The Eight Books - by Sohrab Sepehri (Paperback)

About the Book

The Eight Books: A Complete English Translation comprises an introduction framing Sohrab Sepehri as a modernist and the first complete translation which appears with the original Persian on facing pages.

Book Synopsis

The Eight Books: A Complete English Translation is the first complete translation of the collected poems of Sohrab Sepehri (1928-1980), a major Iranian modernist poet and painter and yet under-translated into English. The introduction takes up Sepehri's famously difficult if languidly beautiful style to explain it as a series of appropriations of global modernisms in poetry and painting. It offers close readings of how Sepehri's modernism follows and breaks with the jagged rhythms of Nima Yushij (d.1960), Iran's inaugural modernist poet. In keeping with this modernist framing, the translations replicate Sepehri's rhymes where possible, his fluctuations between formal and colloquial registers, his syntactic distortions, and his embeddings of governmental and other jargons. It also includes Sepehri's autobiography.

About the Author

Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi is Instructional Professor of Persian at the University of Chicago. She has translated several books from Persian to English and edited several volumes, including Oxford Handbook of Persian Linguistics and Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation.

Prashant Keshavmurthy is Associate Professor of Persian-Iranian Studies at McGill University. He is the author of Persian Authorship and Canonicity in Late Mughal Delhi: Building an Ark (Routledge, 2016), essays on Persian and Urdu literature; modernism; and Persian literary criticism.