{"id":2800,"date":"2024-09-04T09:09:21","date_gmt":"2024-09-04T09:09:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2800"},"modified":"2024-09-04T09:09:21","modified_gmt":"2024-09-04T09:09:21","slug":"hasan-alizadeh-house-arrest-translated-and-introduced-by-kayvan-tahmasebian-and-rebecca-ruth-gould-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2800","title":{"rendered":"Hasan Alizadeh, House Arrest, translated and introduced by Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould – review"},"content":{"rendered":"

The poems in Hasan Alizadeh\u2019s House Arrest<\/em> are translated and introduced by Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould. What I got out of them was above all streams of vivid and expressive images. Like Fan in The Ink Cloud Reader<\/a>, Alizadeh weaves together strands from different cultural traditions. Some of his poems relate to Iranian public life, some to the Old and New Testaments or Greek and Roman mythology, some apparently to the personal experience of the poet himself. The introduction tells us that he started as a short story writer. His poems usually do involve story but their fundamental impulse is lyrical. Taking the overall narrative arc for granted, they tend to present one moment within it in an extremely vivid way, suggesting an emotion or complex of emotions. This is true even of a poem like \u2018Feuilleton\u2019. It begins with something that as well as being a startling image looks like an intriguing narrative hook:<\/p>\n

I fell in love with a sweet-lipped
\nbitter-eyed<\/p>\n

\ngirl from Balkh.<\/p>\n

Not much develops from this hook, however. We\u2019re told, in a summary way, what went wrong with the relationship: the poet delighted in the girl\u2019s \u2018body whiter than jasmine\u2019 and her \u2018flower-scented lips\u2019, but was too young and careless to be interested in her mind:<\/p>\n

I had nothing to do with her strange
\nsweet & bitter girlish dreams.<\/p>\n

To me it\u2019s disappointing that her sweetness and bitterness are simply repeated, taken as given, not explored imaginatively. There\u2019s a kind of flatness there. The poem ends with the speaker\u2019s haunting sense of loss, expressed in a sad cadence reminiscent of the end of some of Ezra Pound\u2019s Cathay poems \u2013 \u2018I sigh and sigh\u2019. However, what \u2018Feuilleton\u2019 doesn\u2019t have is the compelling, intricately dynamic narrative life of a poem like Pound\u2019s \u2018Exile\u2019s Letter\u2019 as it evolves towards its wistful conclusion.<\/p>\n

Sometimes the images of these poems are anchored in literal-seeming scenarios and sometimes, as in \u2018Old Testament, New Testament\u2019, they\u2019re of a more fantastical kind, dissolving and reforming like pictures in a dream. Some work as momentarily living, camera flash glimpses into imagined situations. Some have a wider but more indefinite resonance, like the beautiful single line \u2018The silence of the sirens\u2019 songs\u2019 forming the final section of \u2018Margins\u2019, six micropoems about Ulysses\u2019 return. Most of the poems in this book work very well on this imagistic level. Admittedly they sometimes fail to come as fully alive as wholes as the vitality of individual phrases suggests they should. Whatever may be the case in the original, in translation these less successful poems seem to me to lack expressive life in their rhythms and syntax. Fortunately, and it\u2019s to the translators\u2019 credit that this should be so, there are others in which parts and even whole poems do achieve rhythmical beauty and expressiveness.<\/p>\n

A fundamental similarity between Alizadeh\u2019s and Fan\u2019s books is that they both reflect the tensions and interweaving of cultures that is such a feature of the twentieth and twenty-first century world. In this way, they both bring challenging and widening perspectives to the reader\u2019s grasp of the world. A fundamental difference, however, is in the fact that Alizadeh\u2019s poems are translated and Fan\u2019s are not. Another is that where Alizadeh seems essentially a lyrical poet, Fan is a much more conceptual figure who, for all the beauty of his touches of lyricism, explicitly presents himself as\u00a0 wrestling with ideas, and in doing so draws the reader into sharing the evolution of those ideas within and between the poems.<\/p>\n

Hasan Alizadeh<\/strong>, translated and introduced by Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould<\/strong>, House Arrest<\/em>, 98pp, \u00a310.99, Arc Publications, 2022<\/p>\n

I would like to thank Peter and Ann Sansom and Holly Hopkins for their permission to post this review, which appeared in the North issue 70.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The poems in Hasan Alizadeh\u2019s House Arrest are translated and introduced by Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould. What I got out of them was above all streams of vivid and expressive images. Like Fan in The Ink Cloud Reader, Alizadeh weaves together strands from different cultural traditions. Some of his poems relate to Iranian […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[206],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hasan-alizadeh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2800"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2800"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2800\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2803,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2800\/revisions\/2803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}