The Art of Stepping Through Time: Selected Poems of H.E. Sayeh
AUTHOR
H.E. Sayeh
TRANSLATORS
Chad Sweeney and Mojdeh Marashi
This compelling selection is the first to span fifty years of H.E. Sayeh's bearing witness to a turbulent Iranian century, especially the national crises which followed the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the CIA-led coup d'état of 1953. Sayeh shows tremendous range, from the inward, spare lyric to bardic incantations that roll off the tongue and resonate with the voice of the whole nation, blending traditional Persian verse in the spirit of Rumi and Hafez with issues of contemporary Iranian society. Chad Sweeney and Mojdeh Marashi have delivered exquisite translations of this important Iranian poet.
Reviews
No reviews available yet.
Mojdeh Marashi is a writer, designer, social innovator, and entrepreneur. Her writing is deeply influenced by the ancient and modern history of Iran. Mojdeh’s stories merge the world of magical realism in Persian literature that she grew up reading, the reality of the world she lives in today, and the utopia she dreams about.
Mojdeh was born in Tehran, Iran where she had an amazing childhood. She moved to the U.S. in 1977 and has been based in the San Francisco Bay Area since. She holds an MA in Interdisciplinary Arts as well an MA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She lives in Palo Alto, California.
Chad Sweeney is a poet and translator. He is the author of six books of poetry, Little Million Doors (Nightboat Books, winner of Nightboat Prize, 2019), Parable of Hide and Seek (Alice James Books), Arranging the Blaze (Anhinga Press), White Martini of the Apocalypse (Marick Press), Wolf’s Milk:the Lost Notebooks of Juan Sweeney (Forklift Books, bilingual Spanish/English) and An Architecture (BlazeVOX Books), and two books of translation, The Art of Stepping Through Time, the selected poems of Iranian dissident poet, H.E. Sayeh (White Pine Press, with Mojdeh Marashi) and Pablo Neruda’s final book, The Call to Destroy Nixon and to Advance the Chilean Revolution (Marick Press, 2019).
Sweeney’s poems have been included in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Verse Daily, American Poetry Review, New American Writing, and the Writer's Almanac. He is the editor of the anthology, Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds: Teaching Artists of WritersCorps in Poetry and Prose, and Iroquois elder Maurice Kenny’s posthumous collection of poetry and prose: Monahsetah, Resistance, and Other Markings on Turtle’s Back. Chad Sweeney holds an MFA from San Francisco State University and a PhD from Western Michigan University. He is an Associate Professor of English/ reative Writing at California State University San Bernardino and lives in southern California with his partner, Jennifer Kochanek Sweeney, and their two children.
Amir Hushang Ebtehaj, also known by his pen name H. E. Sayeh, was an Iranian poet of the 20th century, whose life and work spans many of Iran's political, cultural and literary upheavals