A poet falls so deep in love that the world renames him Majnun — madman — and the East's Romeo and Juliet begins: two lovers kept apart by everything but death.
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Centuries before Verona, the desert had its star-crossed lovers. Nizami's 12th-century masterpiece made Layla and Majnun the love story of the Islamic world — sung from Istanbul to Delhi, painted in a thousand miniatures, quoted by Eric Clapton.
Persian is one of the most musical languages ever written, and Nizami is among its supreme craftsmen. The interlinear opens the couplets one word at a time — the passion legible even before the language is.
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