3 Questions with Siavash Saadlou
Siavash Saadlou is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer and literary translator whose work has been noted in the 2023 Best American Essays series. His fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Malahat Review, Plenitude Magazine, and Southeast Review, among other journals. His poems have been anthologized in Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora (2021) and Odes to Our Undoing (2022). He is the winner of the 2023 Constance Rooke Nonfiction Prize and the 55th Cole Swensen Prize for Translation.
Associate Editor Maya Chari talks with Siavash Saadlou about their work from Issue 74, out now!
How did you come to translate the work of Garous Abdolmalekian?
I guess you could say the constellations were aligned for this collaboration to come about because I didn’t know Garous personally to begin with. It just so happened that the two of us had a mutual friend—Morteza Tehrani—who put in a good word for me with Garous and recommended that I be the translator of his most recent poetry collection. Morteza was incredibly selfless and generous in introducing me to Garous because he actually happened to be Garous’s original translator of choice.
In your translator’s note, you mention Garous Abdolmalekian as particularly gifted with metaphors and turns of phrase, which can sometimes pose difficulties for you as a translator. Can you talk about how you approached translating one such phrase?
Garous’s poetic idiom is, above all, drenched in puns, and as is the case with the second poem, sometimes these puns can be extremely tricky. Regarding turns of phrase, he sometimes uses figurative language and wordplay to create a haunting image: “The hand that has grasped freedom/refuses to return to a man’s arm.”
Garous also uses a myriad of mixed metaphors in his work, and I think that’s one of the several places where his talent shines through. This is especially true of the first poem, where he combines military lingo with the common parlance. “We load and unload death” is a case in point. Or think of this sequence of lines: “And the one who asks/for water from behind bars/is planning to swallow his own tooth.”
The second example alludes to a prisoner who, instead of swallowing a pill with their glass of water, must swallow their own tooth because of having endured physical torture.
Is there anything you’d like to share about your translation of these poems that we don’t know?
I spent three months translating and editing The Middle East: A Trilogy – War, Love, Solitude, and I’m so glad that despite the linguistic and formal challenges it came with, I stuck to my MO which is all about an organic process that involves improvisation and free association as opposed to relying heavily on a thesaurus.