Persian Literature

he current Quarterly Feature at ArteEast is It Deserves and Commands Your Attention, a fascinating collection of Persian fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.

Here’s editor Richard Jeffrey Newman summary of the contents:

I will not pretend that the poems, essays and stories gathered here represent anything other than the relatively small number of people who sent them to me or from whom I solicited them. Nonetheless, I do think they begin to sketch the outlines of the landscape my question was intended to uncover and begin to explore. Among the writers represented here are two women from Iran, one a young poet of 24, the other with an established career as a writer and editor, each of whom write poetry in English; there is an award-winning Iranian-American poet; a poet born in the year of the revolution who now writes, in Persian and Swedish, in Sweden; another poet published here in translation has been barred from entering Iran for more than two decades. There is a fiction writer from the United States who has made her career out of writing the Iranian immigrant experience. You will find translations of classical Persian literature, a fictionalized memoir by an academic from the United Kingdom and a short story by a man who is now a well-known Iranian director, but who began his career as a fiction writer deeply sympathetic to the Islamic Republic.

Seems to me that there’s a lot of interesting Iranian Persian writing out there, but that it’s sort of “under the radar,” at least from a mainstream perspective. (As if great literature from other countries/languages is getting tons of attention.)

In addition to this great publication, anyone interested in Iranian literature should definitely check out The Translation Project which is run by the amazing Niloufar Talebi. I’ll post more about this in the future, but as a taste, here’s what they list online as their Current Projects:

1. An Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Poetry Around the World, forthcoming summer 2008 (North Atlantic Books) edited and translated by Niloufar Talebi. It offers a comprehensive yet eclectic view of poetry generated outside Iran since the 1979 revolution by both established and emerging Iranian poets. Poetry IN diaspora, not OF diaspora, means that editorial decisions will not focus on the subject of exile, but on the quality and growth of each poet’s work during their time spent outside of Iran.

2. Multimedia Iranian Literary Arts Festival, November 13-17, 2007 in San Francisco. This multimedia festival will feature a new theatrical piece based on Iranian poetry, called ICARUS/RISE, panel presentations, readings, translator’s forum, film screenings and more.

3. Midnight Approaches…: DVD of short films. A multi-dimensional, evocative and entertaining DVD of short films based on contemporary Iranian poetry, it features an Introduction to Persian Poetry, 6 films based on contemporary Iranian Poetry translated, adapted and brought to life with music, performance and dance. Musical compositions by master musicians such as Ostaad Nejad, Hafez Modirzadeh, royal hartigan and David Molina, and more. Get you own copy now and support the organization.