Translators’ Note
Our translations represent the first time Hasan Alizadeh’s poems have been rendered into any foreign language. We have translated Alizadeh in the conviction that, when his literary output is made available in English, he will be recognized as a lyric poet comparable in stature to Guillaume Apollinaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Federico García Lorca, and Marina Tsvetaeva. The magma-like dream world that Alizadeh evokes, and the unpredictable juxtapositions of his poetics, together constitute the defining features of his voice within contemporary Iranian poetry. The poet’s formalist yet lyrical poetics posit poetry as an event that opens life onto the contingency of creaturely existence. In our effort to keep faith with the poems we have translated, our translations foreground the many historical and semantic contingencies that enrich Alizadeh’s poetics.
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