Niloufar Talebi uses the art of translation in her new hybrid memoir to keep a poet’s legacy alive.
Ahmad Shamlou’s literature helped to define modern poetry, but have you heard of him? The first Iranian poet to take his poems from classic poetry forms to free verse, this Nobel Prize-winning writer should be heard of everywhere. “A poet, cultural icon, encyclopediast, and translator,” says Niloufar Talebi, an Iranian poet and mentee to Ahmad Shamlou. This poet is known as someone who “…considered the colloquial language he had been exposed to in his early years to be much richer and more expressive than the official language. He began to fuse high and low language together to create a new, multidimensional one.” He released his first poetry volume in 1957 titled Fresh Air, which gave Shamlou a name as a writer in Iran and then released several more until the end of his life. Zia Movahed, another Iranian poet, claims Fresh Air was the first collection of Iranian poetry rooted with a unique rhythm, something never before seen in modern Iranian poetry. In 1958, Shamlou began translating other works of art from French into Persian, becoming well known as a translator as well as a poet, even translating pieces such as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. Deceased in 2000, Shamlou’s mentee Niloufar Talebi lives today to keep his boundary-breaking poetry alive through the art of translation.
Talebi’s duty to translate Persian literature stems from the fact that literary translations make up an extremely small amount of the publishing industry, but translation from Persian to English in the U.S. market is on the “fringes of the fringes.” Focusing on translating Shamlou’s poetry, she faced several challenges, specifically pushback from other Iranian translators and poets. In 2016, she had a gut-wrenching realization that her translations of Shamlou’s poems would not be accepted by the Alef. Bamdad Institute. She was shamefully rejected from her work as a translator due to the genre’s freedom for interpretation and negative attitudes toward women. Colleagues and leaders of the Alef. Bamdad Institute did not believe she accurately interpreted Shamlou’s poetry, though she is a poet herself and knew him and his work personally. Not only was her work not accepted, but she had her award for translating Shamlou’s work revoked, lost the winning prize, and was verbally shamed by colleagues. After her rejection, she was “lost in translation”, not being able to fathom the idea that her own friends would try to silence her, and with that, silencing Ahmad Shamlou and the chance to bring his voice to the States.
Niloufar Talebi’s hybrid memoir titled Self Portrait in Bloom takes a deep dive into agony, rejection, and hope, but to do this, she is “curating two incomplete portraits: one of myself, and one of Shamloo, my amoo [uncle].” Bordering on biography, she very clearly could not share this story without the inclusion of Ahmad Shamlou. He is the sun that Tabelbi orbits, leading and guiding her, even in his death. Her story of identity, beauty, and transformation does not exist without the award-winning poet’s impact on Talebi’s life. A combination of prose, images, translation, and poetry, the reader is getting an experience in Self Portrait in Bloom that they did not know they needed.
This book begins like any traditional biography: a peek into Talebi’s childhood, the enthusiasm and challenges presented by her parents, and her quality education. The beginning of a scholar, I might say. Raised in a home that cherished literature and art, it was inevitable that writing and expression became a part of her nature. Britain-born and raised in Tehran for ten years, Talebi claims that her soul lies in this city. A child living in Tehran when Iran was forcefully Westernized, she questioned art, censorship, life, and her femininity. She sought out answers, which she came to realize were hard to find. Her walk in life (some may call it fate) would land her in the presence of someone who could give her answers: Ahmad Shamlou. Talebi knew him personally as a young girl living in Tehran; he was an active member of her family’s literary salons after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. A memorable photo featured in this hybrid memoir is a blurry snapshot of Shamlou and Talebi dancing in her living room. Looking at the image of Talebi’s long hair swinging, Shamlou’s pipe in his hand, we can’t help but feel the emotional attachment that Talebi has for Shamlou, a father figure, the spark that drew her creative spirit near to his writing. He brought her “the world,” she claims in her 2019 TED Talk in Berkeley, California.
After moving to the United States with her family at eighteen, she writes “I was hungry for a union that would spark something, be the key piece to the puzzle of my directionless life, whose only thing going for it was a structureless but creative set of projects…” Talebi’s journey to finding her purpose was a wild ride through identity, censorship, biography, and women’s systemic oppression. She searches for a purpose so deeply enrooted in her soul, so loud and clear, yet so hard to grasp and follow. When being a professional dancer wasn’t as artistic and magnificent as she wanted to believe it was, a friend suggested looking into the art of translation.
