Water’s Footfall by Sohrab Sepehri (review)

colorado review 168 Water’s Footfall, by Sohrab Sepehri translated by Kazim Ali with Mohammad Jafar Mahallati Omnidawn, 2011 reviewed by Roger Sedarat The modest though significant recent influx of translations in American publishing, often by smaller presses, continues to introduce English readers to established poets from various literary traditions who have gone unrecognized throughout most of the world. Kazim Ali’s rendering of the Persian poet Sohrab Sepehri’s long lyrical poem Water’s Footfall, translated with a scholar of Islamic studies and Sufi poetry, offers fidelity to both the letter and the spirit of an important modern book of verse from Iran that warrants reading. Sohrab Sepehri (1928–1980), from Kashan, Iran, authored six collections during his lifetime, with three additional collections published posthumously. This book, his fourth, was written in the 1960s, after he had already made much progress toward developing his distinct poetic voice. A painter by training , he remains well known among Iranians for his visual art in addition to his poetry. (In 2009–2010, the Tehran Museum of Modern Art featured a retrospective of his work.) Like other talented poets who paint, especially those from the Far East, such as Buson and Mi Fu, he imbues his writing with rich visual imagery from nature. Such comparisons to Japanese and Chinese poet-artists prove particularly apt for Sepehri, who retains throughout his writing a keen cosmopolitan interest in the literatures of Asia as well as those of Europe. Consider for example the simple, direct descriptions in the following passage. With editing and different line breaks, this could become haiku: The florist is having a fire-sale. A poet hangs a rope-swing between two jasmine trees. A schoolboy pelting stones at the wall. A child spitting apricot pits on his father’s prayer rug, a goat drinks long from a map of the Caspian. A clothesline—bra flapping, impatient in the wind. An especially modern reason for a poet to read poetry outside of his or her traditional domain is to absorb various influences 169 Book Notes in one’s own writing, heeding Ezra Pound’s twentieth-century axiom to “make it new.” Sepehri offers a great example as to how poets from traditions outside of the better-known westerners like Pound and Eliot appropriated styles and themes in their work. In the lines above, active, transitory nature, delivered with accessible diction, gets metaphorically mapped onto the Caspian Sea, as the child offers defiant commentary on parental authority metonymically linked to an Islamic prayer rug. Such conflation of a transnatural sensibility, deriving in part from readings outside Persian verse and juxtaposed with distinct cultural allusions to geography and religion, begins to inform this poet’s modernist moves. Modernism itself means something quite different in other cultures, and this translation of Sepehri’s verse begins to demonstrate an important lesson in Iranian poetics of the last century. Breaking from meter and rhyme in Europe and America quickly became a given, as western poets sought further and much more radical experimentation, whereas for Persian poets like Sohrab Sepehri, Nima Youshij, and Forough Farrokhzad, who come from a two-thousand-year tradition defined by the closed form of the ghazal, this violation itself very much remained the revolution . Of course, these individuals rendered their verse distinct through various new thematic as well as stylistic choices. While at first glance a long poem like Water’s Footfall appears conservative relative to poems written by Robert Lowell or E. E. Cummings in America during the 1960s, a closer reading of this accessible book on its own, Persian terms, reveals a significantly different modernist perspective. A series of declarative statements, often linked by anaphora, reports upon the poet’s experience in nature. Sufism, which derives from Islam yet makes, like Emerson in the American romantic tradition, a religion of nature, informs the entire twentythree -page poem. (The small book places, on each facing page, the Persian translation, which, even for those unable to read in the language, shows how close to the form the translators remain .) In addition to ordering verse by syntax and idea instead of by meter and rhyme, Sepehri avoids the dominant Persian tendency toward didacticism, allowing the...