Sholeh Wolpé: If I Do Not Translate, It’s A Sin

“Translation is a scalpel,” writes Sholeh Wolpé. “It cuts to reveal and to heal.” Through her translations of Iranian writers, and through four collections of her own poetry, Wolpé seeks to bridge the fierce political divide between her native Iran and her adopted Western homes—to pierce their mutual ignorance, and reveal one to the other. In 2007, she translated the twentieth-century Iranian poet and feminist Forugh Farrokhzad in the collection Sin, and in 2013 and 2014, she and Mohsen Emadi collaborated on the first complete Persian translation of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, to be published in Iran later this year. Her own poetry cuts at multiple homelands—Tehran, Trinidad, Los Angeles—revealing beauty, dislocation, hope, and violence in each.

Wolpé’s latest project, for which she received a PEN/Heim grant, is a new translation of The Conference of the Birds, published by W. W. Norton in March 2017. Composed by the twelfth-century Sufi poet and mystic Farīd Ud-Dīn Attar, The Conference of the Birds chronicles a quest by the birds of the world to find their king, the mythical Persian bird called the Simorgh. The story is revealed as an allegory for the soul’s journey to the Divine. For Attar, the journey’s chief obstacle is the ego, that worldly self-conceit that traps us in our own smallness, and his indictment of egoism is as timely today as it was in medieval Persia:

What is in you arises from greed;
it comes from anger and rage.
Others see it, but you don’t.
Inside you lies an