Dying in a Mother Tongue

Roja Chamankar has published nine volumes of poetry in Persian, cowritten three books for children, and translated a collection of poems by Henri Meschonic from French into Persian. Her works have been translated into half a dozen languages, and she has won a number of national and international awards for her poetry, including the prestigious Nikos Gatsos Prize.Blake Atwood is an assistant professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic.

There is a call in the culture of poetry at this contemporary moment for poetry that identifies the margin, names the margin, and works through our cultural ambivalence to margins. Dying in a Mother Tongue points at one way to do this—not by the all too common trope of boundless suffering but rather its obverse—a self which sees the limits of its suffering, the borders, political and emotional which mark it, and turns towards it. (Michigan Quarterly Review) The richness of Roja Chamankar's poetry lies in its contractions: familiar domestic scenes are cut with violent surrealism; love veers between tender and destructive; nature's enduring beauty clashes with urban war wounds and mythology's optimism gives way to modern disillusionment...The text pulls me in by constructing intimate scenes in a cramped urban apartment only to push me away with an unfamiliar place name or a surprising usage of my own language. This constant push and pull between closeness and distance is a hallmark of good translation. (Kenyon Review)