Place: Iran

Gestures of the Light, Shadow of Things: Kayvan Tahmasebian on Persian Poetry and Activist Translation

January 9, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Why should we accept the universal validity of the categories that the West creates for self-description?

Born and raised in the city of Isfahan in central Iran, Dr. Kayvan Tahmasebian is a writer and scholar whose work examines Persian literature’s place in the constellations of what is labeled as ‘world literatures’, and a poet and translator working on Persian, English, and French. Dr. Tahmasebian’s co-translation of House Arrest (with Rebecca Ruth Gould, Arc Publications, 2022) by Iranian poet Hasan Alizadeh was recently shortlisted for the Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation, and he has translated and studied Persian-language texts from ancient Persian astrology and dream writing to contemporary Iranian modernist poetry.

In this interview, I spoke with Dr. Tahmasebian on his translations from the Persianate literary world, both modern and from antiquity, as well as the potential expansion of activism through translation.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): First of all, congratulations on being shortlisted for the 2024 Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation for co-translating Hasan Alizadeh’s avant-garde House Arrest (Arc Publications, 2022). You also worked with Rebecca Ruth Gould on your translation of High Tide of the Eyes (2019) by Bijan Elahi, one of the figureheads of Iranian modernist literature. Could you tell us the experience of translating both Alizadeh and Elahi?

Kayvan Tahmasebian (KT): Bijan Elahi is a highly experimental poet and translator in modern Persian poetry. He moves through different language registers—formal, colloquial, archaic, even obsolete ones. He’s also a difficult poet. His poetry is intricate and can be quite challenging in its images and structures. For me, translating Elahi was an exercise in trying to grasp his poetic fluidity. And by ‘grasp,’ I mean something similar to what a photographer does when capturing a fleeting moment—seizing something that’s just passing by. The tough part was that his language is so volatile, and the perspectives he offers on his subjects can be so intuitive, that they sometimes clash with English poetry, which tends to be more discursive and analytical.

Hasan Alizadeh is almost the opposite of Elahi in many ways. It is the simple, the everyday, that speaks through his poetry. But that simplicity is deceptive. It’s a mask that hides the real delicacy of his poems. What I really admire about Alizadeh is how he uncovers the subtleties of spoken Persian, the little hidden dramas that play out in the unnoticed corners of everyday conversations. Translating his poems was about getting in touch with that extraordinary intimacy in his language. I actually had the chance to meet Mr. Alizadeh in Tehran in 2023, and it was fascinating. The way he recited his own poems, the way he seemed almost surprised by the stories his poems tell—about chance encounters, moments of forgetfulness, or the magical appeal of everyday objects—was fantastic. 

AMMD: There is variety to the Iranian authors you have (co)translated: from the fourteenth-century poet and princess Jahan Malek Khatun of the Injuid dynasty to Nima Yushij, the father of modern Persian poetry who popularised she’r-e now. You have also made scholarly incursions into Iranian modernism as well as Persian dream writing (Khābnāma), Persian magic and astrology (The Book of Tankalūshā), and Persian albums of calligraphy and painting (moraqqaʿ). I’m curious about your translation process: Are there parallelisms and variances, process-wise, in translating across these differing genres, aesthetics, and movements these writers write from?

KT: Let me break that down separately for my translation work and my research.

When it comes to translating poetry, it’s really simple: I choose what touches my heart. Jacques Derrida was once asked, ‘What is poetry?‘ and he responded with the Arabic phrase ‘ḥafiẓa ʻan ẓahr-i qalb,’ which means something like ‘what is memorised by heart.’ I totally connect with that. For me, good poetry is the kind that gets etched onto the heart. And what drives me to translate a poem? It’s usually the urge to experiment, to do a creative exercise—mashq, as they say in Persian. What I’m really trying to do in translation is grasp—or maybe perform—that feeling of something touching the heart by alienating the poem through the translation process.

As for my research, even though my projects might seem all over the place, they are actually connected by my fascination with chance, randomness, the arbitrary, and the aleatory. My muse is bakht, which is the Persian word for ‘chance’ or ‘fate.’ I’m drawn to developing a literary theory of order—how literature can be seen as a discourse of order/disorder, construction/chance.

One interesting thing to note: In Arabic and Persian, the word for ‘verse’ is naẓm, which literally means ‘order.’ That alone hints at how a theory of poetry is inseparable from a theory of order. So, I’m really fascinated with the arbitrary nature of interpretation. Medieval dream interpretation manuals, the random constellations of words and images on a medieval moraqqaʿ (album) folio, the aleatory faces of fate in the medieval astrological text, The Book of Tankalūshā—that’s where my curiosity takes me.

AMMD: In The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism (Routledge, 2020), you and Rebecca Ruth Gould made the case for activist translation as an ‘intrinsically and irrevocably political’ act of translation that ‘stirs readers and audiences to action . . . provoking the reader [to] stand in tension with—and even contradict—a literal rendering of words on the page.’ You continued, citing Ali Shariʿati’s 1963 translation of Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth into Persian which aroused anticolonial sentiments leading to the Iranian Revolution of 1979:

Equally, an activist agenda may motivate a translator to intervene with the meanings and tones of the original. Such interventions do not mean relinquishing the translational mandate; rather they represent translation’s reconfiguration.

Could you speak further on this?

KT: In our introduction to The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism, Rebecca and I looked at the activism of translation through the lens of time—what we called ‘temporal exigency.’ We were really interested in the role that timing plays in activist translation. For instance, how can a translator tap into the revolutionary or transformative potential of a text across times and places? It’s about the potential for instigating change. In our view, activism always engages with what Walter Benjamin called the ‘time of the now,’ or Jetztzeit.

Timing is so crucial for a social movement to succeed. A translation can contribute to activism when it moves people to action, but the moment has to be right for that to happen.

