{"id":297826,"date":"2014-04-28T14:53:47","date_gmt":"2014-04-28T14:53:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2014\/04\/28\/the-oasis-of-now-by-sorab-sepehri-why-this-book-should-win\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:39:25","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:39:25","slug":"the-oasis-of-now-by-sorab-sepehri-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2014\/04\/28\/the-oasis-of-now-by-sorab-sepehri-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":""The Oasis of Now" by Sorab Sepehri [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’re only hours away from announcing the two winners of this year’s BTBA<\/span> awards, but it’s never too late to promote one of the finalists. The piece below was written by BTBA<\/span> poetry judge, Bill Martin.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/center><\/p>\n

The Oasis of Now<\/em> by Sorab Sepehri, translated from the Persian by Kazim Ali and Mohammad Jafar Mahallati (Iran; BOA<\/span> Editions)<\/b><\/p>\n

One of the books that surprised and impressed me most from this year\u2019s BTBA<\/span> poetry submissions was Sohrab Sepehri\u2019s The Oasis of Now<\/em>, translated by the American poet Kazim Ali and the Iranian scholar of religion Mohammad Jafar Mahallati. Like most readers of English, I was unfamiliar with the work, because like most Persian-language writers, Sepehri\u2014who was born in 1928, lived most of his life during the reign of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and died in 1980, a few months after the revolution\u2014is practically unknown in Anglophony. But something of his poetics, I\u2019ve since discovered, has long been available \u201cin translation\u201d in the films of Sepehri\u2019s countryman Abbas Kiarostami, a staple of film festivals and world cinema courses. The muted colors and rustic life-world, simple narration and gentle irony of Kiarostami\u2019s first international success, Where is the Friend\u2019s Home?<\/em> (1987), for instance, can be understood not only as opening a view onto everyday life in Iran\u2014which was my primary takeaway when I saw it many years ago\u2014but as enacting a philosophy that the filmmaker and the poet shared (the film\u2019s title is a line in one of Sepehri\u2019s canonical poems, \u201cThe Address,\u201d which is included in this book). According to Hamid Dabashi, who has written at length about this connection, Kiarostami\u2019s faith in immediate observation and the \u201cfictive lucidity of the real\u201d can be attributed to the influence of Sepehri\u2019s poetry (and probably of his painting as well\u2014he was equally well known in his lifetime as a visual artist). <\/p>\n

Historically American readers have tended to understand literature from politically repressive countries unaffiliated with the United States mainly in terms of its political value, without reflecting on the ways in which our own reading practices are ideologically determined or inflected. What this may mean for literary translation and the place of world literature, of translated poetry, of a book like this, in the US, is a question at the back of my mind in reading it. Sepehri\u2019s work does not ask to be understood \u201cpolitically\u201d\u2014by contrast with other poets of his generation like Farough Farrokhzad and Ahmad Shamlu\u2014because his domain is the lyric subject\u2019s engagement with nature and his mode is highly deflective even in its insistence on a kind of affective immediacy. Nevertheless, this poetic itself has come to be understood in political terms. Dabashi puts it in a nutshell: \u201cSohrab Sepehri cut through the thick politicization of his age to grasp a primal moment of wonder in the world.\u201d And this may also be a key factor in his translatability. Although Kiarostami\u2019s Iran of the eighties, a fundamentalist theocracy hobbled by a war instigated by its (then US-backed) neighbor Iraq, was far different from the country Sepehri lived in a decade and more earlier (when he was criticized for not taking a stand against the abuses of the\u2014then US-backed\u2014Pahlavi regime), their mutual embrace of the primacy of perception may have provided existential coherence in a time and place disorganized by political ideology. Is that coherence available to us, English-language readers, disorganized (or organized\u2014you choose!<\/i>) as we are by capitalism? Can \u201cprimal moment of wonder in the world\u201d ever be anything other than a commodity for us market segments? And what would it mean for this poetry to win a prize endowed by a megacorporation as part of its brand positioning? (A lot of money, that\u2019s what!)<\/p>\n

