Dick Davis (translator)

In 2015, Davis published a collection of translated poems by Fatemeh Shams, an award-winning Iranian female poet and vocal critic of the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Shams, like the Davises, is currently living in exile in the United States.

In 2012, Davis published Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz. The book is a collection of verse by the poets of Medieval Shiraz, which was so secular and hedonistic compared to other cities in the Islamic World that Davis compares it with Venice. The collection includes many poetic laments written after the Royal House of Inju was overthrown in 1353 by warlord Mubariz al-Din Muhammad, an Islamic Fundamentalist, who imposed Sharia Law upon Shiraz, closed the wine shops, and forced the women of the city to wear the chador and be confined indoors unless escorted by a male relative. According to Davis, Mubariz was sarcastically dubbed "The Morals Officer," by the poets and people of Shiraz, who were overjoyed when Mubariz was ultimately overthrown and blinded by his son, Shah Shoja Mozaffari, who reversed his father's Islamic fundamentalist policies.

Davis' poetry collections have been chosen as books of the year by The Sunday Times (UK) in 1989; The Daily Telegraph (UK) in 1989; The Economist (UK) in 2002; The Washington Post in 2010, and The Times Literary Supplement (UK) in 2013.

Davis also made a translation with Afkham's assistance of Attar of Nishapur's The Conference of Birds, which was published in 1984. Since then, Davis has published literary translations of a collection of medieval Persian epigrams in 1997, Ferdowsi's The Shahnameh, Iran's national epic, in 2006, and Fakhruddin As'ad Gurgani's famous love story Vis and Ramin in 2009.

After arrived in the United Kingdom, Davis began writing and publishing poetry of his own. In a 1980 book review, American poet and literary critic Dana Gioia commented, "Reading Dick Davis' new book Seeing the World, confirms my impression that he is one of the two or three best young poets now writing in England. With only two thin books to his credit, Davis is already a fully realized poet. There is not mistaking one of his poems. More than any other English poet of his generation, Davis has created a distinctly personal voice, an accomplishment all the more impressive because he has chosen to work in a controlled, classical style. He never cultivates idiosyncrasies, and yet one can always recognize a Davis poem by the intensity of his imagination and the deceptive simplicity of his words. In an age when American and British English are drifting further apart, Davis is also remarkable in how fully his poems are audible to an American ear."

The Davises left Iran for the United Kingdom in November 1978.

Of his relationship with his wife Afkham Darbandi Davis has said, "There were, of course problems because her parents were very much against it. It was the usual concerns, marrying a foreigner, we don't know who he is and all of that. So I stayed in Iran for two more years, and we were married in 1974."

After teaching in Greece and Italy, in 1970 Davis fell in love with an Iranian woman, Afkham Darbandi, and decided to live permanently in Tehran during the reign of the last Shah. As a result, he taught English at the University of Tehran, and married Afkham Darbandi, about whom he has since written and published many love poems, in 1974.

Born into a working-class family shortly before the end of World War II, Davis grew up in the Yorkshire fishing village of Withernsea during the 1950s, where an experimental school made it possible for Davis to become the first member of his family to attend university.

Davis has said that he was very influenced by his stepfather, who had a passionate love of reading about world history. He added, "My stepfather, in many ways, is a very noble man, and he always was. He served in the Second World War and he was highly decorated for bravery. He never talked about it, but I'm certain he killed people in combat and felt quite terrible about it. When I was a very young boy, I remember him bringing a German guest into the home. In those days, it was a terrible thing to do in a little village. Naturally, the Germans had a terrible reputation in England during the 1950s. But he didn't care. He wanted to show his hospitality. A few years later, when I was about eight or nine, we had a West Indian staying in our house, and he was the first black person to ever appear in the village. My stepfather had befriended the young man in London, and he'd always had this belief that nation's shouldn't be isolated from each other."

Dick Davis (born 1945) is an English–American Persophile and Iranologist, poet, university professor, and translator of verse, who is affiliated with the literary movement known as New Formalism in American poetry.

Davis was born on 18 April 1945 in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England, but grew up in Withernsea, Yorkshire. He never knew his biological father, who left when Davis was two years old. His mother remarried soon afterwards and, even though his mother and stepfather were working-class people with very little education, they both read voraciously. Davis later recalled, "...there were many books around the house, and I was expected to read them like everyone else."