Take Maxim Gorky’s novel Mother. He wrote it after the failed 1905 Russian Revolution, trying to inspire revolutionaries to push past the hopelessness. Now, the Persian translation of Mother was banned in Iran before the revolution of the late 1970s. It re-contextualised Gorky’s message by drawing parallels between pre-revolutionary Iran and pre-revolutionary Russia, which gave it real revolutionary power at the time. But here’s the interesting part: the novel is no longer banned in Iran today—not because the political conditions have become more lenient, but because it’s lost that activist spark. It doesn’t move the masses to action anymore. The ‘time of the now’ has passed for that particular translation. 

AMMD: I would like to know your take as a translator from the Global South working on dominant languages such as English, French, and in so many ways, Persian: Given translation’s colonial legacy and history since time immemorial, how can we work towards an anti-imperialist and decolonial publishing industry?

KT: Honestly, I don’t know if I have a clear answer for how to escape this imperialist publishing industry that just keeps growing more bloated. I wish we had other terms than ‘Global South,’ ‘imperialism,’ and ‘decolonisation’ to describe who we are, the oppression we face, and how we envision our freedom. It feels like we’re stuck discussing these things in the very language of oppression itself.

Why should we accept the universal validity of the categories that the West creates for self-description? The thing is, ‘we’ are only included in these terms as objects. They don’t reflect the experiences of the people who’ve actually been oppressed and exploited, who had no part in shaping these definitions.

Capitalist imperialism is so sophisticated now that it can even take genuinely good ideas, like decolonisation or anti-imperialism, and twist them into tools for further colonisation or exploitation. The concepts we talk about are developed within the same power structures that control Western academia. So, should we be surprised if they end up protecting those structures instead of posing a real challenge to them? I mean, how likely is it that an academic system, so rooted in capitalism, would actually pose a threat to capital accumulation or exploitation?

I once asked some participants in a workshop on activist translation to think about what I call “academicised” activism. You know, the kind of activism that you might find in a textbook. Can an Ivy League university or a multinational academic publisher really inspire genuine activism? I doubt it. When academia studies social movements or political activism, it often feels more like they’re trying to commercialise, contain, and neutralise them.

Take the critique of Eurocentrism in Western academic circles. It’s become a bit of trend, especially in the humanities. But here’s the irony: even the critique of Eurocentrism is, at its core, still deeply Eurocentric. It’s not leading to real self-reflection or any real change in the way things are done: in methods, approaches, perspectives, and categories. There’s no genuine encounter with the Other; instead, it’s more like an encyclopaedic form of intellectual imperialism—just expanding the scope to include more non-European texts and authors. It’s a kind of intellectual capital accumulation.

Maybe it’s too early to judge, or maybe I’m being too pessimistic. But I’m thinking of the left wing of Western colonialism as well, which often puts on a charitable face, but remains just as Eurocentric. This so-called ‘charity’ doesn’t really see you as an equal. It sees you as an object of pity or aid.

I see it like this: colonialism operates via hard power and soft power. The right wing takes your resources—your wealth—while the left wing colonises your mind. Both rely on violence, just in different ways. One uses military force, the other uses epistemological domination. One dehumanises you, the other pathologises you. One sees you as an inferior object, the other sees you as a pitiable subject. Either way, it’s a form of looking down on you. When the West acknowledges its role in our oppression, it may ease their guilty conscience, but it shouldn’t lead to our objectification again—this time through their remorse.

Unfortunately, the Eurocentric West either doesn’t want to, or simply can’t, see us on our own terms. It cruelly and violently imposes its universalist, scientific categories onto us and labels us in ways that fit its own theories. But we’re not here to fit neatly into their frameworks so that they enjoy a more panoramic view—we’re here to break those frameworks.

AMMD: You translate from English and French into Persian, and from Persian into English. How different is English-to-Persian translation from French-to-Persian? What about English-to-Persian vs Persian-to-English translation?

KT: As a translator into Persian, I actually find English poetry more challenging to translate than French poetry. I think it’s because Persian poetry is more intuitive and less discursive, which brings it closer to the kind of poetry you find in French. The French poet Saint John Perse talks about this distinction in a letter to The Berkeley Review back in 1956. He describes French poetry as more esoteric and synthetic, while English poetry, in his view, is exoteric and analytical.

I’m borrowing Perse’s terms to describe Persian poetry. It’s less about ideas and more about incantation, less about meditation and more about trance. That’s why, for me, French poetry feels more aligned with Persian poetry. When I translate a French poem, it’s more likely to result in something that feels truly poetic in Persian compared to an English poem.

But when it comes to translating from Persian, it has always been a co-creation with Rebecca for me. There’s something beautiful about ‘translating with’—the way the poem unfolds simultaneously in both languages. In our essay ‘Inspired and Multiple,’ Rebecca and I wrote about this shared process, our aesthetics, and the ethics of co-translation. It’s all about the dialogue that keeps the creative process alive. It feels like we’re reaching out to each other across our own limits, and that’s what makes it so special.

AMMD: Who are the scholars, writers, and thinkers whose works shaped your philosophy, creative-critical writings, and ethos? In what ways have they been influential to you?

KT: I’m really fascinated by textual materialism, particularly as it was developed in the medieval Persian letterist movement, or horufiyya. It’s all about how they engage with the materiality of the signifier and the physicality of the text. The idea that words speak to us through their shapes—it’s something that has deeply inspired my poetry and has sharpened my appreciation for certain works of calligraphy as well, like in ‘Étude-analysis 1‘ & ‘Étude-analysis 2.’

Also, Samuel Beckett has been a huge inspiration, especially his short prose pieces from the later phase of his career. I’ve actually been working on translations of Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho. I’ve spent nearly a decade researching the different drafts of these works, both in French and English, thanks to the bilingual variorum editions that are now available. One day, I hope I’ll feel satisfied enough with my translations to get them published.

What really draws me to Beckett’s work is what I like to call a ‘writing of impotentiality.’ It’s not nihilism; it’s more about an impoverished language, a language that’s been pushed to its communicative limits. That’s what I find so fascinating—this language at the edge of collapse.