Well, there are universal values, and translation is possible. Something that Dabashi hints at and another scholar, Massud Farzan, addressed forty years ago as crucial to Sepehri\u2019s work is, in addition to the influence on it of Buddhism, its connection to Sufi apophatic theology, the \u201cvia negativa<\/i> . . . the cleansing of the heart\u2019s and mind\u2019s mirror of its dust and grime.\u201d This mystical affiliation informs the frame that Ali and Mahallati give his work in the introduction to the book, and also affirms the fantasy I had in reading him of an affinity with Toma\u017e \u0160alamun, another poetic descendent of Rumi. (I imagined a genealogy involving other poets on the American scene, too: Whitman, Dickinson, Rilke, Trakl, Lorine Niedecker, Robert Lax, Gary Snyder, Fanny Howe; but none seemed so closely related.) Like \u0160alamun’s poetry, Sepehri’s cleaves and coheres at odd angles to the Anglophone avant-garde. But while \u0160alamun refracts sense paratactically and with scintillating speed, Sepehri is much slower, tellurian, more liable to syntax, haunting, his epiphanies so figurative and deliberate they often come across as platitudes. Yet the experience of reading him is more robust, ample, and structured than it may appear at first sight:<\/p>\n

\n

Beyond the poplars
\nsweet innocence beckons. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

I paused by the stand of bamboo to listen as the wind susurrated through.
\nWho was speaking to me?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

A lizard slid into the water. I walked on.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Hayfield, cucumber patch, rose bush, oblivion . . .<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

At the stream I doffed my sandals to dangle my feet in the water.
\nHow alive I am,
\nhow green like the garden.
\nSo what if sadness creeps down the mountain slope?
\nWho is that hiding behind the trees?
\nOnly a water buffalo grazing. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Like most of the poems in The Oasis of Now<\/em>, this one, \u201cGolestaneh,\u201d reads like a rehearsal of reverse apperception, with the \u201chuman position\u201d of the subject reconceived in relation to nature through repeated gestures\u2014questions, reappraisals, simple descriptions, epiphanies\u2014a repertoire of moderated ecstasy. This poetic redirection of the subject toward nature, or as Jonathan Skinner has put it, this \u201cturning of the poem out of doors\u201d and the \u201cextending and developing\u201d in these poems of the \u201cperception of the natural world,\u201d that signals the potential inspiration of Sepehri\u2019s work for ecopoetics. This is not a book that immediately announces itself as avant-garde or new<\/em>, it does not brandish its modernism, and does not in fact seem so easily commodifiable, but the more time one spends with it, the more it astonishes and yields.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

The Oasis of Now<\/em> is made up of three sections of Sepehri\u2019s poetry from the mid-1960s, the high point of his career, which followed on his encounter with Buddhism and coincided with extensive travel in China and Japan, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. It begins with the long poem \u201cWater\u2019s Footfall\u201d (\u1e62ed\u0101-ye p\u0101-ye \u0101b, 1965), which Omnidawn published as a bilingual chapbook in 2011; the midsection comprises the 25 poems of the book \u201cA Measure of Green\u201d (\u1e24ajm-e sabz<\/em>, 1968), which as Houman Sarshar points out, in his excellent Encyclopaedia Iranica<\/em><\/a> entry on Sepehri, was written between 1962 and 1967 and \u201ccomprises virtually all of Sepehri\u2019s best-known and most anthologized works\u201d (a translation of this book by David L. Martin was published in 1988); and it wraps up with another long poem, \u201cThe Traveler\u201d (Mos\u0101fer, 1966). Sepehri\u2019s collected works, \u201cEight Books\u201d (Ha\u0161t ket\u0101b<\/em>, 1978), included everything already published along with a previously unpublished series of poems, M\u0101 hi\u010d, m\u0101 neg\u0101h<\/i>\u2014a title that is basically untranslatable but means something like \u201cWe are nothing but looking,\u201d as Kazim Ali says in the interview below. Sarshar also points to the influence on this final phase of Sepehri\u2019s poetry of Ralph Waldo Emerson\u2019s essay \u201cNature,\u201d and to the echo in this title of Emerson\u2019s line: \u201cI become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing, I see all.\u201d Hopefully English-language readers will be able to read more of Sepehri\u2019s remarkable and important work very soon. <\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

I was curious to hear more about the translation of Sepehri\u2019s work in preparation for writing these ruminations, so I conducted a brief interview with Kazim Ali over Skype last week. Here it is: <\/p>\n

