Emerson in Iran , livre ebook

State University of New York Press - Roger Sedarat

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

143 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Emerson in Iran is the first full-length study of Persian influence in the work of the seminal American poet, philosopher, and translator, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Extending the current trend in transnational studies back to the figural origins of both the United States and Iran, Roger Sedarat's insightful comparative readings of Platonism and Sufi mysticism reveal how Emerson managed to reconcile through verse two countries so seemingly different in religion and philosophy. By tracking various rhetorical strategies through a close interrogation of Emerson's own writings on language and literary appropriation, Sedarat exposes the development of a latent but considerable translation theory in the American literary tradition. He further shows how generative Persian poetry becomes during Emerson's nineteenth century, and how such formative effects continue to influence contemporary American poetry and verse translation.
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. From Plato to Persia: Emerson’s Transnational Origins

2. Transparent Eyeball / Persian Mirror: The Renewal of American Vision

3. Imitation as Suicide: Islamic Fatalism and the Paradox of Self-Reliance

4. The Subversion of Equivalence: Emerson’s Translation Theory in Praxis

5. Americanizing Rumi and Hafez: The Return of Emerson’s Verse Translation

6. The Other Side of the Persian Mirror: Emerson’s Gaze as Necessary Corrective

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

États-Unis

United States of America

USA

Informations

Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	31 mai 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438474878
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1648€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Emerson in Iran
Emerson in Iran
The American Appropriation of Persian Poetry
Roger Sedarat
Credit for Figure 1 : Willis Barnstone, Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice . Yale UP, 1995, p. 24.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2019 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sedarat, Roger, 1971– author.
Title: Emerson in Iran : the American appropriation of Persian poetry / Roger Sedarat.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018035999 | ISBN 9781438474854 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438474878 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803–1882—Knowledge—Persian literature. | American poetry—Persian influences. | American poetry—19th century—History and criticism. | Persian literature—Influence.
Classification: LCC PS1642.P47 S43 2019 | DDC 814/.3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018035999
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my two countries
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 From Plato to Persia: Emerson’s Transnational Origins
Chapter 2 Transparent Eyeball / Persian Mirror: The Renewal of American Vision
Chapter 3 Imitation as Suicide: Islamic Fatalism and the Paradox of Self-Reliance
Chapter 4 The Subversion of Equivalence: Emerson’s Translation Theory in Praxis
Chapter 5 Americanizing Rumi and Hafez: The Return of Emerson’s Verse Translation
Chapter 6 The Other Side of the Persian Mirror: Emerson’s Gaze as Necessary Corrective
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
A few mentors early in my academic career instilled in me a lifelong passion for Emerson’s writing. More than simply passing down knowledge, the late Americanist Jesper Rosenmeier, along with my former professor and recently retired colleague Harold Schechter, have modeled an especially Emersonian individuality in their lives as well as in their scholarship. I would further include for much the same reason George Held and the late Mario D’Avanzo. Elizabeth Ammons also proved uniquely supportive by encouraging me to bring my Persian background to American literature and culture long before the recent trend in transnational studies. Persis Karim, who significantly positioned Iranian-American studies deeper into the United States through the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, has greatly helped make this topic relevant. Much like Emerson, Willis Barnstone personally showed me the power of integrating a more inclusive poetic approach to my writing about literary theory and translation, as well as to comparative scholarship, at a time when academia can seem too regressively specialized for its own good. Through his insistence upon my attempting to creatively engage literary theory, as opposed to merely passively apply it to texts, Lee Edelman warrants special mention here as well. The influence of these teachers upon this project and others in formation remains invaluable.
Current Emerson scholars David LaRocca and Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso offered much-needed tangible support of my topic. Their acceptance of a chapter concerned with Emerson’s generalized influence from the broader Middle East for A Power to Translate the World: New Essays on Emerson and International Culture motivated me to eventually pursue this more specific focus on Iran. The groundbreaking comparative offerings from my fellow contributors to this collection provided a multitude of interdisciplinary approaches to Emerson studies with critical methodologies that led me to radically conceptualize my own original readings in relation to the Persian tradition. David LaRocca, Dartmouth College/UPNE editor Richard Pult, and Donald Pease—editor of the transnational series that published this collection of essays—gave me helpful notes toward a much-improved revision of this manuscript. Farhang Jahanpour’s extensive critique of an early version of my third chapter led to important revisions and redirections. I also want to make special mention of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society, which granted me a 2018 subvention award in support of this book’s publication. That specialists in Emerson studies have found my scholarship worthy of such distinction validates all of the hard work as well as the many critical risks taken throughout the following chapters.
