Posts filed under 'Iran'

Visual Spotlight: Some Artists on Developing a New Visual Language of Protest

The Some Artists page is proof of a dream, the dream of art and artists who will forever stay with the people and against the power.

Over the weekend, Iran’s Deputy Attorney General said that punishment for those who encourage others to remove their hijabs would face criminal prosecution, and only days before, it was reported that women who were not wearing the hijab were being barred from the Tehran metro, leaving many unable to go to work. This comes at a time when tensions surrounding the longstanding and long-protested compulsory hijab law are especially high; last year, after Mahsa Amini was killed in police custody following her arrest for allegedly failing to comply with the compulsory hijab law, protests against Amini’s killing and against the compulsory hijab law broke out and grew into a larger protest movement. While the protests were violently repressed by the government, the spirit of protest in Iran has both a longer history and a continuing energy. Many Iranian women continue to go without the hijab in public as a display of defiance, and even prior to the recent protests, resistance to the compulsory hijab law was inextricably linked to older Iranian protest movements. The visual histories of these interconnected protest movements are on display in the work of Some Artists, an anonymous group of artists who began using social media to disseminate art in solidarity with Iranian protesters following protests in 2018. In this edition of our series spotlighting visual content from our archives, we revisit our feature on Some Artists from our Winter 2020 issue

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Following the protests of January 2018 and the ensuing silence of the middle class, artists and intellectuals in the face of protests by workers and the rise of the afflicted, we aimed to become a bridge. A visual cry for the afflicted and a platform where artists and intellectuals would be translated beyond class.

The first piece uploaded on Some Artists’ Facebook page was a video clip dedicated to Sina Ghanbari, entitled “(Far)yad” [“Cry 1”], on January 27, 2018.

We realized a lack of precedence of visual language for what we hoped to do, and this made our process hard. Whatever existed before then was either the literature and visual arts belonging to the era of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which felt aged, or the politicized visual language of the Green Movement of 2009; there was nothing else. To address the issue, we decided that a simplicity in form and content would be our only way to go. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest literary news from Hong Kong, Argentina, and Iran!

Whilst coronavirus remains a concern for countries around the world, our weekly dispatches are a testament that world literature continues to thrive, with our writers reporting on new literary journal initiatives, publishing fairs, audio books, and newly released novels. In Hong Kong, writers are advocating Cantonese literature and boldly responding to the ongoing protests by launching two new literary journals, Resonate and Hong Kong Protesting. Lovers of Argentine literature will be excited by the release of English audio books from the Centro Cultural Kirchner, featuring authors such as César Aira and Hebe Uhart, and available for free. In Iran, the literary community mourns the passing of prominent linguistic scholar Badr al-Zaman Qarib but has also celebrated the new release by the renowned novelist and Man Asian Literary Prize nominee Mahmoud Dowlatabadi. Read on to find out more! 

Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

Two weeks ago, University of Edinburgh student Andrew Yu tweeted that one of the journal reviewers of his academic paper claimed that the name of Hong Kong is inappropriately “foreign” and needs to be amended to appear alongside its Chinese equivalent (香港) and its Mandarin romanization (Xianggang). Despite its roots in British colonialism, “Hong Kong” has been used for at least 180 years and is a closer romanization of the city’s name in Cantonese, its local language. What the reviewer proposed is unnatural, but it is also reflective of the city’s larger struggles as it tries to maintain its own identity amid political pressure and the sweeping national security law.

There have been recent initiatives to better protect Hong Kong’s unique culture and literature. Launched in June, Resonate is the world’s first literary journal written completely in Cantonese, which is seen mainly as a spoken language and is rarely written out in formal or literary contexts. Featuring fiction and criticism, the journal also publishes articles about the language itself, debunking myths long believed by its speakers—like the idea that Cantonese was spoken during the Tang dynasty. In fact, it is a modern variety of Middle Chinese, used from the Northern and Southern dynasties to the Song dynasty (roughly, from around A.D. 600  to A.D. 1200). Mandarin and Shanghainese also developed from Middle Chinese.