WM: How did you come to Sohrab Sepehri\u2019s poetry?<\/b><\/p>\n

KA: My father, in around 2002\u20132003, was working in Iran on an international hydroelectric dam project, which is what he does. And he asked me what I would like him to bring back as a gift. I said I\u2019d love to read some Iranian poets. So he brought back some volumes of poetry that had been translated into English from Farsi, but published in Iran in a very basic translation. I didn\u2019t think too much of it, although I recognized that there was a mystical aspect that was appealing to me, in terms of the work that I do myself. It wasn\u2019t until a while later that my partner, Marco, who is a photographer, needed text for a project he was working on, and took the book off the shelf and read this couplet out loud to me, which as I later learned is an iconic Sepehri couplet: \u201cI am a Muslim, the rose is my qibla.\u201d I thought it was actually very beautiful, and I often thought of that line and quoted it and other lines from the same passage later on. But I didn\u2019t think about doing a translation of Sepehri\u2019s poetry until several years later when Poets\u2019 House and City Lore, two institutions in New York City, held their \u201cPoetries of the Islamic World\u201d event [in May 2011]. <\/p>\n

In preparation for that event, I felt like, even though they had invited me as an American Muslim poet, I wanted to bring something from the Muslim world. Particularly because the Cold War against Iran has not only been a political Cold War, but has had a cultural impact as well, in terms of its cultural isolation. So I thought I would bring some Iranian poets to the attention of the American audience. Because, as you know, it is a very ancient and storied literary culture, I mean it\u2019s incredible, the literature of Iran and literature in Farsi, the classics, everything. And not just literary culture, but visual culture and music, all of it. I was thinking of what has happened with the cultural damage and fallout from the Iraq invasion, and the horror of something like that happening again. So there was a political motivation for me. I really wanted to get something of Iranian literature to American readers so they that they can better understand what this country is about. <\/p>\n

Luckily for me, I have a colleague here at Oberlin, Jafar Mahallati, a wonderful scholar in the Religion Department, who is very interested in Iranian poetry. I asked him if he would be interested to tackle this with me, and we sat down and did it. I had the old, bad translation to work from, and he and I would sit together and he would recite the Farsi to me, and we would talk through the poem and all the different nuances. You know, with Sepehri there are so many different layers of meaning, oftentimes we would be very confused by the images and metaphors he was using and have to tease out the multiple layers. He uses lots of images of birds and plants and stuff like that. And Jafar would say something like, \u201cWell, you know, the interesting thing about this plant is that it only blooms in the nighttime, so Sepehri is saying such and such by using it.\u201d So we would spend an hour on a page of poetry, just talking through it. And then I would go and create it as an English poem. And then I would send them to him and he would say, \u201cThis is great,\u201d or \u201cthis image is not exactly right,\u201d that sort of thing. We did the whole book like that together. The final part, \u201cThe Traveler,\u201d I did mostly on my own. But he did go through it, so it was a collaboration from beginning to end. <\/p>\n

WM: The book you got from your father, from Iran, was that a single volume of Sepehri\u2019s work, or was it his work in an anthology?<\/b><\/p>\n

KA: It was two books of his in one: the long poem \u201cWater\u2019s Footfall\u201d and another book which we\u2019ve translated as \u201cA Measure of Green.\u201d And there was another volume as well, which we\u2019re working on now, which had two more books of Sepehri\u2019s in it. One of them is \u201cThe Traveler,\u201d which went into The Oasis of Now<\/em>; and the other is a book with a title that is very hard to translate, but means something like \u201cWe are nothing but the looking\u201d or \u201cOur life itself is an observation.\u201d It\u2019s like Emily Dickinson\u2019s line \u201cAs all the Heavens were a Bell, and Being, but an Ear.\u201d But with Sepehri, being is a looking. We don\u2019t know how we\u2019re going to translate the title. This is the problem when working on Sepehri, it\u2019s all very esoteric and metaphysical and philosophical. <\/p>\n

Sepehri had six collections of poetry that he published in his lifetime, and then included two sections of new poetry in his collected works, Eight Books.<\/em> We\u2019re just working our way through it. We\u2019d like to finish his body of work, but it\u2019s going to be a long project. <\/p>\n

