High Tide of the Eyes

by Bijan Elahi, Rebecca Ruth Gould (translator), کیوان طهماسبیان (translator)

Bijan Elahi (1945–2010) was a poet, a prolific translator of T. S. Eliot, Rimbaud, Michaux, Hölderlin, and the founder of Other Poetry, the leading avant-garde movement within Persian modernism. This book translates his most important poems, as gathered in Vision (2014) and Youths (2015), into English for the first time. Author website: bijanelahi.hcommons.org.

Elahi’s poetics is distinguished by its diversity of styles and registers. Traversing the borders of ambiguity and clarity, speech and writing, familiarity and foreignness, in Elahi’s work the nuances of the Persian language are registered in ways that are without precedent in Persian poetry. To the translators, the process of creating these translations was like a musha’ira, a Persian tradition of poetic recitation in which one poet completes the other’s poem. The translation process exiled us from our native language and taught us to give voice to Elahi’s poetics in a language it was never intended to inhabit.

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Genres: Poetry

106 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2019