The Weight of Certain News

The work of acclaimed Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian, finally available in English in Lean Against This Late Hour (Penguin, 2020), grants a window into a generation shaped by decades of pointless war. It also introduces American audiences to a voice they might almost recognize as one of their own: a seeker hoping to strike a balance between his longing for transcendence and the grim, violent realities of his everyday life. Translated by Ahmad Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey, Lean Against This Late Hour collects work from six of Abdolmalekian’s published collections, an impressive output for a poet his age. Despite being relatively short for a selected poems—half of its 133 pages are taken up by the original Persian poems en face—the book nevertheless feels substantial, if also often frustrating.

Born at the beginning of the 1980s, a watershed decade for Iran, Abdolmalekian was shaped by the tumultuous era he witnessed only as a child; years when waves of arrests, expulsions, and mass executions served as subplots to the Iran–Iraq conflict (1980–1988), a war of attrition that cost a million and a half lives. It’s fitting, perhaps, that Lean Against This Late Hour begins with a poem entitled “Border,” likely a nod to the fact that after eight years of devastating attacks and counteroffensives, the contested border between Iran and Iraq never shifted an inch.

“Now the tanks have crossed the trenches into our bedsheets / and one by one they enter my dream,” Abdolmalekian writes, unable to escape armed conflict even within his own bedroom, where his wife reads aloud a poem about war. Alert to the often contradictory emotions stirred by the smallest moments, Abdolmalekian finds some humor in the situation—“the last thing I need is for the tanks / to advance into my bed”—before succumbing to the obvious, namely that “bullets have made numerous holes / in my dreams.”

Part of what makes Abdolmalekian’s work so compelling is how he sustains a mood for the duration of a poem. The opening of “I Need to Acknowledge” exemplifies his dramatic abilities: “The weight of certain news / on the phone / makes the receiver heavier // makes it fall from my hands // the pointless weight of certain things.” The poem then focuses on his father, “who after years / has yet to take my brother's corpse / off his shoulders / and place him in the ground.” However, the seemingly confessional elements of Abdolmalekian’s work are rarely straightforward. His lyrics of loss, including “I Need to Acknowledge,” do not contain enough autobiographical information to confirm he’s describing himself, or his family, but rather, they give the impression of being a public address to everyone’s father, brother, sister, or mother.

Despite the weightiness of this subject matter, Abdolmalekian’s speakers remain steely yet casual, striking the perfect balance for political poems, for which Abdolmalekian, like many contemporary Iranian poets, lacks no inspiration. “Poem for Stillness” is worth quoting as an example:

He stirs his tea with a gun barrel
He solves the puzzle with a gun barrel
He scratches his thoughts with a gun barrel
 
And sometimes
he sits facing himself
and pulls bullet-memories
out of his brain
 
He’s fought in many wars
but is no match for his own despair
 
These white pills
have left him so colorless
his shadow must stand up
to fetch him water
 
We ought to accept
that no soldier
has ever returned
from war
alive

Overall, most of Abdolmalekian’s poems are not forthrightly political, as he regularly slips in meditations on the natural, or the eternal, as evidenced by these lines from “Passage”: “When the police place their hands on my chest / or when I sit behind bars / I’m not bothered … // Just like / a riverbed / cutting through a dam / unclear / if it is leaving / or returning.” Or these lines from “Long Exposure V”: “Forget about the machine gun / about death // and consider the saga of a bee / humming over minefields / in pursuit of a flower.”

While poets from non-Western cultures ruled by repressive regimes are typically analyzed from a sociopolitical perspective, Abdolmalekian is, above all, a poet of love, and his penchant for synthesizing lyricism with social commitment recalls the work of Ahmad Shamlou (1925–2000), perhaps the most famous male Iranian poet of the late 20th century. “The one who says ‘I love you’ / is a sad soloist / having lost his song” one of Shamlou’s poems begins, connecting him to a tradition of unabashedly direct and erotic verse that is a hallmark of the Iranian canon. Iranian poets have historically walked the tightrope between romantic and divine love (Hafez and Rumi are classic examples), where the intensity felt for one’s beloved isn’t merely proof of a higher plane of existence but constitutes a path to metaphysical wholeness. This union of the amorous and the spiritual—and/or the political—is especially evident in Abdolmalekian’s shorter poems, such as “Pattern,” one of my favorites in the collection: “Your dress waving in the wind. / This / is the only flag I love.” The speaker’s palpable lust is heightened and galvanized when injected with such a passionate call to cosmopolitanism. What are flags worth, the poet appears to ask, compared to a dress worn by one’s beloved—a question that positions nationalism as an enemy of love, a sentiment that knows no borders. Abdolmalekian achieves such richness in only 13 words.

Lean Against This Late Hour is a page-turner, which is remarkable given there are no plots to follow, nor any thematically connected poems, simply lyrics that arise out of largely quotidian situations. “One-Way Ticket,” for instance, is prompted by the discovery of a bunch of one-way train tickets inside the speaker’s pocket. At first, the poem focuses on the lyricism inspired by this unexpected find: “Oh, all the one-way tickets! / I haven’t found anything / more sorrowful than you / in the pockets of the world.” But then it concludes with this arresting image: “—You pound the windowpanes of this train to no avail. / In vain you hurl your voice to the other side of the window. / We / are the actors in a silent film.”

