High Tide of the Eyes

by Bijan Elahi, Rebecca Ruth Gould (translator), کیوان طهماسبیان (translator)

Bijan Elahi (1945–2010) was a poet, a prolific translator of T. S. Eliot, Rimbaud, Michaux, Hölderlin, and the founder of Other Poetry, the leading avant-garde movement within Persian modernism. This book translates his most important poems, as gathered in Vision (2014) and Youths (2015), into English for the first time. Author website: bijanelahi.hcommons.org.

Elahi’s poetics is distinguished by its diversity of styles and registers. Traversing the borders of ambiguity and clarity, speech and writing, familiarity and foreignness, in Elahi’s work the nuances of the Persian language are registered in ways that are without precedent in Persian poetry. To the translators, the process of creating these translations was like a musha’ira, a Persian tradition of poetic recitation in which one poet completes the other’s poem. The translation process exiled us from our native language and taught us to give voice to Elahi’s poetics in a language it was never intended to inhabit.

Publisher website:
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Genres: Poetry

106 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2019

About the author

بیژن الهی (زادهٔ تیر ۱۳۲۴ – درگذشتهٔ ۱۰ آذر ۱۳۸۹ در تهران) شاعر، مترجم و نقاش ایرانی بود.
الهی در ابتدای دههٔ ۴۰، با حضور در محافل شعری و چاپ اشعاری در مجلهٔ جزوهٔ شعر، که اسماعیل نوری‌علاء در قطع دفتر مشق مدرسه درمی‌آورد و به قولی پیشتازترین صحنه شعر آن دوره بود، به تبیین فضاهای شعری خود دست یازید. تأثیر شعر الهی بر شاعران این جزوه، را می توان نظیر همان تأثیر غیرمحسوسی دانست که ازرا پاوند بر جُنگ سوررئالیست‌ها داشت.
الهی به دلایل نامعلوم، پس از بازگشت از سفر، دایرهٔ رفاقت‌های گروهی و حضور در مجامع ادبی را ترک کرد.
بیژن الهی مدتی همسر غزاله علیزاده، نویسنده، و مدتی همسر ژاله کاظمی بود

او در عصر سه‌شنبه ۱۰ آذر ۱۳۸۹ در ۶۵ سالگی در تهران بر اثر عارضه قلبی درگذشت

Bijan Elahi was the only child born into the affluent family of ʿAli Moḥammad and Qodsi Elahi. He abandoned his secondary education at Alborz College, during his senior year and didn’t return to a formal educational setting again. While in high school he also attended the painting classes of Javād Ḥamidi (1919-2002), and became familiarized with the modern art movement in vogue in the West. With Ḥamidi’s encouragement, he submitted several of his paintings to a biennale in France where two of them were published in the booklet of the biennale (Asadi Kiāras, 2013, pp.11-12). Although his involvement with the canvas came soon to an end, it had a direct impact on his aesthetics as a poet (Aṣlāni, p. 133)

Elahi married the novelist Ghazaleh Alizadeh, in 1969 (Figure 3). The marriage, which did not last long, provided Elahi his only child, a daughter, Salmeh, born in 1971. He married Žāleh Kāẓemi, a television producer and news anchor in 1988. The marriage ended in divorce in 2000.

In the last three decades of his life, Elahi increasingly immersed himself in Sufism, and took a leave from all literary circles, choosing a life of solitude into which only a few close friends were invited. He died on 1 December 2010 of heart failure. In accordance to his final wishes, he was buried in a small village near Marzan Ābād, in northern Iran, during which, according to Elahi’s will no recording devices were to be allowed. Masʿoud Kimiāʾi, the noted director, and Elahi’s life long friend who had intended to document the burial, deferred to Elahi’s wishes. Šamim Bahār, art critic, storywriter and Elahi’s colleague in Fifty-one Publications (Entešārāt-e Panjāh o yek), was appointed by Elahi as his executor to oversee the publication of his manuscripts