Dying in a Mother Tongue by Roja Chamankar and translated by Blake Atwood

This is poetry from Iran.

Dying in a Mother Tongue by Roja Chamankar translated by Blake Atwood is published by Center for Middle Eastern Studies, The University of Texas at Austin. This is a Book originally written in Persian. This was published in 2018.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781477317808E12.

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.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.