Cha, Hong Kong’s English-language literary journal, has also initiated a new project amassing writing about the Hong Kong protests, recently stifled by mass arrests of pro-democracy figures and the disqualification of lawmakers and election hopefuls. Hong Kong Protesting is a growing collection of original and translated poetry, essays, criticism, and art from various contributors. In particular, several translations of works by Hong Kong poets are available, including poems by Cao Shuying (trans. Andrea Lingenfelter), Derek Chung (trans. Tammy Lai-Ming Ho), Liu Waitong (trans. Lucas Klein), and Jacky Yuen (trans. Nicky Admussen). Many of the works evoke the start of the movement last summer when two million people marched peacefully, and when violating incidents, such as the attacks on journalists and citizens, became more frequent, altering the city once and for all. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest literary news from Argentina, Sweden, and Iran!

This week, our writers bring you news from Argentina, Sweden, and Iran. In Argentina, book fairs have moved events online and well-known trans writer Camila Sosa Villada has spoken about the benefits of trans literature; in Sweden, newspapers have been publishing full-length novels as a daily series for Summer; and in Iran, a new book of letters by Abbas Kiarostami has faced publication rights controversy. Read on to find out more! 

Allison Braden, Co-Editor-at-Large, reporting from Argentina

This year, the 46th annual Buenos Aires Book Fair was postponed indefinitely. The spring gathering, predictably, had to adapt to limitations imposed by coronavirus, but the change of plans was nevertheless a huge loss to the booksellers and industry professionals who rely on the blockbuster event, which attracts upwards of 10,000 visitors over the course of the fair. However, Fundación El Libro, the organization that puts on the fair, opted to go a different route for its children’s book fair. That programming will be held virtually, beginning this coming Monday, July 20, and continuing through the end of the month. Organizers promise hundreds of digital activity opportunities for children and young adults, which may provide welcome relief to parents.

Even with the book fair on hold, other efforts to promote Argentine literature around the world continue. Programa Sur, one of the most robust programs of its kind in the Spanish-speaking world, was developed in 2016 to offer grants to incentivize small and medium publishers abroad to release Argentine books in translation. Since its inception, the program site boasts that “over 800 foreign publishers from 46 countries have applied for support in the translation of 1,060 works by more than 380 Argentine authors into 40 languages.” The program is accepting applications through September.

Those stuck at home in Argentina and abroad, looking to keep their finger on the pulse of literary news and views, may turn to news organization RED/ACCIÓN’s weekly newsletter, Sie7e Párrafos (“seven paragraphs”). The Tuesday newsletter features readings and commentary on literature and nonfiction books, as well as occasional updates on the publishing industry. One recent issue featured a short interview with trans literary star Camila Sosa Villada. Interviewer Javier Sinay asked what the opportunities are for trans literature and what trans literature can contribute to the world. She answers, in my translation, “What happens when writing runs counter to the established canon? A kind of rupture in the peace promised by the rules of good writing . . . Now, you have the opportunity to read something unexpected, about unknown worlds and knowledge you never imagined.” Her answer underscores why the postponed book fair is such a loss and why Programa Sur remains so important. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

Our latest dispatches from Sweden, United States, and Iran!

This week our writers bring you the latest news from Sweden, the United States, and Iran. In Sweden, Nordic Noir finds a new form in a popular podcast, whilst mounting tension between the United States and Iran sparks debate over the politics of language and the sociopolitical responsibility of artists. Read on to find out more!

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

Take Nordic Noir and True Crime, mixed with the possibilities—and sometimes blurry legal framework—of new technologies for storytelling, and what you end up with is a podcast called Mordpodden (“The Murder Podcast”) that promises the listener to be able to “dig into creepy, true, and really thrilling murder cases.” Since most documents from Swedish trials are easily accessible, the popular podcast with over 250,000 weekly listeners, has no shortage of source material. There has, however, been complaints about lack of ethical considerations when relatives of murder victims have found themselves encountering the very witness statements and traumatic experiences they thought they had left behind. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Love in the Footnotes” by Mahsa Mohebali

My lover and I are sitting in our apartment, smoking gloomily. Depression, like ivy, ties us together.

Published in 2004 in Tehran, Iran, Love in the Footnotes is Mahsa Mohebali’s second short story collection. Within a year of its publication, the book was in its third print and reaping national prizes before it was banned by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. The titular short story, presented here, is concerned with love and its ensuing ennui. The theme of this story is by no means novel. What sets Love in the Footnotes apart from all other “love” stories is its unique development, with most of the story being told in the elaborate intertextual footnotes which weave together an intricate web of films, songs, paintings, and novels from different cultures, at the crossroads of which the protagonist locates herself. 