And there it was. An idea. A new lifestyle. A purpose. A biography. A challenge. An honor. From a young Iranian girl, to an American college drop-out, to a professional dancer, Talebi found translation to be her “home” the first time she ever attempted it. There was now “an outlet, a magical gateway into my inner worlds whose beginning had not yet discovered expression. A scaffolding for wordsmithing, verbal activity, solving linguistic puzzles, for pulling from the universe to render a word or a line, for exercising the left and the right brains.” Persian translation had consumed the immigrant in her “on every level.” She began translating written works into English, but she knew there was someone’s poetry she needed to translate specifically: Amhad Shamlou.
In her memoir about rejection, the reader comes face to face with rejection themselves, to human greed, and to selfishness. The finger of shame was not just pointed at Talebi, but it was pointed at me as well. My own greed, my own limitations, my own lack of cultural knowledge, and maybe my lack of appreciation for art was staring blankly at me. It is obviously a living necessity for Niloufar Talebi. Navigating the rights to publish Shamlou’s poetry was “merky,” and ultimately led to her voice being silenced, something I’ve had the privilege never to experience. Perhaps it was the betrayal of her own culture and colleagues that hurt the most. Talebi’s memoir uses prose, images, and translated poetry to merge two different cultures together as one and to express an experience so unimaginable to someone like myself.
A photo in Self Portrait in Bloom captures her painful journey perfectly, and it still sticks with me. The black-and-white image featured halfway through the memoir includes an Iranian man openly criticizing her in front of her face. His face is contorted in anger, and his finger points accusingly toward her. Talebi, waiting for the rant to be over, stands tall, hands folded, and takes the criticism. This particular image stopped me from turning to the next chapter; I couldn’t help but analyze it. Grainy and poor quality, it was an obvious symbol of her oppression as a female Iranian translator, and I hurt for her. More than that, I was proud of her.
Talebi is a master of bending and shaping art and culture to create abstraction and gripping emotion. At the end of her hybrid memoir, I breathed in Talebi’s unwavering hope into my own soul until it attached itself to me and wouldn’t let me free. Readers of this memoir will realize that our stories can’t be created without the influence of other people. Our human connections, we can’t escape them; we need them, perhaps most of all in the midst of pain. Talebi uses her voice to enlighten, to break, to guide, and to build readers back up through her artistic, cross-cultural lifestyle in her multi-genre memoir Self Portrait in Bloom. She is a woman who brings her life-long learning experiences from Britain to Tehran to San Francisco to you.
Despite her rejections and criticisms, Talebi uses her resilience and passion for Iranian literature and takes her translation and ability to combine unlikely genres to the next level. Abraham in Flames is a new opera based on the poetry of Ahmad Shamlou. Never settling for just one form of art and expression, Talebi decided to use her power of translation and connection to Shamlou to write the story and the lyrics to several new operas. A librettist now. This opera is another piece of art that brings together Iranian culture, authentic emotional expression, and an American audience. The title for this opera is based on the Biblical character of Abraham and his ability to stand up for truth besides trial: a journey closely related to her own. Talebi used the jarring and sharp imagery written in Shamlou’s poems to create a riveting opera. The opera is about a young girl, played by a girls’ chorus, who is seeking to find “her true self.” She admits the young girl in the opera closely resembles herself. Talebi constantly challenges herself by finding something she’s never done and putting all of her faith into it until she’s completed her mission. Seven years of “hard labor” were required to create the opera now called Abraham in Flames. Even the process of the project differs from tradition; never before has a librettist led the creation of an opera; it is typically a composer who drives it. She is clearly an unstoppable force for creativity and art in American culture. Other attempts at a hybrid genre include fiction-based collections but nothing reflective of Talebi’s new genre, which combines both nonfiction and creative writing. Perhaps the first book of it’s kind, it is clear that Americans need more of Niloufar Talebi: her translation, her story, and her lyrics. Maybe we need more translated literature; literature is perhaps one of the most powerful vessels for sharing the human experience. Talebi has also translated the work of contemporary Iranian poet Farideh Razi and the anthology Belonging: New Poetry by Iranians Around the World. After reading Self Portrait in Bloom, I crave her style, her boundary-pushing, her honesty, and most of all, her hope. Though Niloufar Talebi breaks cultural barriers, walls for women, and harnesses this ability to break expectations and limitations of genre, she might say that Ahmad Shamlou was the first to do so in his own work. Shamlou is known today as a “rebel poet,” and Talebi will not let us forget such an influential man of art. She claims “I don’t even think of him as a poet — he is poetry.”
HANNAH TERRY 