And now I’m using this term, ‘the writing of impotentiality,’ so I have to acknowledge another major influence: the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. I’ve translated his Pilato e Gesú into Persian. What I admire about Agamben is the way he blends creative and critical writing. For example, his fragmentary writing in Idea della prosa is brilliant. I’m also really drawn to his concept of experimentum linguae, the experience of language, which he talks about in the preface to Infanzia e storia. There’s this materialist aesthetic of language that ties all these works together for me. 

AMMD: Literary translation from the Persian by translators like M.R. Ghanoonparvar, Nasrin Rahimieh, Hassan Javadi, Abbas Milani, Faridoun Farrokh, and Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi populate the catalogues of publishers like Mazda Publishers in California and the university presses of The University of Texas at Austin and Syracuse University. Are there other Persian-language and/or Iranian translators whose works you think the world should not miss out on? 

KT: Besides the names you’ve already mentioned, I have to highlight the incredible translations by Poupeh Missaghi and Lida Nosrati. I’d also recommend Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and its Diaspora, published by Green Linden Press in 2021 and edited by Christopher Nelson. It’s a fantastic constellation that brings together a vibrant mix of contemporary poets and translators, both Iranian and non-Iranian, making Persian poetry more accessible to English readers.

For those who are really interested in exploring more, I’d also point them to the website ‘Persian, Translated,’ curated by Ali Araghi. It’s an exceptional database of Persian literature in English translation. 

AMMD: If you were to teach a course on Persian poetry, what anthologies and poetry collections would you wish to include as key texts? Can you name some poets that you would be inclined to incorporate into this imaginary syllabus?

KT: I don’t think I could make an exhaustive list of poets that I would include in an imaginary syllabus. But there are definitely some names I wouldn’t want to miss. And I hope doesn’t sound like self-promotion, but I’d have to include the poets I have co-translated with Rebecca: the classics Saeb Tabrizi and Khaqani Shervani, along with the modernists Bijan Elahi and Hasan Alizadeh. These poets often don’t make it into the anthologies of Persian poetry that have been published so far. I’d also add Nima Yushij—whom I have co-translated—and Forugh Farrokhzad—whom I have not translated yet.  

Kayvan Tahmasebian, PhD is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism (Routledge, 2020) and co-translator of Bijan Elahi’s High Tide of the Eyes (The Operating System, 2019) and Hasan Alizadeh’s House Arrest (Arc Publications, 2022) with Rebecca Ruth Gould. He is also the author of Mouldinalia (Tehran: Goman, 2016), about the Iranian short story writer Bahram Sadeqi, and the poetry collection Lecture on Fear and Other Poems (Radical Paper Press, 2019). He is a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics of the University of London-School of African and Oriental Studies, a research fellow at the Global Literary Theory project, and a principal investigator of TRANSMODERN (Untranslatable Modernity: Literary Theory from Europe to Iran), a project funded by the European Commission within Marie Sklowdowska-Curie Actions (University of Birmingham, 2019-2021). His translations and original writings have appeared in, among others, World Literature Today, Comparative Critical Studies, Poetry Daily, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Modern Poetry in Translation, Comparative Literature, Iranian Studies, The Kenyon Review, Translation Review, Cordite Poetry, New Literary History, and Lunch Ticket, where he was a finalist for The Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation and Multilingual Texts (2017). 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them) is Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines and the author of M of the Southern Downpours (Australia: Downingfield Press, 2024), In the Name of the Body: Lyric Essays (Canada: Wrong Publishing, 2023), and Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021). Their works—published from South Africa to Japan, France to Singapore, and translated into Chinese, Damiá, and Swedish—appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, The White Review, Sant Jordi Festival of Books, and the anthologies Infinite Constellations (University of Alabama Press) and He, She, They, Us: Queer Poems (Pan Macmillan UK). Formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine, they’ve been nominated to The Best Literary Translations and twice to the Pushcart Prize for their lyric essays. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.

 *****

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Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from The House of the Edrisis by Ghazeleh Alizadeh

October 8, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by M. R. Ghanoonparvar

Occasionally, outside the windowpane, she saw an apparition of her dead husband in a cotton summer suit . . .

This Translation Tuesday we present an excerpt from celebrated Iranian novelist Ghazeleh Alizadeh’s The House of the Edrisis, a novel about the perils and pathos of a world remade by revolution. The story revolves around a once-affluent aristocratic family and their majestic house, a decaying and melancholy backdrop for the unfolding drama among a colorful cast of disgraced family members and disillusioned revolutionaries. Set in Central Asia, Alizadeh’s story cleverly parallels the Islamic Revolution in Iran and offers an intimate portrait of both young ideologues-turned-tyrants and jaded women whose hope for change slowly fades. With a sardonic tone and elements of black comedy and farce, The House of the Edrisis offers an engrossing reflection on a turbulent history and the enduring spirit of men and women living through it.

The emergence of chaos is not sudden in any house; a soft dust settles in the cracks of the wood, the folds of the sheets, the seams of the windows, and the pleats of the curtains, waiting for a breeze to find its way into the house through an open door, and release the components of dispersion from their place of entrapment.

In the house of the Edrisis, life went on as usual. The wall clock with its engraved frame and its top covered with the images of birds and flowers, the work of Bukhara turners, struck ten times.

Leqa looked at her wristwatch, adjusted it forward, and got up from the breakfast table. She swept up the breadcrumbs to feed the fish.

Vahab, the young man of the family, took the last sip of tea from a lapis lazuli–colored Sèvres cup, swallowed his yawn, and turned toward Mrs. Edrisi. “He feels better today.”

The elderly lady shifted her glasses on her nose; her eyes behind the glasses were a cloudy blue. “Nothing that he does is clear.”

