Translating Persian Poetry and its Discontents

Poetry translation occasionally arouses controversy among Iranian readers, especially when the work of great masters is involved. This sensitivity applies alike to classical master poets like H _ āfiz _ Shirāzī (d. 1390) and S _ ā’ib Tabrīzī (d. 1592) and modernist forerunners like Nima Yushij (d. 1960) and Bijan Elahi (d. 2010). Because of the damages they inflict on the original poems, translations are sometimes read like acts of profanation: the translator is accused of clumsiness, of going astray, of wasting the poem, by readers, at various levels of mastery of their native language and the language in which the poem in question has been translated and at various levels of concern for Persian literature, who do not find the pleasure and the sophistication they used to take from the poem in Persian. “But this is not H _ āfiz _ ,” “this is not S _ ā’ib,” “this is not Nima,” “this is not Elahi,” they complain about the alterity that the poem, and the poet, undergo through “inappropriate” translation. More adequate and “appropriate” translations are rarely suggested by the complainants. Of course, this negativity toward poetry translation does not eclipse other readers’ sympathy with the translator’s hazardous undertaking. I have been profaning poetry for around two decades now: I have published my translations of Friedrich Hölderlin, Stéphane Mallarmé, Francis Ponge, Alejandra Pizarnik, and Arthur Rimbaud in Iranian literary magazines (2004–2014). Since 2017, I have turned to translating Persian poetry into English. With Rebecca Ruth Gould, I have cotranslated modernist poets, Bijan Elahi, Nima Yushij, and Hasan Alizadeh (b. 1947), as well as classical poets, S _ ā’ib Tabrīzī, Khāqānī Shirvānī (d. 1199), and Jahān Malik Khātūn (d. circa 1393). Throughout the years I lectured at the University of Isfahan (2008–2017), I witnessed the students’ wry smiles and grim frowns at the translations from classical Persian by Edward Fitzgerald, Gertrude Bell, R. A. Nicholson, A. J. Arberry, and other eminent scholars of Persian literature. Classical Persian poetry has been read in English translation since the late eighteenth century. Presumably, native English translators of Persian poetry have been far less bothered by concerns about untranslatability than their Persian readers. William Jones’s versified translation of H _ āfiz _ ’s ghazal (“Agar ān turk-i shirāzī”) was published first in his Grammar of the Persian Language (1771), in conjunction with a prose translation evidently for language learning reasons. By adding the prose translation, Jones meant less to highlight the lost information in the versified version than to show learners why the poem’s images and allusions “cannot be translated literally into any European language.” Far from dooming the poem to untranslatability, Jones admits that he attempted to translate it into verse because he was pleased by “the wildness and simplicity of this Persian song.” The subsequent versifications of Persian poetry, such as Joseph Champion’s selected passages from Firdawsī’s Shāhnāma (1790) or George Barrow’s free translations of H _ āfiz _ (1835), were rather Orientalist forms of poetic exercise in English than faithful representations of these poets in English. On the other hand, prose translations, which were usually produced for scholarly purposes, showed a different appreciation of insurmountable difficulties of translation. H. Wilberforce Clarke, for instance, acknowledges in the preface to his translation of the entire Dīvān of H _ āfiz _ that “[T]his is a prose-translation and professes to give the literal and s _ ūfīistic meanings. To render H _ āfez _ in verse, one should be a poet at least equal in power to the author. Even then it would well-nigh be impossible to clothe Persian verse with such an English dress as would truly convey its beauties; and if such a translation could be made, it would be of little value to the student.” However, not all English translators of classical TRANSLATION REVIEW 2022, VOL. 114, NO. 1, 17–26 https://doi.org/10.1080/07374836.2022.2142346