Lean Against This Late Hour

Description

Finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation 

A vivid, “mesmerizing” (New York Times Magazine) portrait of life in the shadow of violence and loss, for readers of both English and Persian

The first selection of poems by renowned Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian to appear in English, this collection is a captivating, disorienting descent into the trauma of loss and its aftermath. In spare lines, Abdolmalekian conjures surreal, cinematic images that pan wide as deftly as they narrow into intimate focus. Time is a thread come unspooled: pain arrives before the wound, and the dead wait for sunrise.

Abdolmalekian resists definitive separations between cause and effect, life and death, or heaven and hell, and challenges our sense of what is fixed and what is unsettled and permeable. Though the speakers in these poems are witnesses to the deforming effects of grief and memory, they remain alive to curiosity, to the pleasure of companionship, and to other ways of being and seeing. Lean Against This Late Hour illuminates the images we conjure in the face of abandonment and ruin, and finds them by turns frightening, bewildering, ethereal, and defiant. “This time,” a disembodied voice commands, “send us a prophet who only listens.”Praise for Lean Against This Late Hour:

“Abdolmalekian deftly weaves together philosophical questions, memorable allegories, and immensely lyrical images with emotional honesty and depth. Yet his poetry is also entirely modern in structure and content, which is a credit to the translators, as well as to the strength and beauty of his natural tone and voice. [He] is a poet of our interconnected, transnational time—this era of citizen against government, of surveillance and mistrust, of loss, despair, and yet somehow, always: of hope and love . . . Abdolmalekian is a necessary voice in the world poetry canon.” —Asymptote 

“A major triumph not only because of the beauty and power of the language . . . but also because of the poet’s refusal to surrender subjective experience in the face of overwhelming historical circumstance . . . Abdolmalekian’s extraordinary capacity for empathy is equal to, and may be the source of, his dazzling imagination . . . Given the political tensions on the world stage and the rise in xenophobia in the United States in the past few years, the powerful voice of this extraordinary poet is perhaps more necessary now than ever.” —Michigan Quarterly Review

“Abdolmalekian’s voice resists facile autobiographical readings, despite—or perhaps because—his words often sound like expressions of real, lived experiences . . . poetic translation alongside the original text offers those who can enjoy both languages a rich reading experience.” —World Literature Today 

“One of the gifts of translation—offered so beautifully here by Idra Novey and Ahmad Nadalizadeh—is that it does not displace the original; rather, by opening the text to new readers in varying contexts, it forges additional routes for thinking about entanglements of harm and resistance.” —Claire Schwartz, Jewish Currents

“These plainspoken poems, tinted with a touch of surrealism, are deceptively simple yet affectingly resonant. Part of the pleasure of reading them is seeing the elegant Persian script mirrored on the facing pages — even if you don’t speak a word of the poet’s native language.” —Santa Barbara Independent

“Dazzling . . . explores disparate yet intertwined topics of nature, politics, and personal relationships with humor, candor, and awe. The tight verses come alive with effectively simple metaphors, viscerally stunning images, and carefully critical lyrics. In this bilingual edition . . . symmetry adds a sense of deft completion, like a silk ribbon on a carefully wrapped gift. Absolutely worth reading for poetry devotees and novices alike.” —Booklist (starred)

“Some works of art can simultaneously break and build up your heart, a marbling of devastation and hope. Lean Against This Late Hour offers such an experience. These [are] nuanced, nimble poems . . . written out of and for difficult days, but they succeed at a fundamental lift that feels natural, no sugar-spooning or sentimentality to be found. This lift is the hard-won hope found in self-awareness . . . Abdolmalekian is a major Iranian poet who should be a mainstay on bedside tables, syllabuses and award shortlists around the world.” —BookPage (starred)

“Accompanied by the Persian originals, this first English-language collection of the renowned Iranian poet’s work comprises 51 sinewy lyrics that evoke a hypnagogic state of consciousness at once ghostly and immediate . . . A lifelong witness to war and oppression in his homeland, Abdolmalekian perceives the constant presence of a dissembling, malevolent force as elemental as air, yet somehow finds glimmers of beauty and hope among the shadows . . . An impressive U.S. debut for a poet whose work invites global recognition.” —Library Journal (starred) 