Maryam Zehtabi Sabeti Moqaddam, translator

In this story, Love happens. Like ivy, love wraps around my lover and me in the lines of this story. My lover and I and several films and stories get so tightly tangled that we become indistinguishable from one another.

I have short auburn hair that falls across my forehead and temples. I weigh 99 lbs. and with heels on, I’m 5’ 5”. I got a BA in literature from The Islamic Azad University. I had been a homebody for a few years before I met my lover at a relative’s Sizde Bedar garden party. My lover has drunk eyes and is a clerk at the Central Bank. He’s tall and very amiable. He has no other remarkable features except that he tends to constantly stroke his mustache. In a corner of the garden, my lover looks at me with his languishing, entreating, and piercing eyes. I avert my eyes from him, look down coyly, and move away. My lover follows me and extends a glass to me. Our eyes meet for a moment. My lover draws me close very gently and fills my glass with a wine-like drink.1

1 See the miniature painting by Mohammad Tajvidi in Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī, Hafiz Diwan, Ed. Ghasem Ghani and Allameh Ghazvini, twenty-third edition, Tehran: Asatir Publication, 1995, p. 23, where the man in the miniature painting, with his beseeching eyes, clings to the girl’s robe, offers her a glass of wine while she turns the upper part of her body away from him and avoids his gaze as much as possible. In spite of her apparent apathy, she burns with a latent desire, evident as she watches the man stealthily out of the corner of her eyes. It seems as though the girl in the miniature painting has been looking forward to this moment for years and now that she finally has the opportunity to seduce, despite all the blood running to her cheeks, she tries to appear composed and indifferent. However, the man in the miniature painting doesn’t seem to be concerned at all. As in Hafez’s poem, “Curls disheveled, sweating, laughing, and drunk / shirt torn, singing ghazals, flask in hand,” he just gawks at the girl. He only thinks of getting together with his beloved and isn’t afraid of going down in history as a fool.

My lover and I are sitting in front of the TV, watching Medicopter 117, in our four-hundred-and-thirty-square-foot rental apartment on Hafez Street. At the most critical moment of the episode, I get up, go to my bedroom, put on my red nightgown and stand in front of the TV set, brushing my hair. In response to my lover’s protests, I look at him seductively. He smiles but still follows what’s happening on TV. I unplug it.2

2 See Graham Greene, Quiet American, Trans. Ezatollah Fooladvand, first edition, Tehran: Kharazmi Publications, 1984, p. 143, where Paul asks Fowler, the professional British journalist, what his most profound sexual encounter had been.

Fowler answers the quiet, young American, “Lying in bed early one morning and watching a woman in a red dressing-gown brush her hair.”

The middle-aged Briton had impregnated the scene with all the eroticism he could muster; a scene which he had most likely never experienced with any of his mistresses. But then, this was the only image that came to his exhausted and agitated mind while spending the night in the fortress, with the Vietnamese soldiers and the quiet American, anticipating the Viet Cong skirmishes. Probably, Fowler was not thinking about any of his mistresses in particular, not about Phuong, his Vietnamese phoenix, and not about his English mistress. That image was the culmination of his whole love life.

My lover and I are sitting in a beach café, sipping our cappuccinos. My lover’s wearing a white t-shirt, stuck to his damp body. I’m in a light-green manteau and have put a big white magnolia in one of its buttonholes. The fragrance of the magnolia and that of the cappuccino wafting out from my cup blend with the sea breeze and make me dizzy. I put my fingers on my temples and take a deep breath. My lover looks at me with worried eyes. I ask my lover to tell me the story of the drowning of the young couple again. He says that he has told me the story five times since yesterday and doesn’t feel like telling it any more.3

3 See Marguerite Duras, Moderato Cantabile, Trans. Reza Seyed-Hosseini, first edition, Tehran: Zaman Publications, 1973, p. 89, where Anne Desbaresdes is wearing a décolleté dress and has pinned a big magnolia to her chest. She gets up from the dinner party table quickly and is anxious to go to the beach bar and drink another glass of wine with Chauvin and ask him, for the last time, to tell the story of the young couple. It’s then that, for the first time, she discovers the magical power of magnolia and wine and the incredible and undeniable similarity of wine, magnolia, love, and exasperation. Anne Desbaresdes realizes that, just like when you drink a little wine, the fragrance of magnolia seems to be very innocent at the beginning, but, after some time, it overwhelms your mind and leaves no room for any other feelings or thoughts. This is how she feels at that moment: Intoxicated with wine and the strong scent of magnolia, she can think of nothing but love. Just like the scent of magnolia, love has inundated her mind, which is soon to be overcome by exasperation.

