Contemporary Iranian Poetry in Translation: A Reading and Conversation with Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould

Event time: 
Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - 12:00pm
Location: 
Online () See map
Event description: 

Join us for a reading and discussion of modern Iranian poetry and translation with Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould, both scholars and practicing poets based at the University of Birmingham, who frequently collaborate on their translations of Persian poetry. They will read poetry by Tahmasebian, as well as their translations of verse by Bijan Elahi and Hasan Alizadeh. They will be joined in conversation by Sam Hodgkin and Robyn Creswell from Yale’s Department of Comparative Literature.
Kayvan Tahmasebian is an Iranian poet, translator, and critic who was born and raised in Isfahan. He is the author of Isfahan’s Mold (2016), on the short story writer Bahram Sadeqi, and Lecture on Fear and Other Poems (2019). Tahmasebian has also translated Beckett, Rimbaud, T. S. Eliot, Ponge, and Mallarmé into Persian. He is currently a Marie-Curie Fellow at the University of Birmingham, and Principal Investigator of Transmodern, a Horizon 2020-funded project on the position of translated literature within modern Iranian literary theory. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming in New Literary History, Modernism/Modernity, and Twentieth Century Literature.
Rebecca Ruth Gould’s translations include The Prose of the Mountains: Tales of the Caucasus (2015) and After and the Days Disappear: Ghazals and Other Poems Hasan Sijzi of Delhi (2016), and, with Kayvan Tahmasebian, High Tide of the Eyes: Poems by Bijan Elahi (2019). She teaches at the University of Birmingham and is the author of Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus (2016) and The Persian Prison Poem: Sovereignty and the Political Imagination (2021).
Sam Hodgkin is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University, who has published on the modern verse, theater, and criticism of Iran, Turkey, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. His first book project is entitled “The Nightingales’ Congress: Literary Representatives in the Communist East.”
Robyn Creswell is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale and author of City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut (Princeton, 2019). He is the translator of Abdelfattah Kilito’s The Clash of Images (New Directions, 2010) and The Tongue of Adam (New Directions, 2016), as well as Sonallah Ibrahim’s That Smell and Notes from Prison (New Directions, 2013).

Kayvan Tahmasebian, University of Birmingham and Rebecca Ruth Gould, University of Birmingham

203-436-2553