Poet and translator Hajar Hussaini has made her mark powerfully with the debut collection, Disbound, which navigates the distance between her two countries—Afghanistan and the United States—with musical precision and great sensitivity to linguistic friction and spark. Additionally, in her work to bring the texts from her native Persian into English, she is continuing a vital poetic lineage of political urgency, independent voice, and pathways towards empathy—powerfully exemplified in her translation of S. Asef Hossaini’s poems in our Spring 2023 issue. In this following interview, Hussaini discusses her personal statement of a “poetics of abandonment”, the communication channel between nations, and writing from “within” as opposed to “about”.
Terezia Klasova (TK): In an essay you wrote for The Poetry Foundation, you suggest an approach to writing called a “poetics of abandonment.” Is it characteristic only of your writing of poetry, or do you consider it descriptive of most, if not all, of your writing? Do you think it can be applied to other types of writing or other authors, and if yes, how so?
Hajar Hussaini (HH): I intended the “poetics of abandonment” to be a statement on my poetry collection, Disbound, and I’ve described it as the culmination of political and personal losses that manifest in a radical offering of language, sincerity, and understanding—in the hope of creating a (perhaps false) sense of equilibrium between the poet and her reader. I used the Persian concept of Taroof as the central metaphor of this poetics; I understand Taroof, in its essence, as a refusal to become the subject of pity, and through writing about it I came to see it as the only way out of certain intrinsically hierarchical relationships.
As I explained in the essay, writing abandonment is contingent upon the circumstances in which a poet writes. Of course, Afghan poets of my generation share this context, and some may conceive of composing poetry similarly (e.g. in giving one’s all to the poem). But I don’t know if categorizing their works under “poetics of abandonment” is helpful because the poets I translate have a readership in Persian, whereas I write in English. Their readers come from similar sociocultural backgrounds and are familiar with that loss because they share a collective memory, whereas that memory does not have an equivalent currency for my readers because the average English reader of American poetry who would gravitate toward my work is presumably less familiar with my literary and political references. In this way, I have lost something that an Afghan poet writing in Persian has not, but I have also gained readers that they will only have in English if a translator mediates.
It’s important to mention something about being an Afghan who has lived in between Afghanistan and Iran. I write poetry in English, and Persian is my mother tongue; I know both languages very intimately. Like Hossaini and myself, many Afghans have lived in Iran—and those who have not, have read Iranian books, watched Iranian films, and listened to BBC Persian. So, contemporary Afghan literature in Persian is a blend of Kabuli and Iranian Persian.
I think of the poetic statement genre as simultaneously personal and public. The statement traces the conceits of one poet while inviting other poets to similarly conceive. Regarding the influence of writing “abandonment” over my translations, I think it has so far played a role of gravitating me toward sincere and honest texts.
TK: As a poet and translator, you are in a specific position to appreciate and understand the nuances of literary translation. What are the insights you have gained in these dual occupations?
HH: Poet-translators are most equipped with conveying the soul/spirit of a text, or the so-called style, because they pay attention to how things are being said instead of what is being said. Translating “how” is not necessarily more challenging, but it’s what gives the poem new life in its new language; it is what recycles the poem. I think poet translators do “how” much better than other translators because poets, unlike other writers, are less likely to perceive language primarily as a means to an end.
When we talk about translation, we mean every aspect of introducing a text in a new language, including the reading and finding of works that would fit best in the new language; the never-ending process of finding equivalences, and the gradual association of other corpora and authors with one’s own name. From the very beginning, translation is influential. Reading itself is instrumental in the writing of any creative text because everything we read contributes to that alchemy of other sources, glued together by our subjectivity. Multiple rounds of close reading ensure the new text matches the old, and this close reading of Afghan literature is valuable for me because no other text mirrors my human condition with such semblance and proximity. Translating them stretches my memory to remember a time and a language I can barely access or speak anymore.
But I think the real evidence of translation’s power might not be during translation or writing one’s work, but rather when several translated texts have been completed. That is when it influences the poet’s work, because it establishes an individual canon to contextualize one’s writing historically and aesthetically. I haven’t written much since I started translating these works; after the publication of Disbound, I realized I needed to contextualize it for my reader because even though I write in English, I consider my work a part of the same fabric of the works I translate.
TK: How do you perceive translation, world literature in translation, and Afghan literature in translation in a broader socio-political context? Do you ascribe any emancipatory, liberatory, subversive (or other transformative) role to translation?
