Sholeh Wolpé, The Forbidden: Poetry from Iran and Its Exiles. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012.
La redonda, suprema y celestial sandía
Es la fruta del árbol de la sed
Es la ballena verde del verano
At a Chilean food market in Santiago, a young fruit vendor hums verses in praise of watermelons: “Watermelon: round, supreme and celestial / it’s the fruit of the tree of thirst / it’s the green whale of summer.” The poem’s eloquent simplicity and creative metaphors pique the curiosity of a passerby who decides to eavesdrop in the corner. The boy does not remotely appear “moonstruck” or “bookish,” and having been impressed by his talent, the passerby commits the poem to memory. Sometime after his return to the United States, he comes across those lines in a book of poetry by Pablo Neruda. The poem is entitled “Oda a la Sandía,” and the anecdote has been recounted by Stephen Lapscott, professor of literature at MIT, in the introduction to his edited anthology, Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry.[1]
What might appear to English speakers as a traveler’s tale, an isolated incident, reflects the aesthetic force and power of poetry in relation to people of different orientations and walks of life in Latin America. Lapscott’s anecdote resonates profoundly with the inhabitants of a cultural universe wherein poets and their verse occupy a significant place in the historical fabric of social change. Does an English rendition on its own reveal the ways in which Latin Americans in general, and Chileans in particular, relate to the interior metaphors, aesthetic force, literary traditions, and cultural codes of Neruda’s “simple” verse? In that light, Lapscott’s anecdote serves a critical purpose and invites us to re-evaluate our understanding of the significance and development of poetic traditions in “other” cultures. One of the most significant losses in translation occurs during the process of cultural appropriation, which at times results in the dehistoricization of the poem’s cultural nuances and social contexts.
Similarly, the development of the Persian literary tradition mirrors different levels of public importance, social status, cultural reverence, and political relevance assigned to poetry. Persian poetry was established as a royal profession about a millennium ago, in various courts of Eastern Iran and Central Asia. The livelihood of court poets depended on the composition of panegyrics in praise of the monarch. In the first millennium of its existence, Persian poetry and its social place has been transformed time and again, but the legacy of poetry as a form of orality is still visible in cultural conventions and word formation. The common phrase for writing poetry in Persian is sheʿr surudan, or reciting poetry. According to the literary critic M. R. Shafi’i Kadkani, the usage of sheʿr neveshtan, or writing poetry, is a recent development to be attributed to the high volume of poetry translated into Persian from English and French (the common phrase for composing poetry in English is “writing poetry,” and in French is “écrire de la poésie”).[2]
Classical forms such as ghazal, rubaʿi, and qasidah have traditionally been accompanied by music. Music is still an inseparable element in poetry recitations in Iran, Afghanistan, and in the growing Persian-speaking diaspora. The Persian infinitive surudan, reciting, is a direct legacy of this ongoing tradition, a quality challenged by modern waves of Persian poetry from the 1920s to the present. Today, poetry continues to occupy a significant place in the cultures of Persian-speaking societies. Reciting poetry is at the heart of dazzling elocution. “The tradition of poetry” itself becomes an evolving metaphor, rendered infertile by ethnocentric translations, its social power defanged by cultural appropriation. Poetry, as a metaphor, needs to be unpacked in order to highlight the alterity and philosophies of the source language in the target language.
The footprints of cultural appropriation are perhaps most visible when there is an imbalance of power in the course of a linguistic transfer. Is translating from Persian into Urdu the same as translating from Persian into English? How does power differentiation impact the literary translation? Lapscott writes: “[the] sense of ‘otherness’—our apprehension of [Latin American] traditions as innately foreign, often figuratively ‘feminized’ in contradistinction to our tradition of ‘strong’ poetics—has rendered these Latin American traditions subject to a certain kind of appropriation by translation.” In the case of Persian, E. G. Fitzgerald’s English translations of Omar Khayyam’s Rubáiyát are a classical case in point, where the translator claims to have used the “strong poetics” of the target language to “shape” the original into “art.” In a letter to Edward Byles Cowell, his friend and cohort, Fitzgerald writes, “It is an amusement to me to take what liberties I like with these Persians, who, (as I think) are not Poets enough to frighten one from such excursions, and who really do want a little Art to shape them.” (I use this quotation while recognizing that we have come a long way from such explicit types of ideological bias.)[3] In a political climate where distorted information floods the screens and clouds the minds, the task of the Persian translator to historicize poetry is all the more challenging.