“It is staggering to encounter something that feels so truly new as Garous Abdolmalekian’s Lean Against This Hour. Turning its pages for the first time I felt myself literally gasping out loud, running to read my spouse this line or that poem. Paul Klee wrote about art that wanted to be ‘impelled toward motion and not to be the motor,’ and I feel this so deeply in these crisp translations of Abdolmalekian’s lively lyrics, that irreducible complexity of thinking—about growth, time, desire, trauma—rendered as vectors with staggering precision and disarming clarity: ‘Forest, you are a single tree fleeing the earth a thousand ways.’” —Kaveh Akbar, author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“This book announces to the English-speaking world that there are, indeed, still great poets in our day and age. There is still the possibility for the lyric voice to assume something larger, to give shape and form to a myths and dreams that speak out of devastation. In these spare but beautiful, and unforgettably urgent lyrics, the war and memory are everywhere; they are the magnetic field that charges the pages of exquisite precision. Abdolmalekian is a poet who never gives in to the despair: out of history’s devastation comes a new and beautiful song. To put it simply: Garous Abdolmalekian is one of the most talented poets on the world scene today. It makes me endlessly happy that we now have his work in these beautiful, precise translations.” —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic 

“Garous Abdolmalekian’s Lean Against This Late Hour is a book of aftermath, where speech is pared down to its most basic music. In these haunted and haunting poems, Abdolmalekian refuses the deceptive satisfaction of the observable, and makes, instead, in quietly surreal gestures, the known unknowable again. How lucky we are to behold these poems via Idra Novey and Ahmad Nadalizadeh’s sharp translation, to see in the starkest of lines the pain and trauma of, yes, warfare, but also of life itself. This is a tremendous introduction to his work.” —Solmaz Sharif, author of Look

“Reading Abdolmalekian’s poems is like happening upon a system of non-Euclidian geometry: shapes so clearly rendered, so seemingly inevitable that you’re stunned you had never encountered them before. But then you realize that these elegantly simple lines, in fact, interpenetrate multiple dimensions. The natural and the political, phenomenology and sexuality, reason and imagination fuse into new and compelling hybrids. Only in language can these concepts occupy the same space, and I’m profoundly grateful that English-language readers have, at long last, been offered access to this work.” —Monica Youn, author of Blackacre

“Garous Abdolmalekian’s Lean Against This Late Hour delves deep into the solitary melancholy heart of a poet gripped by the buried secrets of Iran’s historical trauma. With aching intimacy, Abdolmalekian takes dreamlike inventory of the deaths that hang over him. He writes with orphic clarity the silence that the state has imposed upon him and takes a shred of darkness that enshrouds his country and whets it to a blade that sings. This is a powerful, searching, and timeless collection of poems.” —Cathy Park Hong, author of Engine, Empire and Minor FeelingsGarous Abdolmalekian was born in 1980, days after the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War, and lives in Tehran. He is the author of five poetry books and the recipient of the Karnameh Poetry Book of the Year Award and the Iranian Youth Poetry Book Prize. His poems have been translated into Arabic, French, German, Kurdish, and Spanish. Abdolmalekian is presently the editor of the poetry section at Chesmeh Publications in Tehran and the executive editor of publications at the Youth Poetry Office in Iran.

Ahmad Nadalizadeh is a translator from the Persian and PhD candidate in comparative literature at the University of Oregon.

Idra Novey is a novelist, poet, and translator. She is the award-winning author of the novels Those Who Knew and Ways to Disappear. Her work has been translated into ten languages and she’s translated numerous authors from Spanish and Portuguese, most recently Clarice Lispector. For her poetry and translation she has received awards from the PEN Translation Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Foundation. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.Introduction

Born eighteen days after the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War in 1980, Garous Abdolmalekian is one of the most prominent figures in Iran’s contemporary literary landscape. He has had an enormous influence on the new generation of Iranian poets addressing the dramatic social changes under way in the country. The author of six award-winning books and an editor at a leading publishing house in Tehran, Abdolmalekian has becomea pivotal voice among poets in Iran determined to convey the inner life of their country and the stifled songs emerging from the silence in which they came of age.

