People here sometimes ask me how I came to things Iranian, and this is a difficult question to respond to. Because one never comes to things like this; these things always come to one. And if I explained how Iran came to me, those who had to ask me would never believe me, and those who would believe me never ever ask.
Nonetheless, I shall single out two “events”. The first one was September, 11, 2001, when I like many of my “hamvatans”, looking deeply into the flames, began to ponder the “Muslim world.” But my research led me inexorably to Iran, as though it were a road I’d trodden often long before. So throughout most of 2003, while my “progressive” friends and colleagues were all screaming Iraq, I was already singing Iran.
The second “event” which crystallized this evolving path for me, was when, while web searching at the end of ’03, I chanced upon a poem in translation. I did not know at that time who the author was, or whether it was even a man or a woman. I only knew that this voice of movement, majesty and light was an old old voice, and my voice too, and that I needed to learn this language to come home. If only just to read that poem in the original.
And that is what I did, and found to my surprise that the translation that had originally inspired me was sadly lacking in many ways. And so I determined to write my own. And so I did, and here is what I wrote. I owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Michael Hillman, for it was his translation of Forough’s “Tanhaa Sedaast keh Mimunad” that opened for me so many doors. But once we allow the doors to be opened, the wind will carry us wheresoever she wishes.
IT IS SOUND ALONE THAT REMAINS
by Forough Farrokhzad
Translation by Robin Jayne Goldsmith
Why should I stop, why?
The birds have gone off in search of the blue direction
The horizon is vertical it is vertical
and movement fountain-like
and at the borders of insight
shining planets spin
Earth at altitude reaches recurrence
and air wells change
to connecting tunnels
and day is an expanse far too big
for the limited imagination of newspaper worms
Why should I stop?
The road runs through the capillaries of life
Surrounding conditions on the uterus ship of moon
will kill of all decaying cells
and in sun’s chemical space after rising
there is only sound
sound absorbing the particles of time.
Why should I stop?
What can a swamp be
What but the breeding ground of putrid teeming bugs
Bloated, wind-bagged bodies jot down the morgue freezer’s thoughts
The coward has hidden his manlessness in the blackness
and the roach…ah
when the cockroach speaks
why should I stop?
Collaboration of leaden letters is pointless
collaboration of lead type
It will never redeem the base idea
I am of the noble lineage of the trees
Breathing stagnant air is tiresome.
A poor little bird who’d died once counseled me, commit the flight to
memory
The fullest extent of powers is fusion
fusing with the sun’s bright essence
and pouring into the intelligence of light.
It is natural for windmills to rot
Why should I stop?
I hold the unripe wheat sheaves
to my breasts
and feed them milk.
Sound, sound, only sound
the sound of water’s clear asking to flow
the sound of starlight’s oozing onto the pistil sheath of soil
the sound of clotting of meaning’s sperm
and amplification of the one mind of love
sound, sound, voice of sound, it is sound alone that remains.
In the land of the short-statured
standards of measurement
have always orbited the axis of zero
Why should I stop?
I obey the four elements only
and the ratification of my heart’s constellation
lies beyond the jurisdiction of the municipal government of the blind.
To me the long yowl of barbarity in the beast’s sex organs: so what
or the worm’s pathetic movement in its vacuum sac of meat
The bloodline of the roses has pledged me unto life.
Do you understand ‘bloodline of the roses’?
