Six Vowels and Twenty Three Consonants : On Translating an Anthology of Persian Poetry

Poetry translated into English from other languages has long been an important scene of Anglophone literary activity. In the last few decades, however, poetry translation has become an even more prominent field of literary production in English-speaking cultures. This translational turn in contemporary poetry has been beneficial in not only expanding the often small readerships that exist for contemporary poets but in also expanding the literary horizons of English-language readers. In this article I explore some of my own experiences and concerns as the co-editor and co-translator of Six Vowels and Twenty Three Consonants, an anthology of Persian poetry in English. Whilst I am quite satisfied with many aspects of my work on this publication, there are also others which I believe have made working on this project difficult. It is hoped that by addressing both the positive and negative aspects of (co-)creating this anthology, this article will contribute to our understanding of the opportunities as well as potential problematics of the current translational turn. The translational turn in contemporary English poetry Six Vowels and Twenty Three Consonants: An Anthology of Persian Poetry from Rudaki to Langroodi (Arc Publications, 2012) is a new bilingual anthology of poetry that I have co-edited and co-translated with poet and anthologist John Kinsella. This book is the first sustained presentation of poetry from early medieval Persia to contemporary Iran to appear in English, and it aims to provide a selection representing Iran’s entire poetic history. It is, therefore, a project deeply engaged with views and doxa apropos of the nation’s contested past, its putatively troubled present state and its potentially unstable future; and, as such, the book unavoidably speaks to a range of challenging cultural, social and political themes and issues. It is not, however, these topics that I wish to address in this article. My aim here is to briefly discuss the book as a translation project, and to assess my work on it in terms of my role, intentions and expectations as a translator of poetry from Farsi into English. Poetry translated into English from other languages has long been an important scene of Anglophone literary activity, arguably since Thomas Malory’s late-Middle English interpretations of French Arthurian romances in the fifteenth century. In the last few decades, however, perhaps due to socio-political phenomena such as globalization, rapid and escalating movements of populations across the world, and the proliferation of theories and readerships of world literatures and transnationalism in both academia and the publishing sphere, poetry translation has become a prominent field of literary production in English-speaking cultures. Translations of poems of medieval Middle Eastern poet Rumi have become bestsellers in the United States, and many major contemporary poets known for their own original (here meaning non-translated) writings – such as Robert Pinsky, Seamus Heaney and Simon Armitage – have authored volumes of poetry translated from Italian, Russian and Greek sources. This translational turn in contemporary poetry has been greatly beneficial in not only expanding the often small readerships that exist for the work of contemporary poets – by, for example, introducing the Anglophone readers of the nineteenth-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud to the style and aesthetics of one of Rimbaud’s latest translators, the postmodernist American poet John Ashbery – but by also expanding the literary and cultural horizons of Englishlanguage readers who do not possess many or, in some cases, any language other than English. As a reader who can neither read nor speak Chinese, for example, I am very grateful to the ChineseAustralian poet Ouyang Yu for editing and translating the 2002 anthology, In Your Face: Contemporary Chinese Poetry in English Translation, which has introduced me to the work of many innovative and subversive contemporary Chinese poets. In this article I would like to present and explore some of my own artistic and professional experiences and concerns as the co-editor and co-translator of one such anthology. Whilst there are many aspects of my work on Six Vowels and Twenty Three Consonants with which I am quite satisfied, there are also others which I believe have made working on this project precarious and have complicated my personal response to the book since its publication. I hope that by addressing both the pleasures and perils of (co-)creating this anthology, this article will make a contribution to the understanding and evaluation of the opportunities as well as potential problematics of the current translational turn in the production and dissemination of poetry. Collaboration, transformation and poetry translation The most satisfying aspect of my work on first sourcing a very wide range of potential inclusions and contributions for the Persian anthology under discussion, and then selecting and translating forty of these for the final manuscript of the anthology, was my collaboration with the renowned Australian poet, publisher and activist John Kinsella, a process which started in 2007. I had worked with John prior to this project – by having had my second book, the collection of poems Eyes in Times of War (2006), commissioned by him and published by Salt Publishing – but the conception and the process of producing Six Vowels and Twenty Three Consonants provided me with the valuable opportunity to creatively engage with one of Australia’s most remarkable and accomplished poets over an extended period of time. As I’ve said of this process elsewhere: This has been by far the most involved and stimulating collaboration I’ve worked on, not only due to its size and scope, but also because of the intricacy and complexity of the individual pieces included in our project. Selecting and translating poems from a literary tradition of such depth and breadth of aesthetic variety and divergence required quite a bit of research and discussion between John and me; and once we had chosen the pieces that we would include in the anthology, we set about turning my initial literal English translations (often in the form of prose/paragraphs) into English poems that very closely aesthetically resembled the original Farsi texts. This required quite a bit of fine-tuning at times, and very detailed work on individual lines and phrases. I feel I’ve learnt a lot from working so closely with John and observing his poetics in action (Alizadeh n.p.) I am further delighted to find that John has also found our collaboration stimulating and productive. While acknowledging “a few technical questions that confronted” him during our work – mostly to do with the abovementioned “fine-tuning” – John has written that as a result of our collaboration, he has become “passionate” about “one of the great world poetries”; and that he has “enjoy[ed] working [on the project] as someone with a bit of a ‘history’ background [who likes] to explore eras and contexts” (Kinsella 25). Another positive aspect of my experience of working on this anthology has been what Simon Patton has described, in the context of his own work translating poetry from Chinese into Six Vowels and Twenty Three Consonants 23