This co-authored essay reflects on the process of co-translation as a form of co-authorship, drawing on examples taken from Persian poetry and the history of Russian-English literary translation.

This co-authored essay reflects on the process of co-translation as a form of co-authorship, drawing on examples taken from Persian poetry and the history of Russian-English literary translation.

In his essay “The Poet,” Emerson called for the poet who would sing the burgeoning nation of the United States of America. The answer to his request far exceeded all his expectations in the form of a ground-breaking volume of poems where Walt Whitman sang not only a nation, but the people who inhabited it as the people incarnated the values, str…[Read more]

Review of The Halberd at Red Cliff: Jian’an and the Three Kingdoms, by Xiaofei Tian (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2018)

As the Pāṇḍava brothers move through the forest in the third book of the Mahābhārata, they hear stories of fantastic transformations and journeys: a band of gods all masked as the same prince, dice that become thieving birds, a sage turned into a hunted deer, a woman who traverses Yama’s realm. These tales recast and elucidate the condit…[Read more]

In the winter of 476 A.D. the Ostrogoths, hungry and exhausted from wandering for months along the barren confines of the Byzantine Empire, wrote to Emperor Zeno in Constantinople requesting permission to enter the walled city of Epidaurum and just kinda crash and charge their phones. Closer to home, Orpheus walks Eurydice through a suburban…[Read more]

When we think we know Fernando Pessoa, a new surprise arises: this time, one related to the genesis of Mensagem, the most established and celebrated book of the Pessoan canon. That book, published in 1934 with a title only finalized at the time of the typographical proofs, was initially called Portugal—an inscription dating from 1910, when P…[Read more]

The hermit-poet of modern Persian literature, Bijan Elahi (1945-2010) was a modernist poet, a prolific translator of Eliot, Rimbaud, Michaux, Hölderlin, and the founder of Other Poetry, the leading avant-garde movement within Persian modernism. Elahi passed the last three decades of his life in seclusion in his house in Tehran. He stopped…[Read more]

Writing a factual or fictional dream is a difficult task as its ›otherness‹ will challenge all of our accustomed modes of narration. So the existence of established cultural and textual patterns is a welcome help. This collection of essays describes these patterns, their historical and individual modifications and their relation to the dre…[Read more]

از رویکردهای تازه در حوزۀ نقد ادبی رویکرد بوم­نقد است که به بررسی رابطۀ میان انسان و طبیعت در ادبیات می­ پردازد. هرچند تعداد قابل توجهی از آثار نظری و کاربردی در حوزۀ بوم‌نقد منتشر شده ­است، اما تاکنون توجه چندانی به پژوهش بوم­نقد تطبیقی نشده­ است. پژوهش پیش­رو تلاشی است برای گشودن باب چنین پژوهش ­هایی به زبان فارسی در فضای دانشگاهی ایران. شا…[Read more]

Nimā Yushij (1897-1960), the first major modern Persian poet, developed a poetic form later called New Poetry, Free Poetry or Nimāic Poetry to remove the restrictions of traditional rhyme and meter. Although he was not the only or even the first trying to modernize Persian poetry, he was the one on whom was bestowed the title “the father of mod…[Read more]

In this interview with Full Stop magazine editor Michael Schapira, I introduce my Full Stop fellowship project on translation & activism.

بخشی از مطالعات ادبی بینارشته‌ای شامل بررسی ارتباط میان ادبیات و تصویر می‌شود. در این زمینه ارتباط میان ادبیات و سینما شناخته‌شده‌ترین حوزۀ پژوهشی است که تعداد چشمگیری اثر پژوهشی، اعم از رساله و مقاله، در این حوزه نگاشته شده‌ است. در همین زمینه می‌توان به ارتباط میان ادبیات و نقاشی اشاره کرد که در سال‌های اخیر شاهد تعداد انگشت‌شماری اثر تحقیق…[Read more]

If Fernando Pessoa’s Portuguese works contain a coterie of heteronyms, his English poetry also displays an array of fictitious authors: besides Pessoa himself, one finds Charles Robert Anon, Alexander Search and—with his poems compiled here for the first time in print—Frederick Wyatt. After Alexander Search’s presence, which dominated the English…[Read more]

Though Fernando Pessoa is not widely known as a political poet, we may be familiar with the political commentary explicit in some of his works. In four political sonnets dating from 1905 (but only fully published in 1995), the poet criticizes the mockery of Russia by British journalists, calls the colonization of Ireland and the Transvaal “a s…[Read more]

O livro Fernando Pessoa—The Poet With Many Faces, de autoria de Hubert D. Jennings, é a primeira biografia pessoana em Inglês. Originalmente escrito na década de 1970, o livro deveria ter sido impresso em 1974, mas a Revolução dos Cravos interrompeu os planos editoriais. O dactiloscrito, encontrado numa garagem em Joanesburgo, na África do Sul,…[Read more]

A period of six months (Dec. 2017 to Jun. 2018) saw the launch of three digital platforms dedicated to the works of Fernando Pessoa, raising the number of such projects to seven published in a decade. Considering this virtual proliferation as a milestone for Pessoan studies, this article aims to reconstruct, at least as a sketch, the history of…[Read more]

Book Review Literary Translation in Modern Iran: A Sociological Study by Esmaeil Haddadian-Moghaddam, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014, ISBN 978 90 272 5854 0 (hbk), 236 pp

In late-ninth-century China, poetry and meditation became equated — not just metaphorically, but as two equally valid means of achieving stillness and insight. This article discusses how several strands in literary and Buddhist discourses fed into an assertion about such a unity by the poet-monk Qiji 齊己 (864–937?). One strand was the aesthet…[Read more]