I open the door to the fog’s embrace
Treading the pavement’s right-hand side
Turning to a view of the river
The book stalls closed
And scattered here and there
Pizza boxes beer cans plastic
All that’s left of last night’s feast
The water passing by heavy and cold
Under the Pont Mirabeau
I look up at the bridge no one’s there
No one on the bridge
No one to throw themselves off
To doubt step back turn away
Cross the bridge and fade into the narrow, climbing alley
I put my hand in the water it’s cold
All night I’ve been pacing my room
Studying the moss on the roof tiles
Listening to the voice of the city
The faint drone of cars
The lingering yowl of a cat
And the creeping tongue of fog
I reach for a pebble
Scratch it onto the cement of a grave
The grave where I should be sleeping
In my cell I had paced till midnight
Had thought of the river
Of the pebble I would find
Rain punching the window
Are you dead?
Where is Hell, that I might abandon myself?
The best minds of my generation
The best minds of my homeland
Were riddled with blood in the streets
Surrounded at their safe houses
Called up in flocks, to trains full of song
Shrivelled in cells, aged in hiding
Why are my hands wet?
Will sleep ever come?
Was there ever peace? Will there ever be?
The reindeer polishes her antlers in the snow
Drinks from my hand looking into your eyes
How have I stolen you?
Taking you to the garden
Burying you under the ancient pomegranate?
Rain washes down the domes
Streams off my hair
What’s the use of wailing in the cemetery?
Your hands under the earth
And me whistling a shepherd’s air
I was drawn back to the river
To that very pebble
To the call that rends the darkest night
The king of the black-cloaks is come!
The morning took me to the Chief Interrogator’s door
To his warm reception his smile the offer of tea.
Why haven’t I been stoned?
I have been adulterous more than once
My neighbour, a moustached man, spits
On the ground as he bikes past
No one sees me
Under the Pont Mirabeau
Running running running
To lie on the roof window, its opaque glass
Trying to make out naked women in the steam
My adolescence was spent spitting
After the noon call for prayers I was coming home from school
In my hands, books on my books, bread
Eaten piece by piece, on my return
I reckoned him a communist, my neighbour with the moustache
And I, of the Islamic Society
I spat on him
One winter’s dawn I stole onto the roof
Of Qayen’s grand mosque
To say the Azan
To hear the echo of my voice through silence
Dawn in a small town is a strange time
There is was no one in the streets
A cold, burning wind blew through the minaret
And I saw the figure of an angel
And couldn’t cry out as I fled
In the hammam, scrubbing the back of my landlord’s son
Satan bought my soul for thirty silver pieces
That night I lashed myself in the mirror
By the wells of Farahabad, I cried
In the farms of Firoozabad, I cried
In the forests of Bagh-e-Melli, I cried
As I sat on a bench in Bagh-e-Melli
The ghost of Balzac came to me a sweet deception
Placing Madame Bovary in my hands
One pleasure leading to another
Like a famished boy stumbling upon hives full of honey
Pleasure pours through my body like lethargy
My hands embrace Being
My lips kiss the feminine air
Alcohol swims in my blood
Open armed with half-closed eyes
It passes through the corridors and long atriums
To settle in my cells
A feast begins The world is beautiful
Will sleep ever come?
Was there ever peace? Will there ever be?
I ask myself:
How can we forget the Tree?
Why do we tie our hopes to a withered garden?
When will we escape these grasping old hands?
Midnight begins with a muffled song
The pomegranates of Bajestan surge up onto the bough
A summer’s dream borne of hibernation
Travels from school to school
Hospital to hospital
Verdict to verdict
To my suitcase where I pack the taste of thyme
The aroma of saffron
Of fresh-cut clover
I pack the Ahangaran mountain
I pack the Patergan desert
I pack the Esfeden plains
To pass the border
Pass through the colour of turmeric
Through the many patterns of our rugs
Through the scent of burning wood
To your eyes
To your head slowly turning
Your hair falling to one side
To a bruise on your neck
Will sleep ever come?
Was there ever peace? Will there ever be?
I commanded the final trumpet to play
I shod their feet
Lit candles in their bodies
Placed them in the mouth of cannons
Their innocence ignited my rage
I commanded the final trumpet to play
Muslims!
I am the wrath of God!
Crusher of tyrants!
Where are the ones who dreamed of trading jewels,
Of greasing their palms in the stock exchange?
Where are the ones who took the poor for fools,
Selling the dervish look as a lifestyle range?
