بُزچوش

Early in 2020, Alireza Abiz emailed me a group of his poems including “The Desert Monitor”. He had already prepared initial translations and wanted to work on the texts with an English-language poet. I have no Persian, but enjoyed reading his English versions, as well as his manuscript for The Kindly Interrogator (a selection of his poems he translated working with W.N. Herbert, which was published by Shearsman in 2021). We agreed to work on the poems together and started to meet regularly via Zoom so that he could read the Persian aloud for me and we could discuss the nuances of each line. In a few months, we had translated his poem “On London Bridge”, which was published by The Rialto and which the magazine’s editor, Michael Mackmin, described as a poem “you wait for and wait for . . . Prufrock for today”. We were pleased with our efforts and agreed to try to produce a translation of “The Desert Monitor” by the same method.

Even though I had enjoyed working with Alireza, I was apprehensive about tackling “The Desert Monitor”. It is a vast poem, both in sheer length and in its allusive ambition. Along with the original poem, his translation and a recording of him reading the poem, Alireza sent me a series of initial notes (which have been added as clickable notes on the translation) that offered a glimpse of the range of political, religious, social and literary considerations that the poem is oriented around. One note of caution here is the notes that Alireza provided are in no way exhaustive of the allusions in the text.

One thing that was immediately clear was that the text was self-consciously literary. It evokes writers through multiple traditions, both by name and through quotation. Indeed, the poem ends quoting a line by the poet Forugh Farrokhzad. But as Alireza and I spent more time working on the poem together, I started to understand the way that the literary geography of the poem was entwined with its geo-political undercurrents, for example, how a shadow is cast by the Super Étendard (a combat plane provided by the French government to Saddam Hussein’s regime during the Iraq–Iran War) over the celebration of French literary figures found elsewhere in the poem. Throughout the poem, the real-world consequences of political imaginations are waged against the poetic imagination. At times this is almost brazenly playful and speaks to Alireza’s interest in postmodern poetics. The very real “Day of Nakba” elicits tears in the speaker’s litany of sorrow, but then so does the entirely imagined “Day of Unquenchable Tears”.

Alongside its breadth of reference, the poem is complicated by its fluidity of voice. It shifts about in time and perspective. In my reading, the poem generates the overriding sense of a central speaker and consciousness, and yet this vantage point is often disrupted without warning and the settings and context prove similarly unreliable. Time and place do not behave themselves and perspectives alter and blur. At times, in order to make sure I was not misinterpreting something, I had to ask Alireza bluntly what he meant. It is a confounding question for a poet, and his answers were both illuminating and elusive. The poem does draw, at times, on personal experiences (as a teenager the poet was consumed with revolutionary and religious fervour and volunteered to go to the battle front when he was sixteen), but it frequently also operates in pure fantasy, as when the voice becomes that of an avenging demon.

Where possible, we sought to maintain formal aspects that Alireza employed in the original. The majority of the poem is written in free verse, but where classical Persian metre has been employed we sought to create a corresponding effect in the English. At times, of course, we came up against cultural or linguistic specificities we couldn’t find a way to replicate.  The line “Deliver us from the haunted arch     the broken walls      the ruined aqueduct”, for instance, employs a series of three proverbial images in the Persian for which we could find no suitable equivalent. At other times, there was a tonal unease. One such moment was when discussing the extended refrain of “I cry for . . .” that dominates the middle of the poem. In this section the speaker states, among many other laments, that he cries “for the moustache of Akbar Komole!”, and I wondered aloud if this was a moment of absurd levity (after all, one of Alireza’s collections is called Spaghetti with Mexican Sauce). But Alireza explained that it was intended in earnest, that the Kurdish military leader was, like many Kurds of that generation, both famed for and proud of his moustache. At this point in the poem, the speaker is recognizing his sincere empathy towards a figure and a guerrilla movement he previously took up arms against. We could not find a way to offer that degree of exposition in the English and so had to settle for “I cry for the proud moustache of Akbar Komole”. I am grateful for the space afforded here to at least hint at the depths and currents below the surface of the translation itself.