At this session we will be returning to an unfinished translation from our last season ‘Railings Around the Crib’ by Farzaneh Ghavami, a leading feminist translator from Iran, whose poetry reflects her lived experience as a woman living and working under a dictatorship system that suppresses women and femininity.
Poet – Farzaneh Ghavami,
Farzaneh Ghavami, b.1968, is a graduate of Persian Language and Literature and teaches Persian literature in Tehran high schools. Her poetry reflects her lived experience as a woman living and working under a dictatorship system that suppresses women and femininity. It is due to this situation that Farzaneh Ghavami, like many other Iranian contemporary female poets, uses her personal life to make political statements. In her poetry, a first person female narrator is in a permanent dialogue with a fictional beloved and it is through this dialogue that she absorbs the world. She uses her body and her lyrical conversations as a platform to make social and political statements about the contemporary socio-political situation in Iran.
Guest-translator – Alireza Abiz
Alireza Abiz is an Iranian poet, literary critic and translator. Abiz has written extensively on Persian contemporary literature and culture. His scholarly book Censorship of Literature in Post-Revolutionary Iran: Politics and Culture since 1979 was published by I. B. Tauris. He has so far published five collections of poetry in Persian: Stop! We must get off, Spaghetti with Mexican Sauce, I can hear a tree from my desk, 13/1 Koohsangi Street, and Black Line- London Underground. Abiz is an award-winning translator and has translated some leading English language poets including W.B. Yeats, Ted Hughes, Basil Bunting, Derek Walcott, Allen Ginsberg and C.K. Williams into Persian.
Facilitator – Leo Boix
The workshops will be led by award-winning poet and translator Leo Boix, an Argentine-British poet, translator and journalist based in the UK. He is the author of an English collection, Ballad of a Happy Immigrant (Chatto & Windus, 2021) and two Spanish collections, Un lugarpropio (2015) and Mar de noche (2017). He co-directs Invisible Presence, a scheme to nurture young Latinx poets in the UK. Boix received the Bart Wolffe Poetry Prize Award in 2018 and the Keats-Shelly Prize in 2019.
