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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Read more on the Asymptote blog:

• Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from The House of the Edrisis by Ghazeleh Alizadeh
• Poetry and Resistance in Iran
• Visual Spotlight: Some Artists on Developing a New Visual Language of Protest