The fog came halfway down the arched windows, rubbed against the windowpanes, spun, and went toward the pine and spruce trees. From the end of the entrance hall came the sound of the washing of dishes, the opening of the faucet, and the bubbling of the samovar. In the kitchen, Yavar, occasionally coughing, dragged his feet when he walked. READ MORE…

Summer 2024: Highlights from the Team

July 29, 2024  |  in News  |  by Alex Tan, Ellen Elias-Bursac, Hilary Ilkay, Julia Maria, Marguerite Alley, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Sofija Popovska

Find out what our very own editors have to say about our bountiful Summer issue!

Last week’s Paris 2024 Olympics Opening Ceremony featured numerous nods to literature, art, and music, calling to mind Georgi Gospodinov’s statement in his interview for our Summer 2024 issue: “Culture is a continuous conversation, a hum of different voices, and it’s actually wonderful music, a sort of polyphony. We are not only immersed in that conversation, we are also part of it.” Indeed, as our very own Mary Hillis points out, this brand-new Summer edition is a “veritable parade of nations with works from 35 countries.” Read on to discover some of the highlights, courtesy of our multicontinental crew!

My favorite in this issue is Honora Spicer’s Spitting Sutures, with its mesmerizing fluid interplay of drafting a translation, selling a house, and experiences of the body. Fluidity also defines Olivia Sears’s in-depth historical exploration of Italian Futurist Ardengo Soffici in a conversation with Eugene Ostashevsky. Krzysztof Umiński’s Three Translators (tr. Soren Gauger) is also a wonderfully detailed dip into translation history, this time Polish. Two other texts I really enjoyed were Farah Ahamed’s The Day You Ate our Deliveroo Delivery and the dramatic excerpt Trinity by Hamid Ismailov (tr. Shelley Fairweather-Vega), the first for its many-faceted examination of an ethical confrontation, the second for its gorgeously translated insults and imprecations.

 —Ellen Elias-Bursać, Contributing Editor

I love the compact, compressed nature of Adelheid Duvanel’s The Poet (tr. Tyler Schroeder). It’s got an amazing opening line that hooked me right away. The journey of the story that goes from childhood vignette to the awareness of the narrator as poet is really striking, showing how transformative and creative language can be, how altering a shift in perspective can be.

Micaela Brinsley’s Nothing to Be Owed is such a unique piece of writing, hybridic in its tone and structure, lyrical and poetic prose. The reflections on care in italics intersperse beautifully what’s going on in the almost journal-like entries. The line “I’m trapped by the transactional” will stick with me for a while.

Sarah Gear’s conversation with Georgi Gospodinov (tr. Angela Rodel) is a huge interview for Asymptote and it was a privilege to get such intimate access to the Booker International Prize-winning author’s mind.

—Hilary Ilkay, Assistant Managing Editor READ MORE…

Our Summer 2024 Edition Has Landed!

July 18, 2024  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Georgi Gospodinov, Patrick Autréaux, Ali Wajeeh, and Brigitte Giraud in a Special Feature themed on collectives

What stops a cancer from killing its host? What might have prevented a grandmother from dying in a refugee camp? What allows a Deliveroo rider to keep his dignity through itinerant gig-work? Perhaps it’s care: “the connections we have with others and the everyday actions we engage in for each other” (Micaela Brinsley). Care is a vital #lifesupport—a necessity up there with shelter and air. The problem is that it’s scarce, as attested to by our brand-new Summer edition spanning 35 countries and featuring an exclusive interview with 2023 Booker International Prize winner Georgi Gospodinov, 2022 Prix Goncourt winner Brigitte Giraud’s debut in English, as well as new translations of Paul Éluard and Hamid Ismailov. In settings that take us from hospital to hospital and even one assisted suicide facility, few find it, while others seek it with increasing desperation. Patrick Autréaux’s exquisite memoir of chemotherapy, for example, describes cancer as a “cold octopus . . . groping at me as though I were some bizarre object . . . embracing me, holding me back to examine whether I was corpse-like or ecstatic, content or horrified, and offering me, snatched up in death’s vulva, sensations never before imagined.” In Inga Iwasiów’s startling novel, on the other hand, the dead moon jellyfish forming a “gelatinous strip between the water and the land” becomes a buffer between the cancer-stricken narrator and intentional death (which in Pooya Monshizadeh’s devastating Red Meadow is canceled without even a refund). Against absolute loss, Honora Spicer, in this issue’s poignant Brave New World Literature entry, opened the very text that she had requested to translate one week after her grandmother died—to the wide field of “se fue.”


The hospital is also the setting for fifty percent of this issue’s Criticism section. While Fine Gråbøl’s What Kingdom paints a portrait of intimate life at a psychiatric hospital, Vanessa Springora’s Consent begins with a teenager being hospitalized for rheumatism, only to receive not one but two additional diagnoses during her stay. Though it’s the second of these (by a predatory gynecologist) that sets off a nationwide scandal with legal consequences, the first diagnosis very much deserves pause as well: according to the psychologist who sees her, our protagonist is “disengaged from her peers . . . isolated and vulnerable”; she struggles to “join” with others in society. This malaise is directly echoed in the trio of pieces (from Switzerland, Denmark, and South Korea) heading off the entire issue. All three are heart-wrenching portraits of alienation that speak to the current epidemic of loneliness.

If this edition or in fact any issue of this magazine has alleviated your loneliness, I hope you’ll take just three minutes to sign up as a sustaining or masthead member. Subscribing to our Book Club is a great way to take your support for world literature to the next level. If you’re interested in joining our team, good news: In addition to social media managers and marketing managers to join us on the frontlines of a more inclusive world literature, we’re inviting talented illustrators to come onboard as our guest artists—send us a link to your portfolio if you might be interested!

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What’s New in Translation: July 2024

July 15, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel and Samantha Siefert

New publications from Chile and Iran!

