foreign language. Difficulties become sweet memories when you have such a great, kind scholar beside you. Just listen to her words:

"Oh, to be able to cross that gap that separates man from man and woman from woman. Oh, to know what you are thinking and what you expect of me. Oh, to be able to have walked down your streets, lived with your clans, and drank and supped and felt as you have felt. Oh, to have done those things. What a wondrous gift that would be, and what a mystery that consciousness, that gift of human kind, is so boxed in and confounded. Is it some kind of test that God instilled in our being, or is it something we must work to correct? Can we in any way train ourselves to be able to see through another's eyes?

The only solution to our self-only knowledge is to go to those lands we have never mentally considered before. We can read Thoreau, or the Bible, or Joseph Campbell or Rumi, or the Sufi Prophets and gain new dimension to our thoughts. We can flesh out one idea with another and another and another – a fountain of different thoughts flowing out from a central theme. We will never understand all that the Other believes and carries in that wondrous mind of theirs, but we can begin to see the breadth of all thought, and through the process, our ethical, moral, and social senses will expand and grow.

'It is when we try to grapple with another man’s intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensive, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.' - Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim"

Whether you are an English teacher or a translator or if you are simply a student of English as a foreign language, please click on the word “comment” below and start talking to us. Whatever you say is welcomed and your questions will be answered. You can also send a personal email to: a.z.mirror@gmail.com

Dear Sue,
Nice to hear from you again. Thank you for correcting my letter. In Iran we have blacks in south of Iran. I saw them when I went to Kish. They speak to Arabic, if you ask about their country, all of them will say: we are an Iranian. In Iran we have racial prejudice, but it isn’t for blacks. It is for an Afghanian worker. They are very poor peoplesatirize them for theirdialect.
I insist you say my mistakes to me, if you have time, please.
After exams I will write more.
I am so sorry for my mistakes.
Take care,
Bahman

Clarity is Freedom

I had tea yesterday with a great theologian,
and he asked me,

“What is your experience of God’s will?”

I liked that question –
for the distillation of thought hones thought in others.
Clarity, I know, is freedom.

What is my experience of God’s will?

Everyone is a traveler. Most all need lodging, food,
and clothes.

I let enter my mouth what will enrich me. I wear what
will make my eye content,
I sleep where I will
wake with the
strength to
deeply
love


all my mind can
hold.

What is God’s will for a wing?
Every bird knows
that.

~ St. Teresa of Avila ~


(Love Poems From God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West by Daniel Ladinsky)

This St. Teresa was a Catholic Saint who lived in Spain in the Sixteenth Century.

The last sentence answers so many questions for me. I hope it speaks to you as well.

Sue

Faranak's writing

Dear Sue,
Thank you very much for your guidance. It was very helpful to me. In the Persian language, we don't have "a, an, the" so, I forget them most of the time.

Today is mother's day. In our religion, we have a woman that she was very virtuous and immaculate and we believe that she was a holy person. Mother's day is her birth day.

Sue, I have a professor that he lived in US for about 20 or 30 years. He is differ with other professors.
In a university most of the professors have a room and they spend their free time there and eat foods and lunch in their room or a special place that is for the personnel but, he eats food in a buffet where student are there and in his free time an break time, he is in a campus of university. He calls student in the first name too and always calls me "Feranak" with a sweet accent, he is very likable.
In Iran, professors are very intimate with students (almost like friends)in some course, specially art, and in a technical course(like my course), relations are friendly an official.
Please say me, how are relations between professor and student there.

My letter is very long, I hope that I can say what I mean correctly and you don't become tired when you read it.
Take care.
Your friend Faranak.

I Dream a World

by Langton Hughes

I dream a world where man
No other man will scorn,
Where love will bless the earth
And peace its paths adorn.
I dream a world where all
Will know sweet freedom's way,
Where greed no longer saps the soul
Nor avarice blights our day.
A world I dream where black or white,
Whatever race you be,
Will share the bounties of the earth
And every man is free,
Where wretchedness will hang its head
And joy, like a pearl,
Attends the needs of all mankind--
Of such I dream, my world!

And I dream a class where we improve our English with the words of great poets and writers.

Langston Hughes

Thanks a lot, Sue for bringing up Langston Hughes. I had always wanted you to talk about him and explain some of his poems to us. One of the greatest contemporary Iranian poets called Ahmad Shamloo translated some selected poems of his into Persian more than a decade ago. That is the good news. The bad news is that Ahmad Shamloo is one of the worst contemporary translators.

I love this one and I think it is very easy to understand even for beginners in English:

“Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die,
Life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly,
Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams go,
Life is a barren field,
Frozen with snow”

They say that Langston Hughes was a waiter in a restaurant when one of America's great poets went there. He then placed one of his poems on a plate and put it on the poet's table. Then once the great poet saw Langston's poem, he got so sxcited and liked it so much that he rose from his chair and read it for the people in the restaurant aloud and announced that he thought he was a great poet.

Have you heard this, Sue?

The Dream Keeper

Dreams are the vapor of our hopes and aspirations. “What do you dream?” we ask one another when we are very young? It is so important that poets, dreamers, musicians of every culture and subculture give voice to our dreams, for without dreams and hopes a culture will die.

Here is one of Black America’s famous Dream Keepers: Langston Hughes takes a place as one of the foremost black American writers. Born in 1902 and died in 1967, he was of mixed race: his grandmothers were black and his grandfathers were white. Not uncommon in early America. Hughes wrote of Harlem, of being black, of jazz, and all the life that seethed in that black section of New York City which he loved. Hughes was definitely one of the American negros’ Dream Keepers.


“The Dream Keeper

Bring me all of your dreams,
You dreamers.
Bring me all of your dreams
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world.”

Here is a poem in which he uses common slang terms. Earlier we discussed black English, or “Jive Talk.” (I put a few definitions in for the reader.)

“Motto

I play it cool (unruffled, calm, with a certain modern flair)
And dig all jive (understand all popular things)
That's the reason
I stay alive.

My motto,
As I live and learn,
is:
Dig and Be Dug (Understand and like others and be understood and liked by them in return.)
In Return.”

Here is one of his most famous poems:

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers, by Langston Hughes

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than
The flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I’ve bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young,
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincon
Went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
Bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

I hope you learn to love Hughes work as I do.

Sue