By Marc Chalufour

Blind Owl was first published in 1936 as a handwritten manuscript. Just 50 copies were produced—but many versions have followed. The novella, by Iranian writer Sadeq Hedayat, has been banned, censored—and celebrated.

The story, told in the first person by an opium-fueled narrator, blurs reality and hallucination. He talks of his trade—repeatedly painting the same scene onto cheap pen cases—and recounts the various ways he has witnessed and interacted with the old man and young woman in the image. Is it real? Or all in his mind? And when he realizes there’s a dead body in his apartment that he must dispose of, we’re left wondering if he’s committed a gruesome crime. Little is obvious.

Blind Owl is filled with disturbing imagery—drugs, violent sex, and death all factor into the narrator’s tale, and explain some of the controversy that has surrounded it. The book is also now hailed as a classic of Persian literature, and Hedayat—a prolific writer until his death by suicide at 48 years old—draws comparisons to Franz Kafka and Edgar Allan Poe. Now, English speakers can read the story in a new translation by Sassan Tabatabai, a master lecturer in world languages and literatures and in the core curriculum, and coordinator of the Persian language program.

The new translation by Tabatabai (CAS’88, GRS’94, UNI’00) was published by Penguin Classics in April 2022.

Tabatabai spoke with arts&sciences about Blind Owl controversial history and the challenges and rewards of translating from Persian to English.

arts&sciences: What’s your history with Blind Owl—and what makes it a classic?

Sassan Tabatabai: It breaks with the classical Persian tradition. It’s a modern novel that goes against the grain of 1,000 years of Persian literature. By giving the reader access into the deranged mind of the narrator, Hedayat turns some of the staple images of classical Persian literature—the wise, old dervish, the beautiful wine-bearer, the bucolic setting—on their head. It’s like looking at a very familiar scene but through a distorting mirror. That was what was particularly groundbreaking. It’s one of the greatest 20th-century novels written in Persian.

Initially, I had read it in Persian. When I started reading it in English, I realized that the voice of the narrator is completely wrong. In [D.P.] Costello’s translation from the 1950s, he had intellectualized the character. But the [original’s] tone is very conversational, and the character is quite provincial. So that was the spark behind making a new translation.

This book has a complicated history, having been censored and banned in its original Persian. What version did you work from?

I went back to the original handwritten manuscript. There are some spelling mistakes, but it’s unaltered. Any act of censorship changes what the original work was and what the original author intended—words were changed, some parts were redacted. Some of the real unsavory things were sterilized—and there are a lot of unsavory things that happen in this book.

Why are classic books often translated multiple times?

It really depends. Rumi, for example, was a 13th-century poet, and new translations keep adding new things. Sometimes there is something lacking in a translation. The old translation [of Blind Owl] really wasn’t doing justice to what this book is all about. A lot of people were having a hard time getting through the English translation, but it’s not as complicated as that translation had made it. So, sometimes, something needs to be fixed. Other times, you want multiple translations to give you deeper access into the work.

How might translators view a text differently from one era to another?

Translators are writing in the language of their time. If we read classical poetry from the 12th or 13th century and it’s translated by someone in Elizabethan times, it has that flavor to it. So the timeframe and the location make a huge difference. If I lived in England in the 1950s, chances are my translation would be very different than what it is.

What sort of decisions do you have to make as the translator? Is that more a mechanical or creative process?

I’ve been translating poetry forever, and this is my first venture into prose. It is a completely different creative process. In a way, it’s even harder than writing something from scratch. You have to adhere to the creative process, but at the same time, you’re working under strict confines. It’s like if I’m going to make a little house using blocks, I can use blocks of whatever size or shape I want. But in a translation, you’re given a very specific bag of blocks—and they are the only ones you can use. You have to be faithful to whatever it is you’re translating, but at the same time, it has to be engaging for the reader.

Is there an original voice of the writer that you’re trying to maintain? Or does it end up in your voice after translation?

I would like to think it’s both. It is the voice of the original, as I heard in my head. And that’s the voice that I want to write in English. That was actually one of the main issues with the old translation, because the voice just did not ring. The voice is very important.

How does translating a novella compare to translating poetry?

Translating prose was a breath of fresh air. It’s so much easier. Those confines you have when translating poetry are a lot stricter. And I think something that worked for me is that l was thinking as a poet—I was still thinking about the sounds of the words, if there’s assonance, and the rhythm of the lines. Translating prose was a commitment, but I didn’t have the kind of shackles on that I do when translating poetry.

Are there challenges unique to translating from Persian to English?

Persian syntax is almost the opposite of English. A typical sentence in English starts with a verb, so you know exactly what’s happening. Persian is the opposite—the verb is the last thing in the sentence. So you have to go through the whole sentence stuck in this weird limbo of not knowing what’s going on. They seem to be mirror images of each other.

Another thing is that English is one of the languages that has the most vocabulary words. Persian has very few vocabulary words, so you very often combine words to make other words. This is an example I use in class: In Persian, we don’t have a word for “ostrich.” Ostrich is “shotormorgh.” Shotor is camel and morgh is chicken. So an ostrich is a combination of a camel and a chicken.