This month, we introduce two extraordinary novels erecting vivid, immersive narratives upon the intricate sociopolitical histories of their respective nations. From Chile, Carlos Labbé builds an intricate match of class warfare and collective action against the backdrop of professional soccer; and from Iran, Ghazi Rabihavi tells the tragic story of two queer lovers as they navigate the repressions and tumults of pre- and post-Revolution Iran.  

the murmuration

The Murmuration by Carlos Labbé, translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden, Open Letter, 2024

Review by Samantha Siefert, Marketing Manager

Carlos Labbé’s The Murmuration begins like a monologue from The Twilight Zone: a robust voice draws you aboard the night train from Temuco to Santiago, and a conspiracy of uncertainty and intrigue quickly follows. Cigarettes smolder, nail polish glistens, and a retired sports commentator’s hot cup of matico tea steams into the noir-film night. Suddenly, you find yourself hurtling through the darkness on Schrödinger’s train, where a director of the Chilean national soccer team may or may not be asleep in her first-class train car—or perhaps she is in the dining car, having a drink with the sports commentator. Furtive eyes dart about, noting every detail, but Labbé’s experimental style calls reality itself into question, letting linguistic artistry lead the way in an investigation of Chilean identity, representation, and collective memory. 

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “A Triangle with Four Sides” by Nasim Vahabi

April 2, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Parisa Saranj

The line is the rebellious child of two insignificant points that came into existence because of one movement of a pen.

This Translation Tuesday, we present new hybrid, experimental fiction from Iranian author Nasim Vahabi whose debut novel in French  Je ne suis pas un roman (I am not a novel; Tropismes, 2022) was released to critical acclaim. Abstract in a generative way, A Triangle with Four Sides cleverly interrogates the notion of resistance. In each of the four angles that mirror and complement one another, we find a progression to expose and reconcile the many absurdities in everyday life and a wry attempt to rise above micro-oppressions. This is a well crafted puzzle of a piece that will definitely linger in the mind. Read on!

Geometry is more than a mathematical concept. It is the art of observation and comparison.

For example, the line—alone, single, and aimless—has geometry wrapped around its finger. It gets along with any shape. The line is the circle’s entire existence. Sometimes smooth or curvy, straight or zigzagged, sometimes boring and stretched out into eternity, other times stupidly coiled like a snake or long and high maintenance, and sometimes, like a hyphen, humble and content with its small lot in life.

The line is its own boss. When it wills, it folds over, straightens up, creates a sharp edge, or lies parallel with itself, but if it lies parallel with another line, it is liberation and generosity.However, once it decides to stretch even longer, its determination gets on your nerves. It seems something must interfere to save the line from itself. Perhaps self-replication? Or breaking into parts to create an independent entity such as a triangle—the perfect form, an archetype of stability. The square has always been envious of the triangle’s fortified flexibility. With three sides equal in length, whenever it wills, with a delicate, subtle movement, it could demonstrate equilaterality. But the square is heavy. Its movements are coarse. And yet, all it needs is to look at the rectangle or trapezoid to realize it could be worse: cumbersome and uneven. It could always be worse. The rectangle is the master of optimism. Rectangle considers itself the best of all shapes. Hates others and takes pride in having four sides staring at each other. Fanatic and self-absorbed, it only socializes with the rhombus, which is always uncomfortable and self-loathing. The rhombus is the shiest with the least confidence among all shapes: an unlucky rectangle.

The line would have never imagined having such offspring. The line is the rebellious child of two insignificant points that came into existence because of one movement of a pen. No one would ever know if that single movement was intentional or accidental. Right from the start, the point knew the line would not be satisfied with having a simple destiny as, let’s say, an em dash. The points knew the line’s ambition would make all the other points proud one day. Yes, the point—despite its insignificance—was aware of all these.

The geometry family, like all families, has its own untold stories. Geometry is life’s summary despite all its good or bad surprises.

I call my story triangle in honor of geometry, and I know that all it takes for my story to fall apart and turn into a coarse, inflexible square is one broken angle.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: March 2024

March 11, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Bella Creel, Daljinder Johal, and Kathryn Raver

New works from Alexander Kluge, Marjane Satrapi, and Jón Kalman Stefánsson!

The latest text from one of German New Wave’s founding members and all around heavy-hitter; a wide-ranging compilation of art and testimony championing the Iranian feminist movement from Marjane Satrapi; and a moving, braided narrative of grief and recovery from a lauded Icelandic author. Our editors review some of the most exciting works in translation coming to the Anglophone this month. 

kluge

The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul by Alexander Kluge, translated from the German by Alexander Booth, Seagull Books, 2024

Review by Bella Creel, Blog Editor

Filmmaker, author, and philosopher Alexander Kluge’s most recent oeuvre, The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul, is an act of rethinking. Born in Germany in 1932, Kluge blurs the edges of the many years of his life in this ambitious work, expanding beyond the first-hand, beyond generations, drawing connections between now and before, all in order to fully describe the experience of a single life. Alexander Booth offers a wonderfully dense and witty translation from the German, with no aversion to a confusing syntax that demands rereading and rethinking.

Kluge is trying to find the right words throughout this collection, which, in the process of its creation, must have been turned over and inside out, stretched to snapping and magnified to the molecular; reading it, in turn, requires a certain liquifying of the brain. This giving-in allows one to absorb the words, which only then can be reformed into some sort of meaning. Kluge himself seems to follow a similar process:

Where does all my ‘fluent speech’, my rabid desire to write, come from? I listen to others. And carefully! A word that flies towards me, an observation that charms me into conversation, a quotation that I read: all of this gets stored inside me for the long-term.

I usually tear books to shreds, marking any places that captivate me in colour pencil before ripping the page out. These I attach to other findings of mine with a paper clip. They’re often annotated. My flat is full of these piles of paper. My personal bastion against the ‘ignorance that shakes the world’.

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Poetry and Resistance in Iran

January 4, 2024  |  in News  |  by Cy Strom

Words that are spoken are forgotten, and treatises lie unopened on the shelf, while lines of poetry live forever.