While the force in many of Abdolmalekian’s poems is political, his approach to them is fabulist. In “Border,” he brings the blasts of a battle in to the sheets of a couple’s bed. In “Bits of Darkness,” a man shot the day before continues hoping to be released into another sunrise, though he’s been dead for twenty-four hours. In Abdolmalekian’s poems, even the dead go on hoping for intimations of a kinder world. Yet his images never retreat into any kind of easy, blind escape from reality. Instead, they chart the difficulty of not just accepting but prevailing over unspeakable violence and loss. His sensorial images flip the private into the political with a deceptively subversive subtlety and also with startling intimacy. An injured veteran begs his mother to change his diapers. An unspoken death manifests in the dust circulating in a room, aching to be kissed. The political impetus in an Abdolmalekian poem is never evoked directly. Rather, it is left to flow quietly, powerfully, beneath the poem, the unseen groundwater of each speaker’s life.

Abdolmalekian’s style has been described as cinematic, inspired by his love of Iranian film directors such as Abbas Kiarostami who look to contemporary Persian poetry for their aesthetic. Abdolmalekian’s work turns this cinema back into poetry, inviting the reader into poems as unpredictable in their sequencing as the stills of a film, with the reader bearing witness to the poems’ unfolding in both time and space. The poems are thus not only a description of an event, but an invitation for the reader to experience the narrator’s bewilderment alongside all the contradictory reactions that bewilderment demands, as in “Long Poem of Loneliness,” in which time dissembles line by line:
He stands up
to go sit by the window
realizes he has been sitting
by the window for hours.

The reader comes to experience the emerging impossibility of enduring thisafternoon in tandem with the lonely character of the poem. In the blink ofan eye the world becomes increasingly unworlded, devoid of even the reliablerelief of a sunset.

Abdolmalekian has received numerous prizes for his ground breakingpoems in Iran, and his work has been translated into nine languages, with this collection marking the first book-length translation of his work into English. We hope this introduction to one of Iran’s most celebrated new poets will invite English-language readers to join the larger global conversation about his astonishing work. Translating a poet who responds to contemporary events with such a latent metaphorical language can be tricky. How many of his subtle allusions will be apparent to English-language readers, and how many will be lost—this was a constant concern during the translation process. We have done our best to re-create the allusions with as much subtlety as they contain in Persian, with all their fascinating multiplicity of potential interpretations and meanings. Abdolmalekian’s poetry evokes the nuances of the country around him with an urgency evident in the new generation of poets in the United States as well. Young urban poets all over the world are deeply questioning the history and the future of their countries. Abdolmalekian’s haunting, fable-like poems feel as timeless as they are frank and contemporary. His work breathes new life into the ancient art of poetry and how the form may forecast the interior experience of the century ahead.

—AhmadNadalizadeh and Idra Novey

Border

I am in repose,
as my wife reads a poem about war,
the last thing I need is for the tanks
to advance into my bed.

Bullets have made numerous holes
in my dreams.

You put your eye up to one of them:
You see a street
its skin whitened with snow.
If only it did not snow
If the borders between the streets and the bedcovers were clear.

Now the tanks have crossed the trenches into our bedsheets
and one by one they enter my dream:

I was a kid
My mother washed the dishes
and my father returned home with his black mustache.
When the bombs poured forth
all three of us were children . . .
The following pictures of this dream will tighten your chest
Shut your eyes
Put your lips on this little vent
and just breathe
Just breathe
Breathe!
Breathe!
Damn it!
Just breathe!
Breathe!
The doctor shakes his head
The nurse shakes her head
The doctor wipes the sweat from his brow
And the green mountain chainon the screen
turns to desert.US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.4100 × 5.9200 × 8.9700 in
Series	Penguin Poets
Imprint	Penguin Books
ISBN-13	09780143134930
ISBN-10	0143134930
Author	Ahmad Nadalizadeh, Garous Abdolmalekian, Idra Novey
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	POE023000, POE023010
Subjects	literary criticism, zen, translation, american literature, gift ideas, poesía, poetry book, gift books, poetry anthology, poetry collection, POE023000, poetry books, essays, poem books, POE023010, american poetry, poem a day, collected poems, anthologies, poetry collections, penguin gifts, persian poetry, penguin poets, persian poets, death, photography, nature, adventure, historical, arabic, war, inspiration, writing, modern, classic, grief, inspirational, literary, poem, civil war, anthology, german, poetry, middle eastern, persian, poems, 21st century