The Persian Prison Poem from South Asia to the Caucasus: Towards an Anthology

Poster design by Farzan Kermani

 
The event recording is now available:

The Alireza Ahmadian Lecture in Iranian and Persianate Studies present: The Persian Prison Poem from South Asia to the Caucasus: Towards an Anthology on April 2, 2022.

This presentation will introduce Dr. Rebecca Gould and Dr. Kayvan Tahmasebian’s ongoing work towards an anthology of Persian prison poems (habsiyyāt) in English. Building on their prior work on the Persian poetics of imprisonment (Gould 2021), this anthology offers a snapshot of the development of Persian prison poetry from the 11^th to the 21^st century through the prism of its forms and topoi. Among the prison poems they will discuss are Masʿd Saʿd Salman’s rubaʿis to Khaqani Shirvani’s Christian qasida, Majd Hamgar’s ghazals, Malek al-Shoʿara Bahar’s masnavi, and Ahmad Shamlu’s free verse. Throughout the presentation they will develop a new theory of genre attenuated to Persian poetics. As they explain, the criteria underlying the structure of the anthology aims to reflect the dialectic of power and aesthetic in classical and modernist Persian poetry.

Guest Speakers

Rebecca Ruth Gould is the author of Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus (2016) and The Persian Prison Poem: Sovereignty and the Political Imagination (2021). With her co-author Kayvan Tahmasebian, she has published a number of articles on Persian and comparative literature in Representations, Modernism/Modernity, New Literary History, and Twentieth Century Literature. Tahmasebian’s and Gould’s forthcoming translation, House Arrest: Poems of Hasan Alizadeh (2022) won the PEN Translates Award from English PEN.  She teaches at the University of Birmingham, where she directs the GlobalLIT , a project which focuses on Global Literary Theory (‘ilm al-balagha) in Persian, Turkish, and Arabic.

The Persian Prison Poem: Sovereignty and the Political Imagination (2021)

Kayvan Tahmasebian is a researcher in comparative literary theory and criticism. He is the co-editor (with Rebecca Ruth Gould) of The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism (2020).

Discussant

Samuel Hodgkin is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. He has published on the modern verse, theater, and criticism of Iran, Turkey, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. He is a co-organizer of the “Cultures of World Socialism” working group, and his articles have appeared in Iranian Studies and other venues.