Zia Torabi
with Tim Kahl reading in English
Monday, August 24, 2015 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street
Host: Tim Kahl
Ziaeddin (Zia) Torabi is one of Iran’s most well known poets and is the winner of the 2010 Iran Annual Book Prize, the nation’s top honor for writing, for his poetry collection Face to Face with Dreams. In this collection (translated by Parisa Samadi) he employs blank verse (whereas he previously employed free verse) to pursue themes of the human and the social. He treats the historical and mythological in ways that reflect his personal concerns, and he does this by employing a deeply human surrealism. Torabi has published more than thirty volumes, including ten full-length books of poetry like Anxiety Beyond the Glass Walls, Thirsty Throat, Blue Eternity, From the Names Engraved in Stone, and From the Scars of Eyes and Mirrors. He has published other volumes in different areas, including volumes of reviews, and translation. His books of criticism include A Different Nima [Nima Yooshij], A Different Forough [Forough Farrokhzad], A Different Sohrab [Sohrab Sepehri] and About Poetry. Born in 1944 in Zanjan, Iran, Torabi went on to earn a BA in English Language and Literature from Isfahan University and an MA in Linguistics from Tehran University. He was the head of the Tehran Municipal Literary Center and taught literature at the Tehran University of Science and Technology for a decade. He currently lives in the Sacramento, CA area.
Like This
It is the fault of these horses that gallop in the darkness of winter
and disturb the sleep of madmen
who, when they wake, rattle their chains
shake the city
and disturb the calmness of my dreams
It is the fault of these wolves that chase the horses
and scare them, making them gallop in the darkness of winter
and disturb the sleep of madmen
who, when they wake, rattle their chains
shake the city
and disturb the calmness of my dreams
No, no, no
It is not the fault of wolves, the fault of horses, not he fault of
madmen
It is my fault as I have drawn the curtain straight from the top to the
bottom on the summer noon and have slept
to summon the calmness of my dreams
And the earthquake is in my dreams
which happens
like this moment