My esteemed colleagues at Queens College have offered comparable critical feedback, along with prodigious encouragement. Duncan Faherty and Annmarie Drury especially extended themselves on behalf of this book. The former spent considerable time with my proposal and compelled me to move forward with my topic, while the latter as a fellow translator-poet-scholar often impressed upon me the value of interrogating the generative role of translation in a nation’s poetics. Thanks to our many discussions and my early reading of her scholarship, my study to some extent has become a kind of American counterpart to her groundbreaking, Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry . The following colleagues, each in their own ways, have also shared their insightful academic work as well as their time and support: Glenn Burger, Steve Kruger, Amy Wan, Richard McCoy, Ryan Black, Andrea Walkden, Talia Schaffer, Kevin Ferguson, Jason Tougaw, Bill Orchard, Gloria Fisk, Miles Grier, Siân Silyn Roberts, Karen Weingarten, Jeff Cassvan, Wayne Moreland, Fred Buell, Christopher Williams, Maaza Mengiste, John Weir, Kimiko Hahn, Nicole Cooley, Ammiel Alcalay, Tom Frosch, and David Richter. I include here as well President Félix Matos Rodríguez and Acting Provost William McClure, administrators who generously support publication by professors at a relatively teaching-intensive institution. Though currently not at my college, former visiting professor Susan Bernofsky’s willingness to provide me with a rough trot of an almost indecipherable Sa’di translation into early nineteenth-century German for this study helped provoke an especially illuminating insight into Emerson’s strategic adulterations through English translation.
Friends outside academia on a personal level have given the most time and attention to this project. My best and far longest friend Paul Schneider almost daily reminds me of Emerson’s greatest lessons in integrity, aspiration, and intellectual curiosity. Other invaluable friends include Melaine Oster, K Bradford, Steve Sussmann, Gene Pitts, Jesse Garza, Michael Haas, Mark Snow, Dewar MacLeod, Francis Taplin, Joe Regal, Benjamin Selesnick, Justin Morris, Robert Babboni, Elizabeth Cahill, John Younger, Jonathan Fink, Gregg Popovich, Wes and Rebecca Jones, Nicky and Sara Nodjoumi, Rouhollah Zarei, Till Schauder, James Cox, and Ron Reich.
Family of course even more intimately extends such support. My dear sister Mary Sedarat and her husband William Brick embody the best qualities of the Persian family tradition in the displaced and rather fragmented culture of America’s East Coast where we live. My mother Nancy Sedarat, arguably the best teacher I have known, instilled in me a lifelong love of learning as well as the needed discipline to pursue it. Her origins in the American Midwest, combined with those of my late Persian father, Dr. Nassir (Robert) Sedarat from Shiraz, Iran—the “land of the poets”—afforded me perhaps the best personal background for such a comparative interrogation. Growing up memorizing the lines of Hafez, my father’s embrace of American literature and culture as an immigrant further prepared me for this work. Significantly, he gave me my first copy of Emerson’s collected essays, with his favorite sentences underlined, when I was twelve years old. My Iranian sister-in-law Maria Afsharian and her husband Amir Emdad, along with his late father Hassan Emdad—the estimable scholar of Persian poetry whose early comments to me on Emerson and Hafez first inspired the idea of this book—have also provided much needed advice, encouragement, and love.
Finally, my Iranian-American wife Janette Afsharian, who in the Sufi mystic tradition more than qualifies for the role of the beloved as articulated in this study, has patiently listened to seemingly endless turns, discoveries, and frustrations throughout the process of writing this book. My gratitude for her attention and compassion, often mirrored by our sons Milo and Theo, is best expressed in the lines of Hafez and Sa’di to which Emerson found himself so passionately attracted.
Introduction
Emerson
Closing the heavy volume of Montaigne,
The tall New Englander goes out
Into an evening which exalts the fields.
It is a pleasure worth no less than reading.
He walks toward the final sloping of the sun,
Toward the landscape’s gilded edge;
He moves through darkening fields as he moves now
Through the memory of the one who writes this down.
He thinks: I have read the essential books
And written others which oblivion
Will not efface. I have been allowed
That which is given mortal man to know.
The whole continent knows my name.
I have not lived. I want to be someone else.
—Borges (189)
The assumption in Borges’s poem that Ralph Waldo Emerson, established as a seminal figure in American literature, longs to become “someone else” might seem little more than a product of the Argentinian writer’s wild imagination. However, upon closer reflection Borges introduces a problem at the crux of Emerson’s self-identification. The same man