On Translating Fatemeh Shams

Translation, from Latin for “carried across,” refers not just to the conceptual transfer between languages, but also to a physical transfer from place to place. In these poems, the Persian poet Fatemeh Shams, who has lived outside of her native Iran for almost two decades, wrestles with what it means to write in exile, always in anticipation of having her work translated—to write, in other words, out of physical displacement toward linguistic displacement. Confronted by the eventuality of becoming, herself, a translated subject, Shams makes translation itself her subject.

In “Fatemeh,” exile “translates” the poet by reinterpreting the meaning of her name. The poet revisits the scene of her own birth, as her mother and father consider what name to give their newborn daughter. The names that her mother prefers are associated with resistance and revolution in Iran. “Laleh,” or tulip, is especially resonant as a symbol of resistance used by Guerilla Movement poets of the seventies who were writing against political oppression. Her mother’s preferences are set aside, however, when her father pulls out his Koran and chooses the traditional, Islamic “Fatemeh.” Celebrated as the name of the daughter of the prophet Mohammad, “Fatemeh” has its origins in the Arabic "F-Ṭ-M" (ف-ط-م), meaning “to separate, wean, cut something from another thing.” Thus, a name given to commemorate ties to state-sanctioned culture and religion also comes to mark Shams’s separation from her native country, and from her parents, as the dislocation of exile brings the name closer to its original meaning: "She who is separated...like a name from other names.”