Where are the ones who washed their hands in blood?
Where are the desert mystics foretelling the Flood?
Where are the divers risking their lives in vain?
Where are the hands that scrubbed fodder in rain?
Years since your brother was lost to Siberia
Since your sister found herself in Ghezel Hesar
I still follow footprints in the snow
Up mountain paths, down into the valleys
Through border stations at night
Through razor wire, through rivers
An imploded vessel, sunk inside
And then my child asked me
Baba! What are you crying for?
I cry
For the homeless the hungry the barefoot
The wretched the poor the grieving
The nameless the beggars the prostitutes
Those that shiver on park benches
Those that sleep in shop doorways
Those that queue at church
Those that forage in bins
For those that rise early
That hurry miles
On bus and train, through crowded stations
To the swarm of factory floors
For the sparrow-poor pedlars
For the fishermen who live on the river
With never the same neighbour the same address
For the distraught
The forgotten
The suicidal
The insulted abused battered
The children left the miserable teen
The convicted the condemned
For those that mourn those newly childless
For the gouged cheeks of grief
The clothes torn open
The brass pitchers of rosewater
The bitter hookahs of the funeral
Again my child asked me
Baba! What are you crying for?
I cry for the blood bled from the trunk of history
For the martyrs of Karbala
The slaughtered
For the Day of Nakba
The Day of Eternal Lament
The Day of Unquenchable Tears
I cry for the beheaded palm trees of war
The starved wetlands
Fakkeh and Dehlaviyeh
I cry for the scarves of Sardasht women
The mountains of Kurdistan
The girls of Sinjar
I cry for the proud moustache of Akbar Komole
The antique rifle of Dervish Faares
The mule of Ribvar
I cry for Halabja
For Halab
For the gardens of Ba’albak
I cry for the dinghy in rough waters
For the empty breast in the hungry mouth
For the Trail of Tears
I cry for the Sioux for the Cherokee for all the indigenous
I cry for food parcels tents blankets burners
For the earthquakes of Rudbar Bam Tabas
For auntie Ozra and Banoo
Esmaeil and Sima
Agha Seyed Hassan for Ahmad Yakhchali primary school
I cry for Sarin Super Étendard MiG-29
I cry for the guest students who came during the Missile Rain Term
I cry for the lovers of Neruda Tolstoy Kafka
For book-loving prostitutes
For models working in murky studios
For Janette’s mother’s name tattooed on her arm
I cry for children working the street
At the hour when day meets night
Lights come on
In Tibet in New York
While on the hill of Esfad cemetery
In a tent over a newly dug grave
Three men recite the Qur’an till dawn
At the moment when day meets night
And the Amen bird is making its rounds
Delivering the prayers of fathers
The curses of mothers to heaven
Oh Lord!
Cross our sins with the pen of pardon
Forgive us
Let us pass unharmed
Through the hard valleys and steep paths
Let us pass unharmed
By the scorpion and the snake
By the Demon Akwan and the iron-clawed hag
At the moment of sweet sorrow
Keep us safe from sorrow and from sweetness
Redeem us from this state of hope, this awe
Deliver us from violent lips, from inviting vaginas
At the moment when illusions gather between the trees
And elves in the paths
And barley whispers slowly
Deliver us from the dusk of apprehension
At the moment when the soul of the universe wakes
The water of the lakes heave gently
The stems of grass become brittle
The Pakistani goat suddenly stops listens
The moon slowly opens her eyes
The curtains of sleep draw for the squirrel and the oak
The soft rain pauses, to start again
Oh God! Keep us safe in the shelter of kindness
Deliver us from the haunted arch the broken walls the ruined aqueduct
At the foothills of the faraway mountains
Men build a fire
Roast a zebra on the fire
While the Sorceress Marjaneh eyes them up
She comes to know them one by one
Afterwards they cleanse themselves in the river
Which bursts its barricades
Foaming at the mouth
A titanic convulsion
Spilling the juice of its body over its banks
It will be a bountiful year
The vines will bend under their fruit
The pomegranate of Bajestan will surge up into its bough
In pilgrimage to its ancestor
Oh God! Our Father who art in heaven!
At this hour when day meets night
And the horizon underlines itself
And hordes of demons teem through the copper-clad wall
And desert monitors rise up from the sand
And the camels rebel
Forgive us! Shelter us!
