Poetry is widely considered to be untranslatable. Notwithstanding the preponderance of theories which insist on the impossibility of poetry translation, poetry has been translated for millennia around the world. In this article, I discuss the untranslatability of poetry by drawing upon my experience as a translator of Persian poetry into English.…[Read more]

In Arabic and Persian rhetoric, laff wa-nashr or laff-u-nashr is a structuring device. It involves creating a one-to-one correspondence between two or more sets of words across verses or hemistiches of a poem. Laff wa-nashr was in use by the earliest Persian poets but only came to be named as such for the first time in Persian in the fourteenth…[Read more]

In classical manuals of Persian science of eloquence (balāgha), poetry translation (tarjama) is classified as a figure of speech along with other rhetorical devices, such as metaphor (istiʾāra), simile (tashbīh), and paronomasia (jinās). In this working paper, I have translated sections related to the rhetorical device tarjama from Tarjuman al-b…[Read more]

The book we read today in the name of Tanklūshā in Arabic and Persian versions is pseudepigraphic––most likely an imaginary reconstruction of an astrological work by Teukros, rich with images of everyday life appearing in supernatural tints as constellations on the vast screen of the night sky. Each of the twelve zodiac signs contains depic…[Read more]

The process by which a literary text comes to be is among the understudied domains of translation studies. This article draws on my experience of translating Samuel Beckett’s late prose works into Persian to explore how a convergence of translation studies and genetic criticism can affect and broaden the literary translator’s
choices. I out…[Read more]

There is something literary about dreams when they are written down. Dreams and literature intersect in wonder, imagination, and freedom. The excerpts translated here are dream writings from Khābguzārī by an anonymous writer in the twelfth or thirteenth century, and ʿAjā’ib al-makhlūqāt wa gharā’ib al-mawjūdāt by Muḥammad b. Maḥmūd Hamadān…[Read more]