from The Past Me: Signature

Yadollah Royai

#2

Sign playing? Or past-making? The signature passes something that has gone through a thing, and it turns into the thing’s past.

The sign introduces a thing, brings news of a thing. But the signature introduces itself, brings news of itself. The sign is an agent and the signature a form; the first is expecting, the second alone with itself.

So what the signature reveals to me are signs of me that in the moment of signing spill from me, not myself but the product of my familiarity with something above. Below, it familiarizes me with something unexpected that was in me and is a sign of me. A new understanding of some thing in me, and like me entangled.





#3      

The one who whips signs the back of the one who’s whipped. What has happened? Who endorses the back of whom?

Here the signature is no longer the register of the past. Something has happened, but the whip is not the signature of the event. It’s the summoning of the past, meaning the play of the past is also here. But this signature, instead of submitting the proceedings to the past, proceeds with the past, turning the past into the present. It puts what’s before the people on their back, like putting what is due in the palm of a hand. After all, the people’s past is their due and their back isn’t different from their palm. The faqih (“judge”) has come to adjudicate these same dues. He investigates our background, loves the past, goes after the before, digs up what came before and what he finds he brings and puts on the back of the people. For him, before doesn’t mean ahead or in front of. Before means the past, before means past tense, and the signature for him means toying with the past tense. What better place to play with the past tense than on the back. In this way, all the pasts of the judge turn into the present on the back of the people. On the back of those who have been whipped. Otherwise, those who whip wouldn’t take the “before” of the whipped as what is in front of them. They see the judge as the forerunner. He is the greater forerunner the farther back he goes.





#12     

Writing on the back?
A signature on the back that carries someone for someone else.
Someone who on the back of the promissory note comes forward, a hole in
               time, 
a seepage of yesterday into tomorrow.
Like a whip:
a signature on the back of the people from before.
Who has a back?
Who a fore?





#20

The end of the text doesn’t wipe out the sign. I come down with my signature and go up with my signature. Something passes at the bottom of the page that makes the top of the page a past. The past doesn’t get its authority from the above. It gets it from what is now passing below, in my fall from the lines. Here at the end of the fall, there is ascension. I stay at the bottom of the stairs, and the memory stays above in me, entangled. I only know of what I am filled.





#52

A countenance is a feature of a name, or a scene of a name. A scene without a frame.

The surrounding sceneries frame the natural scenes. Around the frame itself is a different surrounding that makes the frame’s surrounding the natural surrounding. Thus, in nature, the scenes never separate from their sceneries. The scenes are inseparable. They stay in their own, and with their own, countenance.

It is like a signature that is the scene for a name, which consumes the countenance and remains inseparable from the name. A scene alone without a surrounding.

translated from the Persian by Kaveh Bassiri

Read the original in Persian

Yadollah Royai (b. 1932) is a seminal figure in modern and experimental Iranian poetry. His work is unique in its linguistic and philosophical complexity. While he spent time in jail as a political prisoner after the 1953 coup, Royai’s poems are not overtly political, though some have dealt with sociopolitical themes. His later books, including Seventy Gravestones (1999) and The Past Me: Signature (2007), are more conceptual, focusing on gravestones and signatures as symbols of death, marking, and remembrance. Royai founded the important hajm movement, and his writing on poetry was influential for new generations of Iranian writers. He has won many awards, including being named a chevalier by the French Ministry of Culture, and he has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. His books have been translated into French but not into English. He has been living in France since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, but his books continue to be published in Iran, and he remains in regular contact with other Iranian writers.

Kaveh Bassiri is an Iranian-American writer and translator. His translations have received the NEA Translation Fellowship and Witter Bynner Poetry Translation Residency. They have been published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Guernica, Colorado Review, Two Line Online, and the Massachusetts Review. His own poetry has won the Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Award and been published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Review, Mississippi Review, as well as in the anthologies Best New Poets and The Forbidden: Poems from Iran and Its Exiles.