Translating Persian Poetry and its Discontents

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Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Jones, A Grammar of the Persian, 133 (my italics).

2. Ibid., 137.

3. Beard, “English iii. Translations”; and Yohannan, “The Persian Poetry Fad,” 144–145.

4. Clarke, The Divan-i Hafiz, viii.

5. FitzGerald, The Letters, vol. 2, 335.

6. See Drury, “Accident, Orientalism.”

7. Barks, The Essential Rumi, 292.

8. Nicholson, The Mathnawî, vol.2, xv.

9. Davis, “On Not Translating Hafez,” 317.

10. Shamlu, Hāykū, Shiʿr-i zhāpunī, 13. Also see Tahmasebian and Gould, “The Translational Horizons,” 38 and 42–43.

11. Shafiʿi Kadkani, Bā chirāq va āyina, 139.

12. Shafiʿi Kadkani, “Dar tarjoma-nāpaẕīrī,” 746; for a translation see Shafiʿi-Kadkani, “On Poetic Untranslatability.”

13. For a continued debate on the translatability of Ḥāfiẓ’s ghazals, see Davis, “On Not Translating Hafez”; Gould, “Hard Translation”; and Fani, “The Allure of Untranslatability.”

14. Clarke, The Divan-i Hafiz, 2.

15. Bell, Poems from the Divan, 67.

16. Arberry, Hafiz: Fifty Poems, 83.

17. Avery and Heath-Stubbs, Hafiz of Shiraz, 19.

18. Gray, The Green Sea of Heaven, 1.

19. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 258.

20. Ibid., 253.

21. For more about how Anglo/English poetry operates in many ways that are incongruous with Persian poetry, see Dick Davis, “On Not Translating Hafez.”

22. I owe this perspective from Anglophone poetry to Rebecca Ruth Gould.

23. Isfarāyinī, Tāj al-tarājim, 10.

24. Molière, The Plays of Molière, 200.

25. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 261.

26. Ibid., 262.

27. Lahuti, ”Sangar-i khūnīn,” 689 -690.

28. Iraj Mirza, Dīvān,128–132 and 153.

29. See Karimi-Hakkak, “From Translation to Appropriation.”

30. Cited in Clark, Martin Heidegger, 112; and For the original, see Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, 79.

31. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 254.

32. For an account and a poetics of our co-translation, see Gould and Tahmasebian, “Inspired and Multiple.”

33. Herbert, “On Translating Poetry,” 98.

34. See Tahmasebian and Gould, “The Translational Horizons,” and Tahmasebian and Gould, “Translation as Alienation.”

35. Farhadpour, “Thought/translation,” 54.

36. Ibid., 57.

37. Mehrgan, Ilāhiyāt-i tarjuma, 50.

38. Ibid., 50.

39. See Beard, “English: iv. Translations of Modern,” for a history of modernist Persian literature translated into English. Also, see Ali Araghi’s project, “Persian Translated” (http://www.ataraghi.com/persian-translated.html), for an online database (in progress) of modernist Persian literary works that has been translated into English.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under ERC-2017-STG Grant Agreement No 759346. The author wishes to thank Rebecca Ruth Gould for her valuable review and feedback. The author is grateful to Translation Review’s anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on this article.

Notes on contributors

Kayvan Tahmasebian

Kayvan Tahmasebian is a research fellow of the ERC-funded project ”Global Literary Theory,” based at the University of Birmingham. He is co-translator of High Tide of the Eyes: Poems by Bijan Elahi (The Operating System, 2019). His co-translation of House Arrest: Poems of Hasan Alizadeh (Todmorden, UK: Arc Publications) received PEN Translates Award in 2021.