Kaveh Bassiri
Photo courtesy of Kaveh Bassiri
Bio
Kaveh Bassiri is an Iranian-American writer and translator. He is a recipient of the Witter Bynner Poetry Translation Residency and the Sturgis International Fellowship. His translations have been published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Guernica, Colorado Review, Two Lines, World Literature Today, Asymptote, and theMassachusetts Review. His poetry won Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Award and is published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Drunken Boat, Nimrod International Journal, Mississippi Review, and Best New Poets. His chapbook 99 Names of Exile, winner of the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, is coming out in 2019.
Translation begins with love. It is a bond, a commitment. Translators believe in immigration and alchemy: By bringing different cultures together, we might make something noble.
For me, translation is also a way to understand my heritage. On a trip to Iran—decades after I’d left and become an American—I was doing research on contemporary Iranian poetry, and I met Roya Zarrin, whose name translates as dream (“roya”) and golden (“zarrin”). I was excited by her poetry, which combines the mythical, spiritual, personal, and political. Her poems richly capture the voices of Iranian women in the post-revolutionary era. On that same trip, I met Kimia, who is now my wife. Her name is at the root of the word alchemy (al-kīmiyā). When I returned to America, I began to translate Zarrin’s poetry, but I was in the middle of getting my PhD, which took precedence. Now the National Endowment for the Arts has made it possible for me to finish these translations. It has cast a vote of confidence in my commitment, and against all odds, it says we can come together and share in words. It gives me hope that Kimia might be able to join me in the States, even though there is currently a travel ban. We are blessed by the NEA and its dedication to the arts, our greatest shared legacy.
From I Want to Swallow My Children by Roya Zarrin
[translated from the Persian]
1.
It was the end of the sixth day,
horizons
ripened from violet shadows
to violets of light.
Onen was tired from the height of so much day and
the straits of so much night.
The air was still violet and scentless,
when from Nile’s seaweed my hair emerged
and from Marmara’s oyster shells my teeth.
The Ecbatana caves were no darker than soil of my larynx,
the red-sand hills of Allivarz no darker than silt of my heart.
Brain became my first uterus and on the seventh day
the air grew fragrant
and the summer sweated on the fuzzy cheeks of a peach.
(First appeared in English in Virginia Quarterly Review)
About Roya Zarrin
Roya Zarrin is the author of six poetry books. I Want to Swallow my Children (2007) won the Khorshid Prize for the best new poetry book by a woman and was named the best book of the year at the Eavar Festival. In 2009, a group of her poems was a co-winner of the Nima Poetry Prize. The Pleasant Tricks of April (2011) won the Iranian Journalist Prize for the best book of poems and received a special recognition from the official National Literary Prize, picked from more than five thousand works. My translation project is from these works.