Since 2022, the Woman, Life, Freedom movement has made historic advances in fighting for the rights of Iranian girls and women. With protests that have ripped all across the world, the demonstrations have continued Iran’s long tradition of fusing literature with politics, showing that where people and ideas go, poetry soon follows. Here, Cy Strom, co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, Woman, Life, Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution (open for submissions!), discusses the texts, songs, and slogans that make up the fabric of contemporary revolution.

The Iranian revolution that began in September 2022 responded to no political manifesto. Instead, it flared up to an unforgettable line of people’s poetry: “Zan, Zandeghi, Azadi!” This is how “Woman, Life, Freedom” sounds in Persian.

In Kurdish, the language in which this slogan was first spoken, its words are “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî.” That is what Mahsa Jina Amini—the Iranian-Kurdish woman whose brutal death catalyzed the protests—would have heard. Protestors in Iran continue to pay respect to the slogan’s origins when they chant both the Kurdish and Persian words, even when Kurdish is not their mother tongue. In both languages, the words of this slogan are balanced and graceful, the rhythms assertive. It is people’s poetry.

The slogan was first circulated among the women militia fighters in Rojava, the western Kurdish lands by the Syrian-Turkish border, and spread through the writings of Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Activists and protestors in the streets have now taken these three words as the name for this first ever feminist revolution, and a statement of the best in hopes and ideals for all people everywhere.

Within days of its outbreak, Iran’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” revolution also found its anthem. Amidst Persian-language reworkings of the World War II partisan song “Bella Ciao” (which kept its wildly incongruous Italian refrain) and the 1970s Chilean insurgent march “El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido,” a string of found poetry began to sound out in Iran, artfully arranged and set to music by singer-songwriter Shervin Hajipour. The people in the streets quickly taught themselves to sing this winding melody, which begins as a murmur but gathers force until a last intake of breath pushes out the words: “Azadi! Azadi!” Freedom. Hajipour assembled the lyrics to this song, which he called “Baraye” (“For” or “For the Sake Of”), from people’s tweets. Some of these were political slogans, some were complaints, some were sweet dreams: “For a dance in the alley. . . For the dreams of the dumpster kids. . . For the jailed beautiful minds. . . For the tranquilizers and insomnia.” The song is said to have gained forty million views in forty-eight hours, and it earned Hajipour six days in prison with the threat of more to come. In February 2023, “Baraye” also earned the first ever Grammy awarded for the best song for social change. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

November 17, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou, Marina García Pardavila, and Miranda Mazariegos

News from Latin America, Greece, and Spain!

Join us this week with a new batch of literary dispatches covering a wide range of news from Latin America, Greece, and Spain; from censorship and literary awards to a slew of literary festivals, read on to learn more!

Miranda Mazariegos, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Latin America

In Colombia, Laura Ardila Arrieta’s book La Costa Nostra was pulled from publication days before going to print by Editorial Planeta, one of the most influential publishers in the Spanish-speaking world. Ardila Arrieta’s book investigates one of the most powerful families in Colombia and was pulled due to “three legal opinions that proved to us that the text contained significant risks that, as a company, we did not want to take on,” according to Planeta’s official statement. Ardila Arrieta was signed by Indent Literary Agency a few days later, and her book has instead been published by Rey Naranjo, an independent Colombian publisher who stated that the publishing of the book represents “the desire to contribute so that the future of our democratic system improves and that education and reading empowers us as a society.” 

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Summer 2023: Highlights from the Team

August 7, 2023  |  in News  |  by Catherine Xin Xin Yu, Heather Green, José García Escobar, Matilde Ribeiro, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Rachel Rankin

Still looking for entry points into our brand-new Summer issue? Members of our multi-continental team offer you several!

From the Indonesian Feature in the Summer edition, I was intrigued by the poems of Nirwan Dewanto, in vivid translations by John H. McGlynn, including “The Way to the Museum,” which begins with “All eyeballs dipped in the vinegar of the bourgeoisie will become pickled eyeballs” and continues, in long lines, to contemplate class, blindness, and revolution. It resonated against the pathos and absurdity in excerpts from Ulrike Draesner’s Schwitters, translated by Sharon Howe, and Tatiana Niculescu’s play Brancusi v. United States, fresh portraits of European Modernist artists Kurt Schwitters and Constantin Brâncuși, respectively. In each case, as the exile of the artist comes to the fore, the language of their place of origin is woven into the text, along with glimmers of humor. I particularly appreciated the note from Niculescu’s translator Amanda L. Andrei, which describes the process of working, as a heritage speaker, with her father Codin Andrei: “The emotional challenge [of translating this work] lies in my own hang-ups of being a non-native speaker due to political and historical forces beyond my control. When we co-translate, my father and I converse about Romanian culture from a perspective free of Western stereotypes of communism, vampires, and oppression, and we are delighted.” Finally, I was swept up in the atmospheric excerpt from Habib Tengour’s Women of the Odyssey (tr. Teresa Villa-Ignacio) while listening to Tengour’s mellifluous reading of the subtle text in French, describing those who console themselves by “sticking ear in seashell” or the “Unfinished / Wave bringing you to the threshold.”

—Heather Green, Visual Editor

I adore the rush of the speaker’s voice in Enrico Remmert’s The War of the Murazzi (tr. Antonella Lettieri), and its syntactical verbality, meandering but never losing control, digressing into tightness, into an accumulation of narrative stress. I love as well the narrator’s contextualisations of the backdrop of Turin and its historico-social problems with violence, particularly in a refugee context: Turin feels masterfully integrated into the plotline, like a combattant in the Murazzi war itself, and the vivacity of its violence continues running, naturalistic, organic, as the “river never stops running.”

The textuality of Mateo Díaz Choza’s Precipitations (tr. Lowry Pressly) is staggering: the dual columns that inform multiple methods of reading the poem, as well as the materiality of the poem, almost transforming it into an object itself. The way the words waterfall down the screen mimic the “drop,” a kind of fall from heaven, in a mode that lends itself to the digital form undoubtedly better than it would a magazine or a standard-format book, in the “depths of the page” that ultimately do not supercede the infinite scroll of the screen. When the poem’s substance and words meet and meld into each other, the poem’s two columns also merge into one, into the “weather,” “snow-mute” but “beautiful” in the void of its meaning. Choza creates an aesthetics of decay, of death, of abandonment, but of regeneration as well. The drop recurs again and again; the speaker will continue to recognise his lover, again and again.

