Listened for the second time by different person. Second listen was so much better, probably because the reader read with such feeling.

لا اسم؛ لا اسم بعد اليوم و لا نور؛
فقد فقدت لينور

https://youtu.be/UQ0LZZnKHis

یک دور خوندمش و وقتی تموم شد دوباره برگشتم و از اول خوندم، بعد صوتیش رو گوش کردم و از رو خوندم و بعد چشمهام رو بستم و دوباره‌ گوش دادم.... و قرار نیست ازینکار دست بردارم، NEVERMORE.....

So what do you do when you can’t sleep even the clock tell you its 2’o clock of the night? You creep yourself out by reading creepy poems where a Raven talks back to you, saying ...Nevermore...
Still can’t sleep? Listen to this rendition. (It mostly scares the daylights out of me)
Here are two of my most favorite passages, which I could once, long time back, in another lifetime, recite by rote

n  Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore?"
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Lenore!" —
Merely this, and nothing more. n

n  And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted- nevermore!” n

P.S: this usually manages to throw me into throes of despondency

Creepy and cool illustrations help set the mood.

Just one suggestion, if someone wants to read this poem he/she should read it in a cold winter night when fog is pressing against the window and dew drops are wetting the window panes. In utter silence, read it aloud,or in whispers perhaps. And you will know why Poe was a genius.

You know the place between sleep and wake, the place where you can still remember dreaming, it’s a worst place to be in when you no longer can sleep nor can dream.we,the humans are a doomed species who ever breathed on planet earth, the moments we cherish turns into memories, the things we desire become wishes, the people we love turns into strangers, and the present we live becomes past…
We all live our dear life with a feel of loss, we all devise altered approaches to seek peace, we all at some phase of our life are rendered alone in a crowd of people around us, we all want to be more understood than loved, we all want someone to hear us when our inner voice is too deafening to hear anything, we all have heard the tapping of something at our window, we all have called those at the past night who are no longer with us, and we’ve heard them answering to our call, talking to us in whispers, when the eyes sleep but heart beats in a relentless rhythm, we hear them,beacause we so want to..
Poe, has a distinct eminence in saying so much with so little words, One can virtually sense the drabness and the loneness he must have felt being alone in his study with barely a fire left and everything dark around him. It almost is letting you think he is completely lost in his own misery from his loss, the loss of his loved one, narrator in his sleep-wake state hears the tapping on window, and at first encounters nothing but darkness.
Raven, can surely be the imagination of the narrator and so is the whole dialogue that proceeds, but using this bird only, has its own regard, Raven is a historical figure in bible, Norse mythology and other references, it symbolizes bad omen, thought and memory, death, darkness, wisdom and at times superiority, and we glimpse all the symbolism visualized through lines.
Whatever caused the poet to die early, The Raven and its symbolism has to do with his psychosis….
and as he says:
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before....

Shall we descend into madness? Shall we be haunted by our own desires? Shall we be consumed by that terrible facet of life known only as death? Shall we cling to what cannot be reanimated? Shall we wish for a return of something that has long been in darkness?

Shall we become obliterated by the brutal finality of such a statement as “nevermore?”

Lenore has gone. She has departed from this life, and is permanently out of the reach of the man. The raven represents the solidarity of this. Despite how much he longs for the impossible, despite how much he hopes for something that could never occur, he still has that inclination that the fantastical could happen: he has to believe that she could come back. And the raven represents the voice of reason, the voice of actuality. And it kills him. It is pain, despair, melancholy and a spiritual death all rolled into one haunting feathery package.

He rebels against this voice of rationality. He knows the voice speaks the truth, but he cannot simply accept it. He has lost something vital; he has lost part of himself that will never grace his presence again. And he clings to hope, a false hope such as it is. The raven smashes this to oblivion; it destroys any last semblance of the miraculous occurring. It makes the man realise that this is life, not some whimsical world where nothing bad ever happens. People die. People we love die. Nothing can change that. Lenore will never walk through his chamber door again, and the reality drives him into madness. It shatters his life.

”And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted- nevermore!”

  

His soul will never lift anymore; hope shall never be lifted anymore. By the end of the poem he has full realised the reality of the situation. The raven, the dark bird of harsh truth, the harbinger of the words he simply doesn’t want to hear, has become demonised. It has become the very object he did not want to face; he created a sense of longing to protect himself from the emotional loss of Lenore, and this bubble of falsehood has been burst. Reality sets in, and it is a fate worse than death. It is one of persecution and mental chaos as the bird is simply unable to supply the man with all his answers. He is driven mad by the unknown.

The man in the poem has lost “Lenore.” But, what is this Lenore? Is she a woman? Is she this man’s lost love? Or is she something much, much, more? I think on the surface level of the poem she is his dead wife. But the archaic references speak of something else. Lenore could perhaps be a universal suggestion of a lost sense of self or even humanity. We are no longer what we once were. It is also rather significant that the man is persecuted only by the natural world. Very much in the Romanticism vein, man stands aside from nature. He has become something different with his modernisation and industrialisation.

He walks outside his nature. And Poe, being an anti-transcendentalism thinker (a dark romantic), demonstrates that life isn’t all sunshine and roses, and nor could it ever be. It is pessimism in full force, and although I strongly disagree with the outlook on life, and appreciate the idealistic utopia offered in the poetry of Percy Shelley and other Romantics much more, I do love the dark beauty of this poem. The finality of the phrase “nevermore” is nothing short of maddening reality for our lost man. It is the end of hope.

This is quite easily one of Poe's finest works, and I highly recommend listening to this version of the poem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Befli... (It's narrated by Christopher Lee!)

Look who’s tweeting now!

Fear for fear’s sake - Delusions empowered!