HH: Translation bridges two cultural artifacts and forces them into a continuum. This connection is not a humanitarian gesture—it does not take the form of being indebted to or profiting from gruesome loans. It isn’t due to diplomatic negotiations, economic sanctions, or drone strikes; it is produced through and by writers, poets, and translators. So, translating Afghan literature into English is inherently subversive because politicians, humanitarian workers, and financial advisors have, despite their good intentions, narrowed the communication channel between the arts and cultures of two countries. Much of the journalism that actively tries to give voice to the “voiceless” has forgotten that Afghans do have a voice—only it has been muted. And those in mainstream culture and art institutions who claim they neither “belong” in the first camp nor the second have also forgotten that their public voice depends on “unvoicing” others.
I believe in translation not only to facilitate Afghans’ speaking on their own terms but also to witness it forever altering American and—by extension—all anglophone literature. Given how Afghans bear the consequence of failed imperialist projects, it’s surprising that English readers have not yet accessed such texts, and there is seemingly little mobilized effort to facilitate this project. The texts I want to translate show the process of becoming an object of Western and Islamist aggression while simultaneously grappling with their ideology.
The convulsions of postmodernism, democracy, and neoliberalism in opposition to theocracy, ethnic fascism, and human rights violations are vital for the imagination of these authors, and I argue that reading them provides us with a new way of looking at the world entirely. How do we realize ourselves amid such pressures? How do we practice empathy? Because ultimately, there is nothing special about Afghanistan, or any other country for that matter. Engaging with texts from Afghanistan is only one pathway toward recognizing our imperialist hearts and colonizing minds, and perhaps an opportunity to understand how we can work toward pulling all the poison out of each other’s throats.
TK: How do you perceive the role of political and social context in the poetry of S. Assef Hossaini?
HH: Hossaini was always deeply invested in politics. I knew him first as a family friend; it was 2005, I was fourteen or fifteen, and my family had moved to Afghanistan two years earlier. He was running for the first parliamentary election as one of its youngest candidates, and was also a student activist at Kabul University. My brother volunteered for his campaign, and we talked about his candidacy quite often during rounds of family gossip. Now that I look back, I cannot remember his slogans, but I do clearly remember the cover of his chapbook, in which he gathered poems about the election. He lost the campaign short of a few hundred votes, but it turned him into a man of politics. Later in exile, he would acquire a PhD in Conflict Management and work as one of Afghanistan’s Deutsche Welle journalists and political analysts. He was always into rolling up his sleeves to work toward political change.
What gravitated me toward his work wasn’t his sociopolitically charged poems—because many writers in Afghanistan write in such a way. Instead, it was that he was much more interested in describing “tenderness”, specifically in relation to political chaos. His poems have always carried an emotional weight infused with a sociopolitical rage. In essence, his work dismisses the dichotomy of love and war, instead working toward showing how people negotiate love during war and how war changes the tenor and texture of belonging to others, to themselves, and to places of home—as well as how war itself changes according to the participants’ devotion to one another. He attempts to understand how the news and its repercussions of violence loom over modern relationships, and in doing so, has adopted an affectionate and erotic language that reminds the reader of its influence from classic Persian poems and their association with the “beloved”.
As it may be already familiar to Asymptote readers, the concept of the “beloved” in classic Persian literature is ambiguous because it manifests in handfuls of words that signify a sublimation of erotic affection toward an objects of desire. Bhat is interesting about his approach to bending the two worlds toward each other is that his poetry refuses to resemble ancient texts—as they are too illustrious to apply to the current situation, and relationships have changed in and of themselves. His poetry also refuses to act and sound like social poetics, because those poems are largely devoid of romantic emotions.
One particular aspect of Hossaini’s work that I admire is that the experience of living in Kabul, refugee life in Iran, our parents’ lives in rural Afghanistan before the war, and our urban/suburban lives in the West—it all meets in the poem. Afghans are so inclined to compartmentalize these experiences, and most of the time, one moves about the world thinking as though one has led several lives. This merging makes the reader feel one with the poem. This unison also happens through multiple literary references in a singular stanza; a seamlessness of reading Mullah Sadra next to Brecht reflects our fragmentations as Afghans because we have lived in multiple countries and we speak in several tongues. Another aspect of Hossaini’s work is how the spectacle of war is, like many other things in life, unfortunately only one among several things one must avoid; for instance, it’s as terrifying to confront an immigration officer or a debt collector, and this refusal to aggrandize an explosion shows how literature in Afghan Persian does not have the luxury of being about something, but rather within it. Ultimately, reading Hossaini allows the reader to experience life alongside him.
Hajar Hussaini is a poet and translator from Kabul living in Saratoga Springs, NY where she is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Skidmore College. Hussaini’s first collection of poetry, Disbound, was published in 2022 by University of Iowa Press. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, her work has appeared in various journals, including Poetry Magazine, AAWW Margins, and Pamenar Press. She is currently working on the English translation of an Afghan novel.
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