MELC Assistant Professor Aria Fani's co-translations to the modernist Iranian poet, Bijan Jalali, was published earlier this month by Asemana, an independent press in Toronto. The cover of the book is illustrated by MELC major Amelia Ossorio. The book is now available on Amazon for purchase.
Shape of Extinction brings together 59 short poems by Jalali, the first book-length selection of his meditative yet quietly radical approach to poetry. A critical introduction situates Jalali’s work within the broader currents of modern Persian poetry and politics. With bilingual Persian-English texts presented in parallel, this volume invites readers—both familiar and new—to engage with Jalali’s poetic vision.
Domenico Ingenito, associate professor of classical Persian literature, writes, "Jalali’s poetry unfolds in a space of numb survival, where language no longer marks the struggle between being and non-being but merely records the trace of an already-erased self. His verses resist the excess of meaning, embodying ‘the silence of poetry’ itself. In these translations, Aria Fani and Adeeba Shahid Talukder navigate the ‘disarming simplicity’ of Jalali’s work, rendering it with ‘literal closeness’ and ‘poetic independence.’ The result is an act of ‘transparent opacity,’ a translation that is both ‘a political event and an agent of transformation.’ Here, poetry begins ‘where all things end.’"