Sholeh Wolpé, Iranian-American poet and the translator of Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad, Sin: Selected has edited a new collection of “poems from Iran and its exiles.” The Forbidden: Poetry from Iran and Its Exiles features poetries of “the ancient” (Rumi and Hafez); “the old” (Iraj Mirza and Tahereh Qurratul-ʿAyn); “the young” (Sepehri, Shamlu, Farrokhzad, and others); as well as work by Iranian poets in exile, some of whom write in English. This anthology is an expanded version of a special issue Wolpé edited on the literature of Iran for the Atlanta Review, which became the journal’s best-selling edition.
The Forbidden is dedicated to “[the] heroic struggle for freedom and democracy [in the Middle East], and to the memory of Neda Agha-Soltan, a twenty-six year-old Iranian student who on 20 June 2009, while attending a demonstration in Tehran protesting the vote-count fraud in the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was shot in the heart by a member of the government’s paramilitary organization, the Basij.” Employing the “transformative” power of a millennium of Persian literary production, The Forbidden has been framed as an alternative narrative that attempts to confront the propaganda machine and censorship of the Islamic Republic on the one hand, and challenge the limited lexicon through which Iran is discussed in American media on the other hand. In this anthology, Wolpé wishes to call on Persian literature to join a “web of literature and culture” in order to better “represent” Iranians globally. In The Forbidden, Wolpé has opted to use Persian literature to “combat” current political characterizations of Iran and Iranians as “enemies of the West.”
My objective is not to reject a framework wherein poetry is positioned to “combat” political propaganda, but merely to problematize this narrative. Wolpé’s introduction makes multiple references to the “Green Movement”; in another instance, she refers to it as a “Revolution,” a dated judgment that seems to have been made with more haste than keen observation. The dust has not yet settled on what sort of political intervention the “Green Movement” has made in the social landscape of Iran today.
Such provocative characterization obscures the complexity of social movements in modern Iran and places Persian poetry in a politicized context. There are a few poems in the anthology that have been composed directly in response to the aftermath of Iran’s 2009 presidential elections. One such poem, “The Green of Iran,” written by Wolpé herself, is featured next to a poem by Sohrab Sepehri (1928-1980), entitled “From Green to Green.”
I, in this darkness
wish for a luminous lamb
to come, to graze
on the grass of my weariness
—Sohrab Sepehri
The earth births this green
that the ants carry through
the cracks of Evin’s walls.
The birds shit green
on the turbans of bearded men.
—Sholeh Wolpé
As the excerpts demonstrate, these two poems respond very differently to political contextualization. Such juxtaposition distorts the readers’ efforts to imagine the social fabric in which Sepehri’s verse was etched. A reader can be left to imagine the poem’s social fabric, or a brief note can attempt to unpack the history of the poet’s aesthetic development. In 1965, Girdhari Tikku, a Kashmiri scholar of Persian literature then at the University of California in Berkeley, traveled to Tehran to engage in a conversation with a group of “revolutionary” poets. Now published in a book, those conversations capture a period in which several young poets, in dialogue with each other’s poetics, set to re-conceptualize Persian poetry.[4] Alongside Ahmad Shamlu (1925-2000), Mehdi Akhavan-Sales (1928-1990), Forugh Farrokhzad (1935-1967), and other early followers of Nima Yushij (1896-1960), Sohrab Sepehri recast Persian poetry by redefining the role of meter and releasing his poetic imagination from the weight of Persian prosody (aruz). Though they all agreed on recasting various aspects of Persian poetry, their respective bodies of work demonstrate diverse approaches to form, meter, and content.
