Thursday 19 November 2015

The Angles Of The Frame (Translated From Original Persian To English by the Author) By Rosa Jamali


1
Many years have passed since the day, 

I looked into a mirror, saw a wrinkled face.
I've been disclosed to the bulging sands of my bed.

2
Aeons of breath account for the many veins in my atrium.

3
The bull I breast-fed for many years
And I've submerged into the frame.

4
I knew the justifications were hard,
Hard as against the current of water.
No news from the ambiguous points
something uncommon.
It can't be justified by natural rules,
many years we've been tangled on it.

5
This usurped land is a part of all buried treasure islands
No finger points in any direction.
Lost in the dead-end alleys
Tracing images without a compass.

6
Horse pounding pulse sing endlessly in my blood.
My kinsmen of horses…
Blood-line linked as to rays of a circle
like roots of a tree growing deep on the roof.

7
You can't stop the hands of the clock.
You can't come back to the broken minutes.
The days have been arranged one after another.
The knights have left the game one after another.

8
There was a straw mat where you fell asleep.
I became numb, quite used to the stillness of the house.

9
Was something supposed to get away from the core
to join us?
A century has passed and we still live in this house.

10
Dimensions have shifted
Not exclusive to the roof
The letters approved us as the residents of the house
They ran away as the convicts
And we got used to the standstill.

Sunday 26 April 2015

THE LAST STREET OF TEHRAN / Rosa Jamali / Translated from original Persian to English by Franklin Lewis


Facing the airport,
all that’s now left in my grasp
is a crumpled land
that fits in the palm of my hand


Facing the wavering sunbeams
of a sun that is cross and will not speak with us.
All the way from the salt sands of Dasht-e Lut,
it came, a dream that made my fingers shift,
that set my teeth on edge, a muted breeze,
a whirlwind
spun from the sand dunes
all the way through the back alley of our house.


Pasting together the cut-up fragments of my face to make me laugh?


A short leap, no longer than the palm of the hand,
exactly the length you had predicted
A huge grave
in which to lay the longest night of the year to sleep
“Sleep has quit our eyelids for other pastures,
has dropped its anchor at the shores of garden ponds
has lost the chapped flaking of its lips,
poor thing.”


Pasting together the cut up fragments of my face to make me laugh?


With scissors – snip, snip – they’re cutting something up.
The alphabet shavings strewn on the ground,
are they the letters of our name?
With every other zig-zag,
rigid and unyielding,
in the middle of the salt dunes, flat and vast,
did you cage my mother’s breath,
her footprints fading
in the shifting sands?


Pasting together the cut up fragments of my face to make me laugh?
No!…
I will not return to the last street.
I left behind a shoe, one of a pair, for you to put on and follow after me
A strange shape forms
facing the horizon…
It fits in the palm of the hand!
A big leap, beyond what three legs could manage,
the length of the palm of the hand.


"From Poetry Anthology of Metropolitan Museum of Art"



Franklin Lewis  is associate professor of  Persian in the department of near eastern languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago. His books include:
- Rumi: Swallowing the Sun (Oneworld, 2007)
- Rumi: Past and Present, East and West (Oneworld, 2000)
-Things We Left Unsaid: Zoya Pirzad, Translated from original Persian by Franklin D. Lewis (Oneworld, 2013)

How I turned to become an experimental poet:


 My talk at the British Library:



1

At the first step when I started my literary career the job was totally challenging for the range of set vocabulary was limited and not too many poets could generate a new style and create new metaphors or revitalise the themes used in Persian classics. I was born one year before the revolution and I grew up at the time of Iran-Iraq war, growing up at the most critical moment of Iran’s history made me a totally different person with a critical view towards the past and present. I usually create new metaphors facing the new subject matters of our society. Besides I felt that we need some new techniques to be much more creative, like narrating a poem through different voices or mingling a formal and informal language.




2

I’m from a generation living in a different milieu far from the classics and with a vague prospect of future for the mass immigration of Iranians. As a patriot there is a strong sense of local colour in my poetry with recurrent themes: Tehran has often been described as a lover, a metropolis with noise and pollution and massive highways, my concerns with the land and reminiscing the past have been expressed through the kind of condensed and language-based imagery I generally apply, allusive to our history.The outcome of such a hectic and traumatic background is that our fears and dreams are different from the generation past. They used to be hopeful,they used to have big goals, they believed in utopias and revolutions but they're all senseless to us and we’re obsessed with the trivial matters, I never judge the situations I usually describe in my poetry, I would let the reader feel and get it between the lines.




3

One of my main concerns is to revitalise the techniques of the past through some layers of intertextuality, there was a sort of writing in the past which was called visionary writing, it’s true to the essence of poetry, with a high sense of intuition to discover life by being through a mystic vision, a sort of trance-like state.In a comparative study the method could be taken as a sort of automatic writing which was a favourite of surrealist poets. I’m a lot influenced by this sort of writing in which you need to discover the unconscious side of the language or create the moment of being as Heidegger says. I still think that sufism is the main trend in Persian poetry which could be recreated through the objects within our everyday life.




4

Being obsessed with archetypes,I’ve been much inspired by a trend of mysticism in poetry which embodies the elements of nature and sees the manifestation of God in the nature and its harmony, a kind of phenomenological approach being seen in the visionary writings in which the boundaries like rhymes and rhythms haven't been considered, what matters is getting united with the whole universe through the words. I like the diction because it's far from the cliches and not so much repetitive as it is in mystical sonnets. In mystical sonnets the cup-bearer has always been taken as a medium of spirituality; as a result, a certain terminology has been created and applied for centuries. Unlike the sonnets in the visionary writings like the diary and letters of mystics the writer is free to apply any word he likes, whether inside the poetics or not, it doesn't matter much. I’ve also been inspired by Persian mythology and I usually mingle that within a modern atmosphere. The book of the kings contains mythological imagery which is quite appealing and surrealistic to my mind.




Iran in Writing: Past and Present
British Library, February 2015
Daljit Nagra, Rosa Jamali, Ahmad Karimi Hakkak, Shadab Vajdi, British Library's Speaker



Rosa Jamali is a Poet, Playwright, Translator and a Poetry Scholar

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