VOA Interview at The Eight Books Launch

Bahiyeh Afnan Shahid took on the prodigious task of translating Sohrab Sepehri’s The Eight Books recently, the launch of which was a few weeks ago at Rose Issa Gallery. Stumbling indoors a few minutes late, away from the rain, I found my way to the front of the room and let my soul drench in Sepehri’s majestic words.

Poets (writers, artists) who break the canon can often become the canon themselves, and by that virtue, over the years, us “contemporaries” may forget or diminish what they once revealed. Not with Sepehri. His words are like water and they feel good, refreshing, true, blue, and more clear with time. I can go on with catchy descriptions but you have to read it to see what I mean. Which is why Afnan Shahid, with the help of Mahmoud Kavir, translated them to English. Yet poetry translated, is like a painting re-done by someone else with a completely different palate. And, as I mention in the short interview with the VOA , texts written in languages as vague as Persian, even as simple as Sepehri’s vocabulary, still carry motifs and interpellations that are un-translatable.

Nevertheless, Afnan Shahid has done us all a favour, and I applaud her for that.

Click here to watch.