Berber Poetry and the Issue of Derivation: Alternate Symbolist Trajectories

Translation as Alienation: Sufi Hermeneutics and Literary Modernism in Bijan Elahi’s Translations

“…"As regards the rewriting of these poems," Elahi writes, "the steps taken beyond the definite borders of the Persian syntax have aimed to get closer to the real flesh [gusht-e vāqeʿi] of the poem. Where there was the danger of suffocating the poem within a strictly grammatical framework, we preferred to break down the framework instead of suffocating the poem" (Elahi,Lorca,9). Such translational transgressions occur in Elahi's rendering of Lorca's "Romance de la Luna, Luna, Luna" (1928), where the violated grammatical principle is the antecedence of the verb in respect to both subject and object in a declarative Persian sentence.…”

“…Elahi regards this type of translation as based on constructive misreading (kazh-khāni-hā-ye sāzanda) (9). In contrast to his renderings of Hallaj, Elahi's translations of Hölderlin have a literalist orientation to the original.…”

“…generative of a global modernity born of crisscrossings and interactions between Europe and its colonies." 9 Such crisscrossings heavily inflect modernism's temporalities at the global scale.…”