Delirium, desire and despair: The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat

The Blind Owl is a not an easy book to read. A hallucinogenic, opium-soaked account of a lonely pen case illustrator’s decent into madness, it is disorienting. Unpleasant. Consumed with death, decay, sexual obsession and frustration. After finishing the last page it sits heavy in the gut. And then, as you start to unwind the experience, it takes on an eerie, impressive, surreal quality—no less dark—but unlikely to easily slip from the imagination once wedged there.

A classic of twentieth century Iranian literature, The Blind Owl was composed during the latter years of the oppressive reign of Reza Shah and first published in 1936 in Bombay where the author, writer and intellectual Sadegh Hedayat was studying. On the first page, Hedayat famously wrote: “The printing and sale [of this work] in Iran is forbidden.” Although the setting of the story the Iranian city of Rey, and, briefly, in India has a classical atmosphere, there is a strong, idiosyncratic modernist feel. The influence of writers like Jung, Rilke, Poe and most notably, Kafka is strong, but this absurdist tale seems to be driven by its own cluster of existential horrors. It can, and has been analyzed, symbolism examined, but that seems less interesting to me having finished the book. It does not matter how much of the author’s own psychology is embedded here (he will commit suicide in 1951 in Paris at age 48), the real power of this work lies in its ability to create a tortured, internal irreality that spins on its own frenzied axis to reach a bizarre climax that, in the end, leaves more questions than answers.

The novella is presented as a confession, the narrator feverishly scrawls out his account, addressing it to an imagined confessor, a shadow on the wall of his room that resembles an owl. In the West, the owl is commonly associated with wisdom, but in Iran and India the bird is considered a bad omen and, as the translator notes, Hedayat was likely aware of both of these contexts—the pen case painter seems to be uncertain if he hopes to understand or exorcise the demons he carries, the macabre dreams and visions that haunt him, and the crime he may, or may not have committed. A delusional narrator driven beyond despair is hardly reliable.

But he can be hard to forget.

To attempt to describe the course of events laid out in this story would be pointless. The same images are endlessly cycled and recycled throughout. The first section appears to recount a vision, a strange visit, and an unexpectedly gruesome event which is echoed but not explained in an extended surreal, feverish central sequence that makes up the core of the book—a relentless nightmarish account of delusions and bitter memories dominated by a preoccupation with death, decay, and decomposition. What appears, at first, to be the narrator’s attempt to fill in his background history, his childhood and miserably unhappy marriage, quickly loses chronological sense. Boundaries between memory, dream, hallucination, and obsessive paranoia melt and blur. The motifs that recur in varying forms—bruised morning glories, clotted blood that can’t be washed off, characters shaking with a harsh convulsive laughter, a butcher chopping up an animal, the narrator’s inability to recognize his own changing face in the mirror, houses with odd, uninhabitable geometrical shapes and shadows that stretch, bend and distort—lend the work a distinctly Expressionist quality. At times I found myself picturing The Cabinet of Dr Caligari re-imagined in a Persian context. But with a much, much darker undertone:

I saw that pain and suffering existed but they were devoid of any purpose or meaning—Amongst the rabble I had become an unknown and unfamiliar breed, so much so that they had forgotten that before this I was a part of their world. What was frightening was that I felt I was neither completely alive nor completely dead, I was but a moving corpse that could neither join the world of the living nor partake in the oblivion and peace of death.

It is hardly surprising that this book has frequently been censored in Iran, attacked by Islamists, and has served as the unfortunate inspiration for suicide among some readers. It is a vital, if disturbing, piece of literature all the same.

However, a discussion would be incomplete without a word about translation. Several versions of The Blind Owl have been published in English over the years, D. P. Costello’s (1957) being the best known. I chose the 75^th Anniversary Edition translated by Naveed Noori, the first to be based on the original Bombay Edition. As a native Persian speaker fluent in English, Noori examines a number of significant inconsistencies in Costello’s text, relative to the original, and considers the likelihood that he was working at least in part from a French translation and a typed Persian version that contained errors and typos. This is, for those interested in debates about translation, where the rubber hits the road.

Those familiar with Persian will benefit most from Noori’s detailed introduction, but he brings up a very interesting matter. “Costello’s translation,” he tells us, “is entirely fluent and reads well;  however, in doing so, the narrator’s voice is changed, and the text has become domesticated.” Domesticated. An example is offered where tones and subtleties are missed, not without admitting that it is always a challenge to balance the tendency to domestication against the risk of foreignization. Smoothness is frequently championed as the hallmark of success in a translation. But at what cost? Noori chose to begin with a foreignized bias and work toward the centre with repeated edits to improve the flow. That means, at times, employing more unconventional English usage, to retain a meaning closer to the original Persian. As well, whereas Costello’s translation is apparently relatively calm and controlled, Noori follows Hedayat’s practice and employs the repetitive use of dashes to heighten the agitated discomfort of the narrator’s collapsing mental state as he frantically scribbles his confession:

Before I leave I only want to bring out on paper these pains that have devoured me in the corner of this room, bit by bit, like leprosy or a festering wound—for in this way I can make my thoughts more orderly and organized—Is it my aim to write a will? Never. I have neither money that the court can swallow up, nor religion that the devil can take away, besides what on this  earth can have the least bit of value for me—that which was life I have lost, I let it and wanted it to slip away, and after I am gone, to hell with it, whether someone reads my scraps of writing, or whether they go unread for seventy black years—I only write for this need to write has now become vital for me—I am in need, more than ever I’m in need of connecting my thoughts to my imaginary being, my shadow—this sinister shadow that, in front of the light of the tallow-burner, is bent over on the wall, as if it is carefully reading and devouring that which I write—This shadow must surely understand more than I!

Now, I cannot compare Costello’s well-loved version, and The Blind Owl is available in at least three English translations along with many more in other languages. However, as a reader interested in the art of translation, I am very glad I happened to select this one for my first introduction to Iranian literature.

The Blind Owl by Sedegh Hedayat, translated by Naveed Noori, is published by l’Aleph under the auspices of The Sadegh Hedayat Foundation.

Author: roughghosts

Literary blog of Joseph Schreiber. Writer. Reader. Editor. Photographer. View all posts by roughghosts