چهار شعر

As translators, we sometimes begin our journey with the greatest aspirations to transform the most technical writing into legible poetry. However, while making the lateral movements between languages, sometimes the hardest challenges pose themselves in the very thought systems bound to each language.

I find Shahin Sadeghzadeh’s work challenging because of its sheer simplicity and how it rebels against language through simple leaps in logic (prevalent in the mystic thought that informs her work) that forces us to rethink language and rewire neural patterns to break past established neural connections.

How a poem comes across at the superfice is as important as its intent, and providing clarity may have been the safe path to follow, but clarity is not where Sadeghzadeh’s poetry shines brightest. The Sufi and mystic thought that informs her work thrives on absurdity, paradox, and surrealism. Sadeghzadeh insists specifically on less conventional word choices, since she believes that by changing simple linguistic rules, the body becomes a site where feelings take place, rid of the ego; an ecology where two metaphysical states—one passing through the body and the other through the self—meet to create the dichotomy of the material versus the spiritual ubiquitous in Sufi thought. Sadeghzadeh’s work moves toward the dissolution of the self into the universal, positing the body as a borrowed vessel for the self. Her poems are simple, but can be quite jarring, and it is precisely in these jarring paradoxes where her poetry is most effective.

It feels extraneous to elaborate so profusely on something simple and burden the reader with an ideological path to follow, since that’s the very habit Sadeghzadeh’s poetry works hard to break. Although her poems take the simplest shapes, they have undergone a most rigorous process in order to convey cultural specificities (and so much needed to be done to convey this, both in the Persian originals and through the process of translation), and are profoundly steeped in the foundations of linguistic thought. Being involved in this project has been simply terrific.