Posts by Erfan Mojib

Translation Tuesday: Five Poems from The Book of Absence by Alireza Roshan

July 13, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Erfan Mojib and Gary Gach

You did to me / what black mulberries / do to fingertips

This week’s Translation Tuesday features a haunting sequence of short poems by the Tehran-born Alireza Roshan. Known widely as “a poet without a book,” Roshan began writing these brief poems on the Internet around 2008, and subsequently gained a popular readership for his evocative verses. For that reason, we may think of these poems as subsisting on a specific cultural moment when the tweet started to be conceived as a unit of thought. On the other hand, these poems can also be said to draw on the tradition of the haiku form that has made its way through world poetics. In Gary Gach and Erfan Mojib’s translation, these poems from The Book of Absence (where Roshan’s poems were eventually collected) flicker dramatically into existence and—in their quick apprehension of a strange image—dissipate, only to have their absence linger in the mind of the reader.

You did to me
what black mulberries
do to fingertips

*

No matter how many windows
I open—darkness
won’t leave my home

*

Solitude
is an invisible thread
which begins from the tip of your toe
encircles the earth
then reaches your heel READ MORE…

The Spell Chanted by Lambs by Reza Ghasemi

December 10, 2013  |  in Translations  |  by Erfan Mojib

A book that began on a blog

Reza Ghasemi’s third novel, The Spell Chanted by Lambs, was initially published in installments under the title of Madman and the Moonpars Tower on the author’s personal blog in 2002 as a reaction to censorship, making Ghasemi the first Iranian writer to turn to the Internet in the face of artistic suppression. It took six years to be traditionally printed by the Paris-based Khavaran Publications, and still five more years to be translated into English by novice translator Erfan Mojib. Says Mojib:  “Ghasemi admits that he’s not aware of the existence of [online narrative] in other languages and is sure of [its] nonexistence in Persian literature, as he calls it the first Iranian ‘online novel’ and sarcastically labels the term as one of his own bastardizations.”

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