So I found out yesterday that I was not elected secretary of my union. I ran not because I was eager to get into union work per se, but because there is serious work that needs to be done on my campus–we are facing a real budget crisis and an administration that has been unambiguously hostile–and I thought the executive committee needed the skills I would have brought to the job. Clearly, my colleagues thought otherwise, since I lost by a margin that could comfortably be described as a land slide. While I’m disappointed not to have won, of course, I don’t begrudge my opponent the win; she is eminently qualified, and, to be honest, I am also a little bit relieved, since winning would have meant I’d have even less time than I do now to devote to writing, and writing is what I really want to be doing when I am not teaching, grading papers, having an intellectual life, a family life, a marriage, a social life–not to mention being co-chair of the union’s Crisis Committee and manager of the Google Group we set up so faculty could communicate with each other away from the college email servers. (See, I am still pretty heavily involved in union work even though I did not get elected.)<\/p>\n
My life, in other words, is already plenty crowded enough. The problem is that my writing life is also crowded. There are at least five projects scattered in files around my office and on my hard drive, each of which deserves my attention. I am, for one, finally writing poems again; there are drafts of essays on writing that I’d like to complete; drafts of the essays I’ve been building from the Fragments of Evolving Manhood<\/a> series I started posting a while back. (The link will take you back to my blog; if you want to read the posts here, where there was quite a bit of discussion in the comments, just do a search on “Fragments of Evolving Manhood.”) Then there is also the beginnings of a one man show based on my book of poems The Silence of Men<\/em><\/a> that a director is interested in working on with me (I would perform the show, which would be very cool); there is the next book of translations, Ilahi Nama<\/em>, by Farid al-Din Attar, which I have written about here<\/a>, here<\/a>\u00a0and here<\/a>; and there is the recent email I received from someone interested in turning my Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan<\/a><\/em>, which is out of print, into an ebook. (This last project is not as simple as it sounds, since I do not own the copyright to the book and I would need to jump through a couple of hoops in order to make sure that the rights to the version that gets turned into an ebook are entirely mine.)\u00a0The one thing that simplifies choosing which project to work on is the fact that I am eligible to apply for a sabbatical in the 2012-2013 academic year, and the most obviously sabbatical-worthy project among those I just mentioned is Ilahi Nama<\/em>, primarily because a university press has expressed interest in seeing the manuscript once I am finished.<\/p>\n Because I would not have been able to take a sabbatical if I’d won the election, and the first draft of the application was due before the election results would be in, I handed in to the committee in my department which reviews and approves (or does not approve) sabbatical applications a very\u00a0<\/em>rough draft, comprised mostly of passages from both the last sabbatical application I submitted, which was for a different book of translations, and unsuccessful grant applications I submitted last year for funding my work on Ilahi Nama<\/em>.\u00a0Now that I’ve lost the election, I’ve gone back to look at my draft application to start figuring out how to revise it, and I’ve been pondering whether or not to follow a specific piece of my committee’s advice. They want me to cut entirely, or scale back significantly, the section I had to write the last time I applied explaining that the literary translation of poetry is often done by poets who are neither fluent nor literate in the source language–Ezra Pound, W. S. Merwin, and Adrienne Rich are three very well known examples. I wrote this section because the first time I submitted my previous sabbatical application it was rejected; the members of the college-wide Sabbatical Committee simply did not believe that I could produce the translations I said I was going to produce without being fluent and\/or literate in Persian. (Interestingly, there were people from my own department on that committee who teach some of Ezra Pound’s translations from the Chinese in their literature classes and they did not know he made them based on someone else’s literal translations and notes.)<\/p>\n Reading over again the section I wrote to respond to that doubt and disbelief started me thinking about the reactions I’ve received from people in the Iranian community, literary and otherwise, and how they reveal the politics that are at stake in the work I’ve done–in terms both specific to the translation of classical Iranian poetry and to the project of translation in general. I’m going to list some of those reactions here, without comment, but there are a couple of things you should know before you read them. First, my wife is from Iran; second, while I am not literate in Persian, I understand the spoken language at what I would call an intermediate level and I can speak it as well, though not quite as well as I understand it.<\/p>\n Cross posted.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So I found out yesterday that I was not elected secretary of my union. I ran not because I was eager to get into union work per se, but because there is serious work that needs to be done on … Continue reading \n