More Babel: Talking With Richard Jeffrey Newman

It feels odd to be promoting myself and my work now, with everything that’s going on Iran, and in the context of everything I’ve been posting, but there is a good interview with me up on the blog More Babel,which is the editor’s blog for the online journal Babel Fruit. I answered questions about translation, classical Iranian literature, my own poetry and more.

One thing I said that I happen to like:

I also discovered that the most popular contemporary translations of classical Iranian poetry into English–those of Rumi by Coleman Barks and of Hafez by Daniel Ladinksi–were more concerned with spiritualizing the texts and writers they were translating than in rendering any but the most tenuous connection between their translations and the original texts, not to mention the culture in which those original texts were written and where they are still very much a living literature. It’s not that I think all translation must hew to a particular line in relation to the original text; nor do I think that either my personal dislike for Barks’ and Ladinsky’s work (neither moves me) or my objections to their motives and methods (about which more below) means that their work is bad in some absolute moral sense–though it does seem to me that it is false advertising to call Ladinsky’s work translations and that it would be more appropriate to call them “writings after Hafez,” or “versions of/improvisations on Hafez,” or some such thing. Rather, it’s that, given both the history of the translation of classical Iranian literature into English and my personal connection to that literature through my wife, my son and the many Iranian friends I have, I feel very strongly the degree to which past translations, including those of Barks and Ladinsky, have been very explicitly invested in misrepresenting Iran, its culture, its literature and, ultimately, its history. More to the point, this misrepresentation was not the misrepresentation of which all translation is guilty by definition; it was an almost willful–and sometimes fully willful–misrepresentation that grew out of the political or spiritual, non-literary agenda of the translator.

More Babel: Talking With Richard Jeffrey Newman.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.