Birthplace
All these roads would end in white
if they replied to you.
Your birthplace, you knew, was a town
bigger than your heart
that left you without reply.
A woman’s lips blossom
in a town smaller than hearts.
A woman’s lips end in white,
to the cold cheeks of the year’s martyrs,
my cold cheek was a sun
that did not reply.
I Laugh for You
The black locust, angel of the poor,
is preparing for us
her cool evening drink.
I bend over you:
your skin
moves like breeze and water beasts.
The air is a cup of the spirit
of a burning and witnessing moth
between a thousand suns and a thousand shadows of you.
You are the white corn husks of my childhood
that I glean again.
You are my first fingers.
The poor laugh
beside green cucumber bushes.
Do you see how naked I am?
My umbilical cord is uncut.
Like a new birth, my love is
slimy and bloody.
I laugh for you.
The houses nearby
are lit earlier.
The air between thousands of lamps
and thousands of your shadows near and far
rises in ash.
They had grown me,
had grown me to surround me
by hasty suns.
You passed and picked me so smoothly
that I touched the breeze
in your hands.
You witnessed the sun and the air,
with breeze in your burning red hair.
The water beasts
went to sleep quietly
and each one of them touched
your clear blood
in their dreams.
You became a face
I gazed at
and
gaze at.
Like a new birth, my love is
still slimy and bloody.
Come
for indeed the small yards
will be covered by insects and light.
I laugh for you.
I laugh for you.
The black locust
receives us today
with cool evening drink.
High Tide of the Eyes
Bijan Elahi
translated from the Persian by Rebecca Ruth Gould and Kayvan Tahmasebian
Listen to the original read by Kayvan Tahmasebian:
With our translations, we hope to contribute to the ongoing revival of Elahi’s poetry. We have aimed to present to the reader something of the alien and counterintuitive register that defines Elahi’s poems in Persian. To the translators, the process of creating these translations was like a mushaʿira, a Persian tradition of poetic recitation in which one poet completes the other’s poem. The translation process exiled us from our native languages and taught us to give voice to Elahi’s poetics in a language it was never intended to inhabit.
Bijan Elahi (1945—2010) is the preeminent hermit-poet of Persian modernism. A major influence on contemporary Iranian poetry, his poetics is distinguished by a diversity of styles and registers, as well as by its intertextual engagement with a wide range of world literatures. His poems establish poetry as visions experienced within the nuances of a language that constantly exiles itself. The Iranian poet Yadollah Royaee describes Elahi's poetry as “the tomorrow of our poetry today; a tomorrow coming from distant pasts.”
Rebecca Ruth Gould has published a poetry collection, Cityscapes (Alien Buddha Press, 2019). She translates from Persian, Russian, and Georgian, and has translated books such as After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Ghazals and Other Poems of Hasan Sijzi of Delhi (Northwestern University Press, 2016) and The Death of Bagrat Zakharych and other Stories by Vazha-Pshavela (Paper & Ink, 2019). She was a finalist for the Luminaire Award for Best Poetry (2017) and—together with Kayvan Tahmasebian—the Lunch Ticket’s Gabo Prize (2017). She is also a Pushcart Prize nominee.
Kayvan Tahmasebian is a poet, translator, and literary critic. His poetry has appeared in Notre Dame Review, Hawai’i Review, Salt Hill, and Lunch Ticket. His co-translations of Elahi have appeared in Tin House, Poetry Wales, Waxwing, Acumen, The McNeese Review, Two Lines, and Kenyon Review. His co-translated volume (with Rebecca Ruth Gould), High Tide of the Eyes: Poems by Bijan Elahi, is forthcoming with The Operating System in 2019.
