14 August 2008

Interview

Omid Memarian

Inter Press Service

NEW YORK: Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, thousands of intellectuals, activists and poets have left Iran, many fleeing to Europe and the United States. A new book brings together the work of 18 Iranian poets from this diaspora to share their experiences with a wider audience.

The new a bilingual (Persian/English) anthology, "Belonging: New Poetry by Iranians Around the World," was edited and translated Niloufar Talebi, a woman passionate about making contemporary Iranian voices heard in translation.

Not surprisingly perhaps, Talebi says the 1979 Iranian Revolution is an integral part of today's expat Iranian poetry.

"The poets in 'Belonging' left their home country, and are self-defined as exiles, expatriates, immigrants or refugees," she said. "So their perspective is naturally politicized, some having more of a political bent than others. So, for the most part, political themes were abundant in their work, depending on how you define 'political.'

"One can argue that any act of citizenry is a political act. Furthermore, three decades have gone by since the defining political event leading to their migration - the 1979 Revolution - and so they also reflect new themes in their work, themes that have to do with their recreating themselves, with their coming to terms with being citizens of the world.

"As the title of the book suggests, they live in the zone between longing for their past and 'belonging' in their present lives. In selecting the poems for this volume, I decidedly featured a balance of political and non-political poems, including erotic, lyrical and humorous poems."

Talebi founded the Translation Project in 2003, a nonprofit literary organization and production company with innovative projects in books, theater and multimedia.

She takes translations beyond the text, creating multimedia projects based on translated poetry, drawing on the Iranian tradition of Naghali, or dramatic story-telling.

Telebi studied comparative literature and trained in theatre, now marrying the two skills to give Naghali (which traditionally dramatizes Classical Persian poetry) new content, and fusing it with Western dramatic elements to reflect the Iranian-American experience in modern society.

She says this anthology reflects the great stylistic variety among expatriate writers. "In my research for the anthology, I was able to find 140 poets living outside Iran and reciting in Persian. No doubt this is a partial list, from which I translated about 35 poets, and eventually featured 18 in 'Belonging,' six from each of the three generations reciting.

"What I noticed about the work of the poets I studied for 'Belonging' is that poets practice a variety of poetic styles," she continued, " ... The middle and younger generations take great advantage of the artistic freedom they have without the kind of censorship they would be subject to inside Iran, which is different than the ways in which writers inside Iran work around censorship.

"The poetry was chosen based on poetic strength. The poets were selected with regard to the growth in their work over time," she says.

Talebi believes that expatriate poetry provides a unique perspective on the community. "... Poetry is where the human experience is recorded," she said. "So to know a people, it makes sense to take a good look at their poetry. Contemporary Iranian poets are, by and large, unheard voices, whether they live in Iran or outside, and whether they recite in Persian or in other languages.

"We've read a number of memoirs by the Iranian diaspora, but seldom have we read their poetry. So I see Iranian poetry as an untapped source of information and illumination, with the power to connect people rather than divide them.

"Bottom line, the literature in translation has to find readership in order to have presence and impact. So the questions to ask are whether enough work appears in translation, whether they are the 'right' works for the readiness of the receiving culture during a particular historical and aesthetic period, and whether the translations are effective. Then there is the question of the editor/publisher's willingness to publish and invest in works of translation - which compose only 0.3 to 3 percent of books published annually in the US."

Talebi feels this is a particularly good time for a volume of expat Iranian poetry to appear on the market, evidently for reasons unconnected with the ongoing political tensions between the American and Iranian regimes.

"Immigrant or exiled writers who continue to write in their mother tongue don't always have the opportunity to communicate their work to readers in their host countries, since language is the tool of their metier," she said. "'Belonging' opens a channel of communication between readers of English and Iranian poets who live outside Iran and recite in Persian.

"Being a bilingual volume, it also familiarizes the Iranian diaspora with the next generation of Iranian poets. The diaspora tends to honor literary figures of the time of the 1979 Revolution and before. Their access to current information is compromised due to the scatteredness of the population, and their cultural knowledge is sometimes frozen in time.

"Even second-generation, foreign-born Iranians adhere to their parents' set of favorite authors, which is of course important and not to be taken for granted, but it's also important for them to be exposed to emerging voices."

She finds the work she sampled to be inherently political. "Literature and art have always played a role in social protest, in political expression, in Iran and elsewhere," she said. "Accordingly, censorship is a factor in the relationship between artistic expression and the state. Though art and literature have been suppressed throughout history, works of art have nevertheless managed to be created, persisting under the worst conditions.

"The same is true of the arts in Iran. Over the past three decades, writers who stayed in Iran have continued creating literature under censorship, the number of women writers has multiplied, and a huge body of criticism about writers living both inside and outside Iran has emerged," she says.

"Many banned works, or works that are not put through the Bureau of Guidance for publication permission are embedded in blogs, accessible to the whole world, until the blogs are discovered and shut down - and then they are embedded in new blogs. So ... despite tremendous obstacles, Iranians have found ways to express themselves in their art." - with The Daily Star

"Belonging: New Poetry by Iranians Around the World" is published by North Atlantic Books.

Copyright The Daily Star 2008.