I love the adventure of Amyr Klink’s One Hundred Days Between Sky and Sea (tr. Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren), the sense of movement through space and time that underpins the narrator’s paradoxical stillness, immobility. It is remininescent of Jules Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires, venturing beneath the sea or into the heart of volcanoes, on a journey pushing against the boundaries of human capacity. Klink melds the joy and exuberance of a child discovering the world with a practical, didactical style of writing that underpins the veracity of his voyage. I find this piece particularly apt for Asymptote as a vessel in the sea of understanding, a buoy of translation in the archipelago of languages.

I appreciate Asymptote‘s continued dedication to featuring Ukrainian writing in each issue, particularly Ukrainian writing about the Russian invasion. In my view, this is one of the most essential tasks of literature in translation: to continually draw attention to the diversity of global experiences; to remind us that our lives are not insular, that we are not islands. To that end, I found Anton Filatov’s Finding Myself at War (tr. Patricia Dubrava) both heart-wrenching and vital. As his “eyes bleed” before the cruelty of false news stories, so do readers’ eyes before the horrors of Ukrainian soldiers’ war experiences. They are given voice not in those news stories, but in literature. Sharing their stories—and I love the detail of the abandoned cat, ironically (or not?) named Death, as well as the final section on cinema—is an act of taken care.

I find Nicole Wong’s discussion of translation theory in The Terroir of a Single Work: Redefining Scope in Approaches to Translation incredibly pertinent and eloquent, and I particularly enjoy the ‘close reading’ section where she dissects her own translation of Proust. It’s a priviledge to experience the clarity and sharpness of such a mind through this piece. Her style is reminescent of Kundera’s narrator in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: playful, heavy on metaphor without falling into abstraction, clear, enlightening (and bearably so!). Since reading this piece, I’ve found myself returning to it as I internalise and integrate her analysis into my own understanding of translation.

 —Michelle Chan Schmidt, Assistant Editor (Fiction)

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The Seyavash Cycle and Ritual as Translation

August 3, 2023  |  in Essays, Retellings  |  by Claire Jacobson

If the rituals as such are the bridge from one story to the other, we can view this transformation as an act of translation . . .

In our new column, Retellings, Asymptote presents essays on the translations of myths, those enduring stories that continue to transform and reincarnate. In this essay, Claire Jacobson covers the path of the Seyavash cycle through time and cultures, its adoptions and adaptations. 

In Khurasani poet Abu al-Qasim Ferdowsi’s epic the Shahnameh, symbol of innocence and hero-prince Seyavash undergoes a false rape accusation, a martyr’s death, and a symbolic resurrection. This tale—the pure hero is falsely accused of rape and suffers either a literal or symbolic death and resurrection as a result—is found across cultures and time, often beginning with the hero’s virtuous rejection of a lustful woman: the incorrupt Seyavash recoils from his stepmother Sudabeh’s declarations of love, as does the Khotanese version of the Mauryan prince Kunala from Queen Tishyaraksha; the righteous Joseph (Yusuf) flees Potiphar’s wife, Zulaikha; the chaste Hippolytus rejects Phaedra’s advances; the honorable Bata refuses to betray his brother Anpu by sleeping with his sister-in-law. Much like Seyavash, each of these men are then written into the cycle of accusation, death, and resurrection. 

Many of these myths coexisted in a shared discursive space, but not all of them continued to develop and change as living stories. After the Islamic conquest of the Iranian plateau, several began to converge. By the early Islamic period, the tale of Yusuf and Zulaikha was considered by literary critics to be the same story as Seyavash and Sudabeh but in a more appropriately Islamic format, and many of the rituals that had long been practiced to celebrate Seyavash were repurposed to commemorate the death of Husayn at Karbala. In this case, ritual (by which I mean the popular practice of religion) seems to act as a medium of translation, carrying the shape of the re-enacted story forward even though the language, notions of gender, and cultural landscape were all slowly changing as the millennia passed.

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Visual Spotlight: Some Artists on Developing a New Visual Language of Protest

April 17, 2023  |  in Visual Art  |  by Poupeh Missaghi and Some Artists

The Some Artists page is proof of a dream, the dream of art and artists who will forever stay with the people and against the power.

Over the weekend, Iran’s Deputy Attorney General said that punishment for those who encourage others to remove their hijabs would face criminal prosecution, and only days before, it was reported that women who were not wearing the hijab were being barred from the Tehran metro, leaving many unable to go to work. This comes at a time when tensions surrounding the longstanding and long-protested compulsory hijab law are especially high; last year, after Mahsa Amini was killed in police custody following her arrest for allegedly failing to comply with the compulsory hijab law, protests against Amini’s killing and against the compulsory hijab law broke out and grew into a larger protest movement. While the protests were violently repressed by the government, the spirit of protest in Iran has both a longer history and a continuing energy. Many Iranian women continue to go without the hijab in public as a display of defiance, and even prior to the recent protests, resistance to the compulsory hijab law was inextricably linked to older Iranian protest movements. The visual histories of these interconnected protest movements are on display in the work of Some Artists, an anonymous group of artists who began using social media to disseminate art in solidarity with Iranian protesters following protests in 2018. In this edition of our series spotlighting visual content from our archives, we revisit our feature on Some Artists from our Winter 2020 issue. 

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Following the protests of January 2018 and the ensuing silence of the middle class, artists and intellectuals in the face of protests by workers and the rise of the afflicted, we aimed to become a bridge. A visual cry for the afflicted and a platform where artists and intellectuals would be translated beyond class.

The first piece uploaded on Some Artists’ Facebook page was a video clip dedicated to Sina Ghanbari, entitled “(Far)yad” [“Cry 1”], on January 27, 2018.