My lover and I are in our four-hundred-and-thirty-square-foot apartment. My lover is lying on the couch, a glass of ice on his chest and a cigarette to his lips. He’s staring at the ceiling and gives curt, nonsensical answers to all my questions. I’m sitting on the sofa and hanging my legs from its arm and thumbing through Art and Decoration magazine irately. I tell my lover not to ash his cigarette on the floor. He ignores me. He looks at the ceiling and flicks his cigarette ash on the floor again. I go stand at the head of the couch, my arms crossed, and look at him resentfully. He smirks while still looking at the ceiling. I yell at him and say that I’m sick and tired of him and the glass he’s always carrying in his hand. My lover puts on his pants, while cursing me under his breath, and buckles his belt. I’m standing in front of the door to block him, telling him that enough is enough; that he’d better stop pretending to be the hero of an American movie who is fed up with his mistress. He shoves me aside abruptly and slams the door.4

4 Don’t refer to happy-ending American movies. Because, unlike Jane Fonda or Julia Roberts, I’m not going to chase down my lover, find him in a park or a bar and bring him back home. As soon as he leaves, I put the opera Salome by Richard Strauss in my player and lie down on the couch and page through Oscar Wilde’s Salome and when Herodias asks Salome to dance for the propitious night, I join her with The Dance of Seven Veils. In the end, when Salome embraces John’s severed head, kissing the lips she couldn’t touch in his life, I take my lover’s photo off the TV set and kiss him on the lips. My sadism and vengefulness at that moment are no less than Salome’s toward John.

My lover and I are lying in the bathtub and are basking in the mild warmth of the water, slowly smoking our cigarettes. My lover rambles constantly and I respond with a dull smile and a duller voice. My eyes are closed and I’m still reminiscing about the previous hours, thinking to myself how my lover would feel if he knew what I was remembering. It gives me chills to even think about it. My lover says I’d better leave the bathtub because I might catch a cold.5

5 See Unfaithful, directed by Adrian Lyne—the scene in which the girl is lying in the tub and suddenly sees the words her naughty lover has written on her belly while she was sleeping. This is definitely the most critical moment in determining her relationship with her husband. Up to that point, it had all been just mischief or even a joke. However, when she gets the sponge and wipes off the heart and dagger sign and her own name, she realizes the magical power of concealment. She has now entered a new phase in her game. Before that, she could confess everything to her husband in a trance or frenzy. But then, she sees the joy and excitement of cheating. That her husband could’ve seen the sign but didn’t awakens the snake of risk-taking that had been lurking dormant in her heart and makes her repeat the dangerous game over and over again.

My lover and I are coming back from the party arm in arm. I’m wearing a dress with an open neckline and my lover is wearing jeans and a t-shirt as usual. We are both singing “Tonight Is the Moonlit Night” a little too loudly. We sometimes stagger and, to keep our balance, cling to each other’s arms, sometimes bursting out laughing. Whenever my lover gets to the word “my lover” in the song, he draws his eyebrows together and points his finger at me with a serious expression. I accompany him in a lower octave.6

6 See the first scene of the movie Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. In this scene, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton both try to conceal their innermost feelings towards each other. They engage in vigorous banter that might lead to insult and injury if they’re not careful. But oblivion comes to their aid. It helps them change their past memories and sometimes heal their emotional or mental wounds, arising from the death of a child, abortion, or an infidelity that was neither confirmed nor denied.