WM: You mention Dickinson. Another poet I thought of when reading the book was Rilke, in terms of a kind of embodied metaphysics in Sepehri\u2019s poetry. And I thought of the way American poetry was saturated with Rilke in the 1980s, and also of the presence here of a poet like Toma\u017e \u0160alamun, and this made me wonder why Sepehri isn\u2019t more available in English, and where you see Sepehri\u2019s home on the American poetry scene.<\/b><\/p>\n

KA: There are actually other recent English versions of Sepehri out there. Sholeh Wolpe, who has published translations of Farough Farrokhzad both here and in England, has done some of his work. Kaveh Bassiri and Jean Valentine did a handful of his poems together. The poet Robin Magowan has also done some. So some individual poems have been translated by different people here and there, but yes, The Oasis of Now<\/em> and the Omnidawn chapbook are the only full books available here. I feel very personally connected to Sepehri\u2019s work, as a poet who is invested in the metaphysical stuff, and someone who is steeped in the religious tradition as well. Sepehri was an iconoclast in a sense, he wasn\u2019t part of the Muslim orthodoxy. That line \u201cI am a Muslim, the rose is my qibla<\/em>,\u201d is an ironic line, in a way, but I feel there is a deep sincerity under the skin of irony. Sepehri often plays fast and loose with literal meanings and metaphorical meanings, flirting with the ordinary and quotidian and turning it into a mythical condition. Working with a native speaker has allowed me to really get underneath the skin of those lines and find a universality in them. <\/p>\n

As for finding a home for his work on the American scene, one of the criticisms that we\u2019ve gotten so far, in a review in American Poetry Review<\/em>, was that I made Sepehri sound too American, or something like that. But there is something about the postmodern American lyric that\u2019s very close to the classical poetics of disjunction that exists in Farsi and Arabic poetry. You know Adonis, the Syrian poet? He wrote an interesting piece on modernism in the Arab world, where he said that, \u201cOur modernist moment in Arab literature happened in 700 A.D.\u201d What happened to British and American literature in modernism in the 20th century was already happening in the Arab world in the 700s. So their classical literature is like our postmodern literature. The ghazal and all these other forms, which are centered around the notion of disjunction, came out in 1700\u20131800 over there; and their contemporary lyric has a lot of affinities with what\u2019s happening now in contemporary American literature. So as far as Sepehri sounding American, I can see that. <\/p>\n

WM: Is there anything else about Sepehri, about the book, that you would want people to know, in terms of framing it, its reception in English?<\/b><\/p>\n

KA: Sepehri is one of the major figures of 20th century Iranian literature. Like a Whitman or Robert Frost. You know how \u201cthe road less travelled\u201d is a line from Frost\u2014the same thing goes for Sepehri. People quote him in everyday life situations. When we were preparing the introduction, we discovered that a newspaper in Afghanistan had just used a line of his for the headline of an article on religious intolerance\u2014it was the line that goes \u201cWe have to rinse our eyes clear of habit so we can actually see\u201d\u2014and it was unattributed because everyone knows it. Sepehri is a great window into a certain type of contemporary, progressive Iranian thought. Which people here don\u2019t think exists. So I\u2019m really glad that the book got out there. I\u2019m very grateful to BOA<\/span>. I mean, they rushed it; they took the book in February and published it in October. So I\u2019m really grateful to them for seeing the importance of the book and getting it out there, and I\u2019m grateful to every organization that\u2019s promoting it, because I think it\u2019s very important to engage with literature from this part of the world now. <\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’re only hours away from announcing the two winners of this year’s BTBA awards, but it’s never too late to promote one of the finalists. The piece below was written by BTBA poetry judge, Bill Martin. The Oasis of Now by Sorab Sepehri, translated from the Persian by Kazim Ali and Mohammad Jafar Mahallati (Iran; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[15416,3766,52306,56046,3776,1646,56036,56026,56056],"class_list":["post-297826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-boa-editions","tag-iranian-literature","tag-kazim-ali","tag-mohammad-jafar-mahallati","tag-persian-literature","tag-review","tag-sorab-sepehri","tag-the-oasis-of-now","tag-william-martin"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297826"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297826\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":317516,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297826\/revisions\/317516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}