The world has been thrown from its catapult
We hang from the edge of the earth
Murmuring the few prayers we remember
All love pours into water like the sea
Under the Pont Mirabeau
Life is passing by
Patiently heavily lost
The Desert Monitor
Alireza Abiz
translated from the Persian by Alireza Abiz and Edward Doegar
Listen to the original read by the poet:
Early in 2020, Alireza Abiz emailed me a group of his poems including “The Desert Monitor”. He had already prepared initial translations and wanted to work on the texts with an English-language poet. I have no Persian, but enjoyed reading his English versions, as well as his manuscript for The Kindly Interrogator (a selection of his poems he translated working with W.N. Herbert, which was published by Shearsman in 2021). We agreed to work on the poems together and started to meet regularly via Zoom so that he could read the Persian aloud for me and we could discuss the nuances of each line. In a few months, we had translated his poem “On London Bridge”, which was published by The Rialto and which the magazine’s editor, Michael Mackmin, described as a poem “you wait for and wait for . . . Prufrock for today”. We were pleased with our efforts and agreed to try to produce a translation of “The Desert Monitor” by the same method.
Even though I had enjoyed working with Alireza, I was apprehensive about tackling “The Desert Monitor”. It is a vast poem, both in sheer length and in its allusive ambition. Along with the original poem, his translation and a recording of him reading the poem, Alireza sent me a series of initial notes (which have been added as clickable notes on the translation) that offered a glimpse of the range of political, religious, social and literary considerations that the poem is oriented around. One note of caution here is the notes that Alireza provided are in no way exhaustive of the allusions in the text.
One thing that was immediately clear was that the text was self-consciously literary. It evokes writers through multiple traditions, both by name and through quotation. Indeed, the poem ends quoting a line by the poet Forugh Farrokhzad. But as Alireza and I spent more time working on the poem together, I started to understand the way that the literary geography of the poem was entwined with its geo-political undercurrents, for example, how a shadow is cast by the Super Étendard (a combat plane provided by the French government to Saddam Hussein’s regime during the Iraq–Iran War) over the celebration of French literary figures found elsewhere in the poem. Throughout the poem, the real-world consequences of political imaginations are waged against the poetic imagination. At times this is almost brazenly playful and speaks to Alireza’s interest in postmodern poetics. The very real “Day of Nakba” elicits tears in the speaker’s litany of sorrow, but then so does the entirely imagined “Day of Unquenchable Tears”.
Alongside its breadth of reference, the poem is complicated by its fluidity of voice. It shifts about in time and perspective. In my reading, the poem generates the overriding sense of a central speaker and consciousness, and yet this vantage point is often disrupted without warning and the settings and context prove similarly unreliable. Time and place do not behave themselves and perspectives alter and blur. At times, in order to make sure I was not misinterpreting something, I had to ask Alireza bluntly what he meant. It is a confounding question for a poet, and his answers were both illuminating and elusive. The poem does draw, at times, on personal experiences (as a teenager the poet was consumed with revolutionary and religious fervour and volunteered to go to the battle front when he was sixteen), but it frequently also operates in pure fantasy, as when the voice becomes that of an avenging demon.
Where possible, we sought to maintain formal aspects that Alireza employed in the original. The majority of the poem is written in free verse, but where classical Persian metre has been employed we sought to create a corresponding effect in the English. At times, of course, we came up against cultural or linguistic specificities we couldn’t find a way to replicate. The line “Deliver us from the haunted arch the broken walls the ruined aqueduct”, for instance, employs a series of three proverbial images in the Persian for which we could find no suitable equivalent. At other times, there was a tonal unease. One such moment was when discussing the extended refrain of “I cry for . . .” that dominates the middle of the poem. In this section the speaker states, among many other laments, that he cries “for the moustache of Akbar Komole!”, and I wondered aloud if this was a moment of absurd levity (after all, one of Alireza’s collections is called Spaghetti with Mexican Sauce). But Alireza explained that it was intended in earnest, that the Kurdish military leader was, like many Kurds of that generation, both famed for and proud of his moustache. At this point in the poem, the speaker is recognizing his sincere empathy towards a figure and a guerrilla movement he previously took up arms against. We could not find a way to offer that degree of exposition in the English and so had to settle for “I cry for the proud moustache of Akbar Komole”. I am grateful for the space afforded here to at least hint at the depths and currents below the surface of the translation itself.
Even though I had enjoyed working with Alireza, I was apprehensive about tackling “The Desert Monitor”. It is a vast poem, both in sheer length and in its allusive ambition. Along with the original poem, his translation and a recording of him reading the poem, Alireza sent me a series of initial notes (which have been added as clickable notes on the translation) that offered a glimpse of the range of political, religious, social and literary considerations that the poem is oriented around. One note of caution here is the notes that Alireza provided are in no way exhaustive of the allusions in the text.
