This brief post is just to share a neat web site, which has a great little collection of short, short Persian stories. These are not “short stories” as in ten pages, but “short stories” as in one paragraph.

Story 01

Here is a taste, appropriate for Valentine’s Day:

پیر مرد از صدای خر و پف پیر زن هر شب شکایت داشت !
پیر زن هرگز نمی پذرفت…
شبی پیر مرد آن صدا را ضبط کرد که صبح حرفش را ثابت کند…
اما صبح پیر زن دیگر هرگز بیدار نشد…
و آن صدای ضبط شده لا لایی هر شب پیر مرد شـــد…

My translation:

A old man always complained about his wife’s snoring.

The old woman never accepted it.

One night the old man made a recording so that he could prove his point the next morning.

But the old woman never woke up.

And that recording has become the old man’s lullaby, every night.

(Go get a tissue if you need to, I’ll wait.)

There is a wealth of material out there for language learning, but finding them is always serendipitous. In this case, I saw a little story/parable on Facebook, and typed a phrase from it into Google. One of the results was this collection of stories.