Abdolmalekian can be surreal, too, despite the everyday scenarios of his poems. “Meeting,” about an awkward rendezvous with a lover after a separation of several years, drops anchor on this image: “A whale dying in agony on the beach / is not there to meet anyone.” “Bricks,” which begins with the pronouncement that lies are a wall made of bricks we lay down in rows every morning, ends: “The water has risen to my neck / The bricks have risen to my neck / The water passing my lips now / The water rising and rising … // But I will not die / I will become a fish.” More often than not, Abdolmalekian’s excursions into the natural world are dark: “Flying / was no longer the bird’s wish // It plucked its feathers out / one by one, / in order to lie bald upon this pillow, / in order to slip into a different dream” (“Pattern VI”). Many of his poems find the speaker torn between a spiritual thirst for meaning and a desire for contentedness—only to return “to the faded colors of the world” with its cold philosophical realizations, among which, “[a] road will not lead to a dream / nor a dream to a road” (“The Bird of Reconciliation”).

Then there’s the matter of death. Abdolmalekian’s concern with the ultimate unknown, that “strange music” as he calls it, haunts many of his poems. In “Ant,” the speaker is so frustrated with a loved one’s mournful withdrawal from life—or is the poem’s you a stand-in for the author himself?—that the speaker’s dreams “contain an image” that frightens him:

an image of a rope hung from the ceiling
a man hanged by the rope
with his back to me
and only I know, I
who am terrified to turn him around.

Abdolmalekian’s ruminations on the great equalizer arguably find their fullest and most memorable fulfillment in “Game,” the collection’s penultimate poem, in which existential dread overlays a tender moment of the author pushing his son on a swing:

You change the game
and hang yourself from the rope
you swung on
years ago.
 
We are the repetitions
of the pieces
of each other
 
like you, my son, on this swing
as I who swing you
to forget the rope.

Beyond the somberness, one also sees a proverb-infused inscrutability, as in “Pattern III”: “A large far sea / or a small puddle. / It makes no difference. // When you are translucent, / the sky appears in you.” An aching for human warmth and kindness electrifies the book, and at his fabulist best, as in “Pattern IV,” Abdolmalekian produces vignettes that achieve a kind of timelessness:

Staring at the tiny planet
God calculated again.
There was no space for a continuous forest
no space for an infinite sea
no matter how endless the search.
 
And so the invention of your eyes.

It is precisely because Abdolmalekian’s work is so engaging that the innumerable flaws of the translations produced by Nadalizadeh, an Iranian doctoral student, and Novey, an American writer and translator, give pause for concern. Consider the concluding section of the second stanza of “Doubts and a Hesitation”:

For years we’ve been living underground
and perhaps a day
in my seventies I’ll be born
and feel that death
is a shirt we all come to put on,
whose buttons we can either fasten
or leave undone …
A man may roll up his sleeves
or he might …

The final two lines reveal a critical error: “A man may roll up his sleeves / or he might…” The couplet—and any hope for meaning—are left to dangle in those final ellipses. A man may roll up his sleeves, or what? In fact, as Abdolmalekian’s original reveals, the final five lines of this stanza gyrate around the shirt as a stand-in for death, a shirt whose buttons one can “either fasten / or leave undone” (why not simply “unfasten”?), or whose sleeves one may roll up or not. There is no “man” present in Abdolmalekian’s original lines at all, and the sleeves are clearly attached to the shirt, quite literally. The translators also needlessly masculinize a noun (“man”) since Persian is a gender-neutral language, as pointed out by the Persianists consulted for this review.

Many of the translations in Lean Against This Late Hour suffer from similarly crucial mistakes. Moreover, indentations appear where they shouldn’t, but don’t appear where they should, while stanzaic structures are inexplicably altered. The latter is all the stranger since even non-Persian speakers can verify this by checking against the original poems printed on the left. None of this falls under the purview of stylistic variations or liberties. While collaborative translations that pair a senior Western writer with a junior non-Western partner are increasingly fashionable, and can work on creative and ethical levels, the failures of the Nadalizadeh-Novey pairing further underscore the fact that there are plenty of Iranian American writers fluent in both languages who could have produced superior work.

The Penguin Poets series hails Lean Against This Late Hour as a “landmark” because, they proudly exclaim, it is the “first collection by a Middle Eastern poet” that they’ve ever published—in 2020! As such, what should have been an occasion for celebration instead proves that Middle Eastern literature in the West is still taken for granted.

Whatever its shortcomings, Lean Against This Late Hour nonetheless has its pleasures, and even faulty translations can’t fully diminish the strength of Abdolmalekian’s voice. One hopes that the publication of this volume will lead to more of his work in translation. Abdolmalekian’s tribe of English-speaking admirers is only likely to grow over the coming years.