SeiTT (asker) Jun 18, 2010:

Apologies and appreciation First of all, I am afraid that I have been having various kinds of difficulties with regard to ease of access to the Net of late, and also to ability to type Persian. Unfortunately I missed out a bit of the sentence:
چند دلقک و معرکهگیر که کارشان به کسادی کشیده بود

I totally agree with our friend’s assessment of the answer, and apologise for lateness of response. It is truly admirable that Ebrahim was able to give a correct answer to my incorrect question!

I am now fully back in action, as it were, so hopefully the above difficulties are a thing of the past.

Edward Plaisance Jr May 30, 2010:

ended/finished versus ended in/finished in Let me see if I can clarify this with examples...

We would use "ended in" if some kind of result follows it, such as "In 1995, their marriage ended in divorce."...but if we do not have "in divorce" we would simply say "In 1995, their marriage ended."

Examples: "the game ended in a tie after 4 hours" but "the game ended after 4 hours"
"the conference ended in disagreement yesterday" but "the conference ended yesterday"

I think Simon's sentence would be "several clowns and storytellers whose work had finished/had ended"

If this is still not clear, please let me know.