I'm holding the poem up to the light: Translating H.E. Sayeh

As part of the publication of the newest TWO LINES, we're featuring short essays by translators on the pieces they have in the new volume. Today we have Fayre Makeig on the Irani poet Hushang Ebtahaj, who wrote under the name H.E. Sayeh. Makeig translated Sayeh's poetry for Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, the newest TWO LINES.

If you're intrigued by what you see, you can order Some Kind of Beautiful Signal directly from the Center right here, or on Amazon right here, or Indiebound right here.

As I try to translate the poetry of Hushang Ebtehaj, I find that every line brings home the ineffable.

True, the language itself is solid and easily held. Each word is a gemstone and Ebtehaj a jeweler, an old and careful jeweler who's learned from the very best. Throughout a lifetime's apprenticeship to Persia's master ghazal-maker, Hafez, Ebtehaj has been consistently careful to set each stone to best advantage. I imagine he works slowly and reworks, reworks. His output is modest: a few collections of ghazals and an annotated edition of Hafez's Divan. The one volume of selected free verse, which I am holding now, is light.

It is not so much the lexicon (much of which echoes Hafez and the other classical greats) or even the themes (derived from his mentor, Nima Yushij, and shared with his contemporaries) that amaze. It is the quality of the setting that allows what is set to dazzle. Take any one line, and see: the hues of the words, their balance, their array, the meaning they reflect off many facets.

There is no way, given my limited skills, that I can recreate the experience in English. The best I can do is provide a rough estimate of the meaning. But this is what slips my grasp. Not because Ebtehaj is convoluted—in fact, he might be the easiest of the major contemporary poets to translate. His syntax is not difficult (vs. Ahmad Shamlu), his images do not stretch the imagination (vs. Sohrab Sepehri), he does not use untranslatable quiet to evoke the deeply personal (vs. Forugh Farrokhzad), he does not play with the roughness of common speech (vs. Mehdi Akhavan Saless and Simin Behbahani).

But in being clear and apparently straightforward, in drawing our attention to the beauty and heft of each word, he brings to light just how individual meaning is—how far beyond consensus and thus, perhaps, translation.

Take one small phrase: "Hafez's resolve." In translation, I have already lost the rhythm and alliteration of the original. But I do hope to recreate, in some form or other, the context where I found it. And so, my first question is, What is the context? As an outsider, a newcomer to the Persian language, I feel some delight in recognizing that this phrase comes, verbatim, from the closing line of one of Hafez's most famous ghazals. This means that it will be immediately recognized by any number of Iranians, and will carry with it whatever feelings and memories they attach to Hafez's use of it.

What is evoked will, of course, depend on the individual—a childhood home, a father's favorite chair, a particular green curtain moving in soft wind—and on the place where he or she lives now. The Persian diaspora is large and those people who, for example, left Iran over thirty years ago have a different lexicon than those who left just this morning to work down the road. Some members of the diaspora may use a phrase that was in vogue decades ago, whereas the majority of the population in the country has moved on to a different phrase. Meanwhile, most young Persian speakers, either in Iran or outside, are not receiving the same education in poetry as the generations that came before. Many will have no idea—and I've asked around—that this phrase, "Hafez's resolve," comes from a famous ghazal. And so they will only respond to the name, Hafez, and might feel the reference to be quaint, an echo of the past. They will feel nothing of the immediacy, the impact that comes when one recalls all that built up to this phrase in Hafez's breathtaking poem.

Meanwhile, in English, many readers will ask, Who is Hafez? And so where we started with a more-or-less shared cultural icon, if not a shared experience, we have moved to the realm of the distant and obscure. And an endnote will not necessarily help bring things any nearer . . .

So, what is a translator to do? Realize—and here I'm speaking only for myself—there's no success. There's no one meaning to grasp. There's no special class that will enable all to appreciate the multiple refractions of Persian poetry in an instant.

But neither is there failure. Even if the gems aren't there, even if the setting can't be recreated, even though I can't find a way to express the strong double and triple meanings of a line, I'm holding the poem up to the light. And the small patch of reflected light coming off a gem's facet—that wasn't there before, and now it's illuminating, or at the very least adorning, a dark corner of this room.