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.