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Dancing in Chains

In 2011, the poet and distinguished translator of Italian literature Mohsen Taher Nokandeh published the writings on translation by the great avant-garde Iranian poet Bijan Elahi (1945–2010) under the heading ‘On Translation’. These writings are translated here for the first time, in part for the light they shed on Elahi’s original poetic creations. The first two selections were published as prefaces to Elahi’s translations. The third selection comprises Elahi’s notes towards an unpublished monograph on translation, initiated and abandoned in 1985, which he planned to call Translation in Every Words (Tarjumeh beh zabān-i ʿālam va ’ādam). Taken together, these texts reveal a great poet and critic, as well as an original theorist of translation at work dissecting literary texts and probing their philosophical implications. Their style bears the heavy imprint of Elahi’s two lodestars: Hölderlin and Rimbaud, whom he translated into Persian in 1973 and 1983, respectively. They also reveal an affinity with Ezra Pound, whose translation method Elahi discusses in the third selection. To an even greater degree than Hölderlin and Rimbaud, Elahi’s writing is marked by various forms of interrupted speech, including ellipses and quotations. Like poetry, this feature of Elahi’s prose creates a jarring effect in Persian, which we have endeavoured to reproduce in our translation. Elahi’s ideas about translation jar even more than his prose. He considers translation as ‘a re-creation [bāz-āfarinish] even more difficult than the original’ and adds that ‘if creation [āfarinish] is viewed as a dance, translation is a dance in chains’. Elahi’s conceptualisation of creation as a form of possession by an outside source reveals the close kinship he perceives between translation and creation. All endnotes below have been added by us. Given the gender neutrality of the Persian third-person pronoun, we have generally rendered the singular third-person pronoun by they/them whenever possible, and have only indicated a gender when grammatically unavoidable. The ellipses below in the translated text reflect the punctuation of the original. A fuller introduction to Elahi as a poet and creator may be found in High Tide of the Eyes: Poems by Bijan Elahi, also co-translated by Rebecca Ruth Gould and Kayvan Tahmasebian.