The SOF/Heyman will present the spring events for Heyman Center Fellow Mana Kia's series, "Against the Grain: Gender and the Fraught Politics of Translation in Persophone Worlds." The spring series's theme is "In Their Own Words: Iranian Lives and the Personal Essay."

You can register for the events by clicking here and here.

Spring: In Their Own Words: Iranian Lives and the Personal Essay

Our two spring events focus on a genre newly flourishing in Iran over the past decade, the personal essay, many of whose authors are women. Both events will be held with authors of this form living and working in Iran and with Salar Abdoh, who has translated their works (and this form more broadly) into English for over a decade. The first event would focus on the work of one of the pioneers of this form, the well-known biographer, essayist, and journalist Habibe Jafarian. Together with Abdoh, and in conversation with Professor Mana Kia, they will discuss working as a professional woman writer and of translating such experiences into English. The second event would feature a panel of two other subsequent nonfiction writers to show the range of directions this genre has taken in Iran. As professional writers, filmmakers, and journalists, they offer views of life in Iran that are far less known to Anglophone readers. Abdoh’s participation would allow a discussion not only of the development of the form and what it allows – the life worlds expressed by this genre – but also the politics of translation.

March 7, 2025
Not Your Usual Resistance
Habibe Jafarian and the translator of her work, Salar Abdoh, will discuss the advent of the contemporary personal essay form in Iran, its relation to the larger direction of her work as an editor and biographer, and the politics of its translation.
Register here.

April 11, 2025
Lived in Real Time
This event will focus on two writers, Sara Mokhavat and Vali Khalili, who have arrived at the personal essay form via different avenues. Together these writers and their translator, Salar Abdoh, will discuss the arc of their various careers as they unfold in real time inside Iran.
Register here.

About the Series

The English language has no formal history in the Persophone countries of West and Central Asia. But British and American involvement, from before the Cold War to the War on Terror to today’s hair trigger tensions, have created fraught political relationships against which Anglophone reading publics receive the translated work of such writers (Iranian, Afghan, Tajik) and their English-language diasporic counterparts. Some works (and their authors) that embrace particular ideological stances enjoy international acclaim according to wider foreign policy exigencies of Euro-American countries. However, there have been critiques (from Said’s Orientalism onward) of the kinds of discourses and politics of representation of which these works partake almost as long as this politically fueled patronage has existed. The events in this series bring those writing in old and new genres to discuss lesser-known views into the life worlds and expressive practices of writers from Persophone West and Central Asia their works offer.

Photo is by Hengameh Golestan