Heard it on The Scarecrow News last night. A tale of ominous foreboding. Tapping, rapping, something happening in the world, filling the soul with fear and worry. What happened last night in the barren field? The Scarecrow shouts it out:

“Who would believe it? The ravens? We let many in, and it has caused problems we wouldn’t have thought possible!”

But what happened? Rumours spread. Thousands and thousands of ravens attacked the Scarecrow in the middle of the barren field? Checking the facts, the guardians of the field say:

“’Tis the wind and nothing more!”

But the wind? The wind can’t have done all that alone? (“All what?”, the croaking ravens ask. “Nothing happened last night in the barren field!”)

“There must be more. Evermore! A Raven Field Massacre?”

Rumours spread with every tweet, the more the twitter rises, the more it sounds familiar, and thus true. Tweeting in a circle of calculated fear.”Thousands and thousands of ravens attacked the Scarecrow in the middle of the barren field? Why did they do it? What for?” The birds are tweeting in reply: “Nothing happened, tell no lies, nevermore, nevermore!”

And the Scarecrow scornful: “I have the freedom to tweet, just like the birds. Scarecrows have the right to claim their honest lies against the dishonest facts! I will tweet it out, evermore, evermore!”

Ravens in fear, croaking and tapping, rapping and croaking:

“Our food is gone, the earth is scorched, we can’t survive nevermore!”

The Scarecrow yells: “See, they are violent, they are activists, we must protect our country from the ravens. They want to take our freedom away, our food, our jobs, our right to destroy their natural habitat!”

“Let’s build a wall, with a roof, to shut them out.
Then they can fly around in the air somewhere! Why should we care?
Scarecrows first!”

And Scarecrow News reports, the wall will pay for itself, it will protect the scarecrows, and make the barren field safe again. The croaking and tapping and rapping from the supporters of the ravens is just humbug, a staged fight. All the other birds love the scarecrow, and the scarecrow loves them.

Voices mingle, louder and louder, croaking versus shouting, choking versus pouting:

“But nothing will grow on the barren field: Nevermore!”

“And the Scarecrow is unharmed, surely that is proof that the ravens did not attack it?”

But the Scarecrow News knows better.

“If the Scarecrow says something happened in the barren field last night, then it did, regardless of whether there is any proof or not. You have to skip the sources, and go straight to truth! The raven supporters are the enemy of the entire scarecrow nation! And of all the honest birds as well! Their call for free flight for all is disgusting and sad! So sad!”

The Scarecrow promises:

“Let’s make the scarecrows great again!”

The ravens around the world remember, tapping, rapping, croaking:

“We have heard that before! And people said: Nevermore!”

And the ravens continue croaking, sometimes joking, always reminding the scarecrows of the real nightmare, the one with the ravens robbed of their rightful place in the community of living things, not the made-up story of the ravens attacking the scarecrow. It didn’t happen last night in the barren field! Why would ravens want to go there anyway? No food, no security, people shooting at them, a ridiculous Scarecrow swaggering in the middle of it all?

But the Scarecrow has no peace:

“But the Raven still beguiling all my fancy into smiling,
Straight I built the greatest wall in front of bird, and bust and door;
tThen, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
tFancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore—
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”

And the ravens keep croaking! It is the scarecrow that is a fake - scary but hollow! Hollow but threatening, dangerous in its hollowness!

In a barren field of fear, history repeats itself. But the ravens croak, louder and louder.

… Nevermore, nevermore, nevermore ...

El poema "El Cuervo" de Edgar Allan Poe es una Obra Maestra en la literatura de terror y suspenso. Publicado por primera vez en 1845, el poema cuenta la historia de un hombre que está sufriendo por la pérdida de su amada Leonora. En la noche, un cuervo misterioso llega a su ventana y comienza a hablar con él, repitiendo una y otra vez la palabra "Nunca más".

La poesía de Poe se caracteriza por su estilo oscuro, melancólico y romántico. En "El Cuervo", Poe utiliza una variedad de técnicas literarias para crear una atmósfera de angustia y desesperación, desde la repetición de la palabra "Nunca más" hasta la rima interna y el uso de aliteraciones y asonancias.

El poema también puede ser interpretado (así lo interpreto yo) como una reflexión sobre el dolor y la pérdida, y cómo estos sentimientos pueden afectar nuestra percepción de la realidad. La figura del cuervo, con su constante repetición de "Nunca más", puede ser vista como una representación del dolor y la tristeza que nunca desaparecen completamente.

La habilidad de Poe para crear una atmósfera de suspenso y terror, combinada con su poesía lírica y melancólica, lo convierten en una de las obras más icónicas de la literatura mundial. En mi humilde opinión uno de los mejores poemas jamás escritos.

Charles van Buren
TOP 1000 REVIEWER
5.0 out of 5 stars

The Raven in English and French

March 20, 2019
Verified Purchase

This review is of the Kindle Edition, free from Amazon, entitled, The Raven $l English $l French.
Publication date: March 25, 2011
Language: English
ASIN: B004TUXH3Y

This volume contains Poe's The Raven in both English and French. There are short passages in English followed by the same passages in French. The English version is of course a five star piece of literature. I can not speak to the French translation. There is no introduction nor commentaries, notes or illustrations.

Note that Amazon has combined reviews of several different editions.

3.5 stars with a bonus for the illustrations, which can be found online here for free, with images and text side by side.

One of my goals this year is to catch up on classics, which hasn't quite been my cup of tea ever since I stopped reading them for school. This was pretty good given my expectations. The language and cadence and rhymes were beautiful. The plot might have taken me a few tries to fully understand, and didn't feel as special, but I have a weak spot for lyrical writing so I enjoyed this overall. Now, this is the first poem I've read in like ... maybe ever? So consider my sample size limited and my rating skewed. I'll very likely be reading more in order to fix that soon.