One thing that was immediately clear was that the text was self-consciously literary. It evokes writers through multiple traditions, both by name and through quotation. Indeed, the poem ends quoting a line by the poet Forugh Farrokhzad. But as Alireza and I spent more time working on the poem together, I started to understand the way that the literary geography of the poem was entwined with its geo-political undercurrents, for example, how a shadow is cast by the Super Étendard (a combat plane provided by the French government to Saddam Hussein’s regime during the Iraq–Iran War) over the celebration of French literary figures found elsewhere in the poem. Throughout the poem, the real-world consequences of political imaginations are waged against the poetic imagination. At times this is almost brazenly playful and speaks to Alireza’s interest in postmodern poetics. The very real “Day of Nakba” elicits tears in the speaker’s litany of sorrow, but then so does the entirely imagined “Day of Unquenchable Tears”.
Alongside its breadth of reference, the poem is complicated by its fluidity of voice. It shifts about in time and perspective. In my reading, the poem generates the overriding sense of a central speaker and consciousness, and yet this vantage point is often disrupted without warning and the settings and context prove similarly unreliable. Time and place do not behave themselves and perspectives alter and blur. At times, in order to make sure I was not misinterpreting something, I had to ask Alireza bluntly what he meant. It is a confounding question for a poet, and his answers were both illuminating and elusive. The poem does draw, at times, on personal experiences (as a teenager the poet was consumed with revolutionary and religious fervour and volunteered to go to the battle front when he was sixteen), but it frequently also operates in pure fantasy, as when the voice becomes that of an avenging demon.
Where possible, we sought to maintain formal aspects that Alireza employed in the original. The majority of the poem is written in free verse, but where classical Persian metre has been employed we sought to create a corresponding effect in the English. At times, of course, we came up against cultural or linguistic specificities we couldn’t find a way to replicate. The line “Deliver us from the haunted arch the broken walls the ruined aqueduct”, for instance, employs a series of three proverbial images in the Persian for which we could find no suitable equivalent. At other times, there was a tonal unease. One such moment was when discussing the extended refrain of “I cry for . . .” that dominates the middle of the poem. In this section the speaker states, among many other laments, that he cries “for the moustache of Akbar Komole!”, and I wondered aloud if this was a moment of absurd levity (after all, one of Alireza’s collections is called Spaghetti with Mexican Sauce). But Alireza explained that it was intended in earnest, that the Kurdish military leader was, like many Kurds of that generation, both famed for and proud of his moustache. At this point in the poem, the speaker is recognizing his sincere empathy towards a figure and a guerrilla movement he previously took up arms against. We could not find a way to offer that degree of exposition in the English and so had to settle for “I cry for the proud moustache of Akbar Komole”. I am grateful for the space afforded here to at least hint at the depths and currents below the surface of the translation itself.
—Edward Doegar
Alireza Abiz is a multi-award-winning Iranian poet, literary scholar and translator. Born in South Khorasan, Iran, in 1968, Abiz studied English literature in Mashhad and Tehran universities and received his Ph.D. in Creative Writing – Poetry from Newcastle University in the UK. Abiz has written extensively on Persian contemporary literature and culture. His scholarly book Censorship of Literature in Post-Revolutionary Iran: Politics and Culture since 1979 was published in 2020 by Bloomsbury. He has so far published five collections of poetry in Persian;
نگه دار باید پیاده شویم (Stop! We Have to Get Off!; Nᾱranj, 1998),
اسپاگتی با سُس مکزیکی (Spaghetti with Mexican Sauce; Sᾱleth, 2004),
از میز من صدای درختی میآید (I Hear My Desk as a Tree; Negᾱh 2013),
کوهسنگی، پلاک ۱۳ ممیز ۱ (1/13 Koohsangee Street; H&S Media 2017) and
خط سیاه، متروی لندن (Black Line- London Underground; Fanoos 2017), which received the Shamlou Award. A selection of his poetry translated into English, The Kindly Interrogator, was published by Shearsman in 2021.
Edward Doegar is a poet and editor based in London. He is a consulting editor at The Rialto and was the commissioning editor of the Poetry Translation Centre between 2018 and 2021. His pamphlet For Now was published by clinic in 2017 and a text written in collaboration with the artist Shakeeb Abu Hamdan will be published by Kelder Press in 2022.