My lover and I are sitting in our apartment, smoking gloomily. I lie on the couch more wearily and smoke and he lies next to the fireplace more morosely and smokes. Depression, like ivy, ties us together. I say it would be best if one of us left the other because usually in these situations one of the lovers leaves. My lover turns on his side towards me and says he doesn’t feel like wandering the streets and that if I’m tired of the situation, I can leave. I remind my lover that usually men are the ones to leave. Despite my persistence, my lover doesn’t give in and just looks at me with his drunken eyes. I tell my lover that I can no longer smoke, sadly; that I can’t stand his smoking either. My lover takes another puff of his cigarette and says that nothing like smoking exhibits depression so neatly. I go to my bedroom, my upper lip twitching in anger, and play Chopin’s sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, and lie on the bed, thinking about a couple of trivial matters.7

7 Had Wim Wenders begun his Paris, Texas some scenes earlier, where the couple experiences exasperation, you could’ve seen that film. However, right now you’d better refer to Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor by Frédéric Chopin, where the notes of the harp remind us of the monotonous rain and Chopin’s ennui on Majorca. When he was at his piano in his sixteenth century villa on the cliff, writing the destructive and exasperating notes of this sonnet, he had one thing on his mind: exasperation, exasperation with love; the inevitable exasperation that follows a long period of lovemaking, cheating, indifference, forgetfulness, argument, intoxication, and languor. It left Chopin with no other choice but to—while listening to the repetitive sound of rain and the waves crashing against the rocks, without taking heed of George Sand’s grumpiness—write the dreary notes that carry a devastating tempest within them. Probably, in the next room, George Sand was writing a story about a lover killing the object of their desire out of exasperation. However, I think if George Sand and Chopin had instead gone to Arles, where Van Gogh painted his beautiful sunflowers, before reaching that intolerable boredom that destroyed their relationship, they would’ve gone so mad that one of them would’ve either killed the other or, as Van Gogh did, cut off a piece of their body.

Translated from the Persian by Maryam Zehtabi Sabeti Moqaddam

Explore the rest of Asymptote’s Summer 2016 issue here.

Mahsa Mohebali (b. 1972) is an accomplished Iranian fiction writer and literary critic. Although she is best known for her critically acclaimed novel Don’t Worry (2008), which won both the Golshiri Foundation’s and the Press Critics’ Best Novel award, she has also penned the novel The Grey Spell (2002) and two short story collections, The Voices (1998) and Love in the Footnotes (2004), the latter of which is now banned in Iran despite being the winner of the Golshiri Foundation’s award for best short story collection. Her works are translated into Swedish, Italian, Turkish, and English and are widely circulated in Iran as well as being adapted for the stage.

Maryam Zehtabi Sabeti Moqaddam is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She received her MA in English Literature in 2012 from the University of Tehran where her research focused on black feminist dialogism in the works of Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston. She is particularly interested in women, gender, and sexuality studies and the intersection of religion and feminism. She is currently writing her dissertation on the representations of prostitution in Persian and Arab literature. She also aspires to introduce Iranian women writers to Western audiences through translation and criticism of their works.

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Read More from Translation Tuesday:

The Persian Edifice of Catch 22

"To rebuild the edifice of Catch 22 in Persian would not have been possible with just one architect."

Written by Ehsan Norouzi[1]

***

I read Catch 22 in high school, completely by accident. I found it in a box of books in an abandoned basement. I read it during my third-year quarterly exams, and it made me fail geometry. My ruined summer was worth my laughter while reading it, though. Amidst the structure of school and the terrifying purgatory of the pre-university year and its entrance exam, Catch 22 (Joseph Heller), The Good Soldier Švejk (Jaroslav Hašek) and other books like them provided a restless teenager like me with some respite. However, the joy of encountering Catch 22 in those teenage years, those dreamlike moments filled with satire that demanded a different kind of laughter, were the result of something else as well.

At the time, literature had not yet become my profession and reading was simply an act of pleasure, with no goal in mind. Later on, there would come a time when I couldn’t read an extraordinary sentence without thinking about how it could be translated into Persian. I lost the joy of reading. READ MORE…

Weekly News Roundup, 23 October 2015: Goog, Good Books

This week's literary highlights, lowlights, and mid-lights from across the world.

Hey, happy Friday! First, brilliant news we’re bursting to tell: The Guardian has just announced their brand-new “books network,” and Asymptote is one of eleven launch partners thus formalized—we’re extra chuffed to be the only one dedicated to world literature! The partnership will see content from both our quarterly and blog shared with The Guardian‘s vast international readership up to eight times a month (all the better to catalyze the transmission of world literature, we say); watch for the very first Asymptote article on this space next Tuesday.