Shamlu’s poetry demonstrates a degree of adherence to littérature engagée, the theory of commitment (taʿahhud), which declares that the artist has a responsibility to society. Shamlu vehemently dismissed poets such as Sepehri for being Gheyr-e Moteʿahed (noncommitted). Sepehri’s verse is not politically engaged; his poetry mirrors his deepest personal feelings and reflections on the smallest incidents of life. Karim Emami, who has translated his verse into English, compares him to a “spiritual mentor and guide” for his readers, the majority of whom are young men and women. Today, both Sepehri and Shamlu are widely celebrated, read, and critiqued in Iran. If censorship imposed by the state curtails free imagination, politicized and dehistoricized frameworks such as that of The Forbidden obscure the aesthetic multiplicity of Persian poetry that speaks powerfully and personally to its native speakers.
Countering government censorship is at the core of the collection’s attempts to re-portray Iran through its arts and literature. Wolpé writes, “In Iran’s Green Revolution we see signs of saplings that have broken through pavements and are growing fast in the streets and squares. Anthologies such as this empower these saplings (voices of poets).” In spite of the anthology’s claims to strengthen literary voices within Iran, The Forbidden includes few living poets (six out of thirty-nine) who currently reside in Iran, while painting a homogenous narrative of the Iranian experience in the diaspora. Wolpé keenly observes that “a vast landscape of expressions” exists in the verse of Iranians who write outside of their homeland, yet reduces the diaspora to “Iran’s exiles.” For instance, Wolpé considers the Iranian-American poet, Roger Sedarat, who was born in Illinois and raised in Texas, an “exilic” voice. To critically engage with the body of literature created outside of Iran, it is fundamental to acknowledge that not all Iranian immigrants are exiles, and not all exilic experiences are necessarily political. Wolpé’s selection of the poetry of “exile” reveals a limited understanding of diasporic Iranians. Though The Forbidden also includes poems with idiosyncratic themes, the overall landscape of Iranian “diasporic” poetry, as represented in the anthology, retains an ideological character (some titles featured in the collection are as follows: “Death Sermon,” “Blood’s Voice,” “The Green of Iran,” “Martyrs of Iran,” “Hezbollah”).
Regarding the status of poets in post-Revolution Iran, Wolpé states that the Islamic Republic created a “brand of literature” aimed at combating the “powerful voices of Iran’s poets.” State-sponsored art and literature, as Octavio Paz posits in his seminal work, “Poetry, Society, State” (1956), loses its aesthetic force once it compromises its intellectual independence. Similarly, confronting the Islamic Republic’s political propaganda without investigative vigor and academic integrity only leads to more propaganda. More often than not, the Islamic Republic is depicted as a hermetically sealed political unit, discussed as an unevolving narrative. The Forbidden contributes to this misperception: “Voices were silenced [following the Iran-Iraq War], religious tolerance completely disappeared...and the freedom of press was squelched.” The relationship between writers and the structure of political power is contingent upon myriad variables, but what remains clear is that not all forms of censorship in Iran are political, and not all political acts of censorship under the Islamic Republic have been homogenous. The Islamic Republic has not shown unanimity in its policies of censorship; it has afforded Iranian writers and artists variegated degrees of tolerance (or intolerance) and freedom of expression in the course of three decades.
A vigorous study of the acts and politics of censorship would be fundamental to our understanding of the complex dynamics of political power and literary production in Iran. But to suggest that writers have been “driven deep underground”—as stated by Wolpé—as a result of state censorship and violence posits a threefold claim. First, it suggests that writers and poets who remained in Iran published their works clandestinely. Second, it obscures the development of the dynamics of censorship during the course of three decades. Third, it implies that such strict restrictions have been questioned and criticized only outside of Iran. Needless to say, actual instances of censorship need to be documented, but uninvestigated claims are hardly productive in exposing patterns of government censorship and the politics of publishing in Iran.[5]
Sin, the selected poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad, a collection that lends several poems to The Forbidden, is a case in point.[6] In her introduction to Sin, Wolpé writes: “After the 1979 revolution in Iran, the new Islamic government officially banned Farrokhzad’s poems and her publisher was ordered to stop printing her books. He refused and subsequently he was jailed and his factory burned to ground.” It is not clear which publisher the translator is referring to, as there are no cited sources; however, Wolpé’s general claim is simply baseless. In a phone interview, Mohammad Karimi, editor-in-chief of the Niloofar Publishing House, told me that Farrokhzad’s books were published until the inception of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (1986). After that, four poems were removed from her four collections (including Gol-i Surkh and Dar Khiaban ha-yi Shab). Her five books of poetry have been published nonstop by umpteen publishers since becoming part of public domain.[7]
The Islamic Republic as a master narrative—a single and unchanging political point of view—against which most literatures pertinent to Iran in the West are placed has long exhausted itself. Today, there may be a tactical need to translate political poets (or politicized poems) who write against the ideological foundations of the Islamic Republic, but in the process, the social contexts in which their works were composed, and the ways in which people with various aesthetic orientations relate to them, must not be ignored. Persian literature—produced inside or outside of Iran—must be placed within its unique social contexts, reflecting the plurality of voices and multiplicity of aesthetic forces, intellectual movements, social conventions, cultural codes, and political dispositions that inform its diverse production and reception.