We realized a lack of precedence of visual language for what we hoped to do, and this made our process hard. Whatever existed before then was either the literature and visual arts belonging to the era of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which felt aged, or the politicized visual language of the Green Movement of 2009; there was nothing else. To address the issue, we decided that a simplicity in form and content would be our only way to go. READ MORE…

Will the Present Suffice? On Disappearance in Fiction

September 21, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by MK Harb

It seems that disappearance creates even more presence, focusing around the individual instead of erasing them.

What is absence—this deeply felt substance that is not made of matter, but lack? In texts across time, writers have given form to vanishing and its metaphorical power, studying its mystery and its abjection, its myth and its experience. In the following essay, MK Harb discusses three cases of disappearance in short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Munro, and Danial Haghighi, and how the three authors use the duality of presence and absence to explore the psychology of those who go and those who stay, as well as experiences of class, gender, sexuality, and colonialism.

In a curious poem by the name of “Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage,” the late Larry Levis created, in words blown with the precision of a glassmaker, a philosophical text on life and desire. Beginning with, “It’s a list of what I cannot touch,” Levis narrates the myth of the Cumaean Sibyl, an ancient Greek priestess who, in her quest to ask the Gods for eternal life, forgot to ask for eternal youth. What ensues is a lesson in cruelty, for as time expands and centuries go by, she shrinks and dwarfs until she becomes as tiny as a thumb, upon which she is placed in a jar to “suffocate without being able to die.” As the years churn on, Sibyl eventually finds herself in a birdcage, placed there by an Athenian shop owner for her protection. She emits small bird-like whispers to Athenian boys, who often rattle her cage to ask: What do you want, Sibyl? To this she responds: death. Her voice goes mute as she witnesses an ever-changing Athens through to the Second World War, all the while continuing to be alive, shriveling and aging, yet somehow disappearing from living. Using Sibyl, Levis creates a melancholic irony in which a desire for a prolonged life leads to disappearance.

When I think of disappearance, I think of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and the soul-crushing friendship between Lila and Elena, two intellectual women haunted by the other’s abilities, acting out their insecurities through never-ending disappearances and reappearances within each other’s lives. I think of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1960s film Woman in The Dunes, where a depressive Japanese scientist spends the night with a seductive village woman in a remote sand dune. After their affair, the staircase leading outwards—a symbol of return to urbanity—vanishes, and the most Sisyphean struggle ensues. In such works, disappearance is an allegory for life and time, lost and spent.

Disappearance has long been a hallmark of serious prose, a thematic thread throughout literature of all variances. In three short stories set in Canada, India, and Iran, this allegorical device operates at the narratives’ center. The first is Jorge Luis Borges’ “Man on the Threshold,” which follows the tradition of narration through memory, telling us of the writer’s childhood friend, Bioy Casares, who brings with him from London to Buenos Aires a strange dagger. This object triggers another story from a friend sitting with them, Christopher Dewey, who served in the British colonies of India. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2022

August 15, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada, Laurel Taylor, and Samantha Siefert

Introducing new translations from French, Persian, and more!

As the world reverberates with the powers and consequence of language, this month’s round-up of translations are especially resonant with their assertion of how texts can subvert, heal, and ascribe meaning to life. Below, find reviews of a text that gathers poetry and its translators in boundary-defying dialogues of methods and ideas; a novel that powerfully uses silence to address the transgenerational trauma of the Rwandan genocide; and a sensitive story of an Iran on the precipices of change by celebrated modern novelist Simin Daneshvar.

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Poetry’s Geographies: A Transatlantic Anthology of Translations, edited by Katherine M. Hedeen and Zoë Skoulding, Eulalia Books, 2022

Review by Laurel Taylor, Assistant Managing Editor

How does one review a translation (or rather a set of translations) which center the translator? This is the question I’ve been asking myself as I make my way through Poetry’s Geographies: A Transatlantic Anthology of Translations, edited by Katherine M. Hedeen and Zoë Skoulding. This ambitious collection is unique in bringing together translation practitioners from the heart of the Anglosphere and giving them a space to speak about their practices—what Hedeen might describe as “countermapping,” what Don Mee Choi might describe as “lilymethod” mapping, and what Erin Moure might call “in”mapping.

As you may have gathered from this description, Poetry’s Geographies begins not with the text-in-translation but with the translator, with their essays and methods which speak in sometimes contradictory, sometimes complementary dialogues. Through these, we, the readers, are asked to sit with the very contradiction of translation itself—the notion that one language can be “deformed” or “twinned” or “exploded” into another. Indeed, the acknowledgement of this impossibility, the greatest and most repeated cliché concerning poetry and translation, drives the collection. As Skoulding writes in the introduction, “Rather than making the world more transparent and ‘accessible’ for quick consumption, poetry and its translation can sustain opacité…as an opaqueness that allows the Other to exist in full, not to be reduced or subordinated.” Put differently in the essay from Sasha Dugdale:

I stand against this idea of translation as a vitrine in which we see the original. I stand against it here, me, many kilos of proteins, lipids, water, with a slow local history of my own composition and concurrent decomposition (I see also that it is a grave act to scribble in these lines)

no person is a pane of glass no person is of pure intent no person is devoid of history

In this approach, the notion of language as a window is cast aside. Language is smoke and mirrors (me). Language is air (Ziba Karbassi). Language is sound (Skoulding). Language is an infestation (Moure). Language is a sufism (Stephen Watts). Poetry’s Geographies asks us to stare into the mist and watch the swirling shapes, the fleeting shadows, the forms familiar, menacing, and absent. The thing we perceive, in Hedeen translating Victor Rodríguez Nuñez, may in fact be absence:

your existing is not shaped
from the knot that resembles the foliage weave
your being is not shaped
from the board sanded down by countless downpours
barely the keyhole owl eye
to look inside so nothing was left outside
an image in heat

fertilized by the void

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