Book record
Dying in a Mother Tongue
Roja Chamankar
Translated from Persian by Blake Atwood
Dying in a Mother Tongue, by Roja Chamankar and translated by Blake Atwood, is a Persian poetry collection whose title captures one of translation’s deepest aches. A mother tongue is origin, intimacy, inheritance, and sometimes constraint. To die in it is not only to lose life, but to be enclosed by the language that first made the self possible. Chamankar’s Iranian poetry, brought into English by Atwood, seems likely to move through gender, memory, body, and the politics of speech. I would read this collection as a meditation on what language gives and what it cannot save. The title feels especially powerful in translation because the English reader is already outside the mother tongue, listening across distance. This book belongs in the library for that tension alone.
- Published
- 2018
- Publisher
- Center for Middle Eastern Studies, The University of Texas at Austin
- Language
- Persian
- Country
- Iran
- ISBN
- 9781477317808