Though I have framed this review as a critique of The Forbidden, my hope is to engage a broader scope, namely the Eurocentric dispositions of the brand of “world literature.” While it is necessary to open the door to the study of non-European literary traditions in English, in its current practice, the institution of “world literature” tends to highlight commonalities and flatten the incommensurable through its Eurocentric scope, assigning Persian literature (in this case) into “intellectual ghettos,” a term used by Ferial Ghazoul.[8] “The idea of comparative literature is to show existing contrapuntal lines in a great composition,” Edward Said writes, “by which difference is respected and understood without coercion.” While the discipline of comparative literature attempts to include various geographical and historical dimensions into its ever-evolving domain, it is crucial to avoid subsuming “other” literatures under European poetics, traditions, and cultural studies.
Whether visible in English translation or not, Persian poetry is read and celebrated by millions in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and the growing Persian-speaking diaspora on its own aesthetic, social, political, and cultural terms. Framing the literature of post-Revolution Iran as a clandestine current not only posits a disempowering and ahistorical thesis, but also further strengthens the misconception that Iran and Iranian writers have been in absolute isolation for the past three decades. Iranian literature has been moving forward on its own terms and in dialogue with the rest of the world. For instance, books whose publication has been discontinued due to censorship in Tehran and Shiraz have been widely sold and read on the streets of Kabul and Herat; and, unsurprisingly, Afghan writers and poets have been well represented in recent years in Iranian book festivals and have won prestigious literary awards. The intellectual trajectory of Persian literature in Iran is inseparable from its mutual interactions with the world, not excluding its dialogue with many Iranian academics and writers living in the diaspora. If any competent translation is to bring Persian literary works into English, it is essential not just to highlight the authoritative attempts that restrict their production and accessibility in their “native landscape,” but also expose and challenge the politicized nature and dehistoricized framework of their “new landscape.”
NOTES
[1] Stephen Lapscott, editor, Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996).
[2] Mohammad Reza Shafi’i Kadkani, ba chiragh va ayinah (Tehran: Sokhan, 2011).
[3] Letter retrieved from Susan Bassnett, Translation Studies (New York: Routledge, 2002), 13.
[4] Girdhari Tikku, A Conversation with Modern Persian Poets (Costa Mesa, California: Mazda Publishers, 2004).
[5] Another example is Wolpé’s statement regarding the “installment of Reza Shah” following the CIA backed coup in 1953 that ousted Mohammad Mossadegh. Reza Shah had been replaced by his son twelve years earlier. In another passage, Ayatollah Montazeri (1922-2009) is referred to as “their own clergy,” referring to the Islamic Republic. Ever since voicing his political objections in 1989, Montazeri was politically demoted by the regime, and was placed under house arrest from 1997 until his death in 2009.
[6] Forugh Farrokhzad, Sin, translated by Sholeh Wolpé (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2007), xxxi.
[7] Forugh Farrokhzad, Majmu’ah-i Surudaha (Tehran: Shadan Publishers, 2005).
[8] Ferial Ghazoul, “Edward Said and the Practice of Comparative Literature,” in Edward Said`s Translocations: Essays in Secular Criticism, edited by Mark Stein and Tobias Döring (New York: Routledge, 2012), 114.