This week, we noted technological inroads into the way we read: giant love-em-or-hate-em behemoth Google won a big fair use lawsuit—and its massive Internet-library project means literally billions of books are set to be scanned for your onscreen perusal. And upon the announcement that the New York Times will partner with Google to provide perusal-via-virtual reality: the future is now.

Speaking of archives—but of the decidedly more old-fashioned kind: Colombian literary giant Gabriel García Márquez’s archive is openly available for research at the University of Texas’ Harry Ransom Center.  READ MORE…

34 Animal Farms: Literary Translation and Copyright in Iran

Our Editor-at-Large Poupeh Missaghi on the peculiarity of copyright and translation in Iran

It’s safe to say that the Iranian book market has a strong interest in translation: it’s easy to find several translations of the same book in a single bookstore. Several reasons fuel this phenomenon, but the most important is rather banal: Iran’s glaring disregard for copyright laws—both internationally and domestically—mean that these kinds of retranslations run rampant.

Most literary publishers enter the translation and publication processes without securing the rights to the original foreign book. Or they can simply translate/publish a title already in print or well into the process of translation/publication by another publishing house.

Iran is not a signatory to the Copyright Treaty of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), though it joined WIPO in 2001. Neither does Iran take part in international conventions on the protection of literary and artistic works. Not legally bound in the way that organizations in other countries—such as many European countries and the United States—are, Iran’s public and/or private literary/artistic organizations do not often behave ethically toward their foreign counterparts. READ MORE…

Live from the NYPL: Tel Aviv and Tehran Noir

Honoring noir writing—and living—in two notoriously conflicted cities

It was a full house at the New York Public Library on Wednesday night, and I learned just how similar Iranians and Israelis are.

Rick Moody moderated a panel event for Live at NYPL, launching two new books from Akashic’s Noir Series: Tel Aviv Noir and Tehran Noir. Akashic Books’ Noir series includes over sixty anthologies of noir stories set in cities around the world. The panel guests included Tel Aviv Noir editors Assaf Gavron and Etgar Keret, Tehran Noir editor Salar Abdoh and Tehran Noir contributor Gina Nahai. Sitting in the audience, listening intently, I felt complicit.

I had translated eleven out of the fourteen stories in Tel Aviv Noir (two others were written originally in English, a third was translated from Spanish). I felt that where the book succeeded or failed, I shared some of the responsibility. I also felt simultaneously in and out of place: I’ve lived in Tel Aviv most of my life, but have never been to Tehran, though when I see pictures of its mountains I get that belly ache of longing.

These two facts are connected: as an Israeli Jew, much of that world is closed to me. READ MORE…

Weekly News Roundup, 31st October 2014: Western Vampire Flicks, Big Kirkus Bucks

This week's literary highlights from across the world

Happy Halloween to our All-Hallow’s-Eve-observing readers. Do you have a literary costume? You could dress up as tumultuous Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who celebrated his 100th birthday this week (from the grave). Or you could simply celebrate by reading R.L. Stine (of Goosebumps fame)’s recently live-tweeted short story, “What’s in my Sandwich?” (Good question). Or ponder the following question, as answered by Ayana Mathis and Francine Prose: what’s the most terrifying book you’ve ever read?  READ MORE…

Six Poems by Bijan Jalali

Sepid poetry by Bijan Jalali

بیژن جلالی

Bijan Jalali

 

با مرگ بگریزم

تا کهکشان‌ها

زیرا با زندگی

راه چندان دوری

نمی‌توان رفت

 

with death

i would elope

to the galaxies

because

thus far

my path

in life

is blocked

READ MORE…

The Spell Chanted by Lambs by Reza Ghasemi

A book that began on a blog

Reza Ghasemi’s third novel, The Spell Chanted by Lambs, was initially published in installments under the title of Madman and the Moonpars Tower on the author’s personal blog in 2002 as a reaction to censorship, making Ghasemi the first Iranian writer to turn to the Internet in the face of artistic suppression. It took six years to be traditionally printed by the Paris-based Khavaran Publications, and still five more years to be translated into English by novice translator Erfan Mojib. Says Mojib:  “Ghasemi admits that he’s not aware of the existence of [online narrative] in other languages and is sure of [its] nonexistence in Persian literature, as he calls it the first Iranian ‘online novel’ and sarcastically labels the term as one of his own bastardizations.”

READ MORE…