Humans
- Mehdi Navid (author)
- Tina Rahimi (translator)
- Iman Raad (artist)
ISBN
978-1-946031-29-7
LCCN
2018948568
Page count
116
Keywords
Poetry, Prose, Dual Language, Translation, Farsi, Farsi-English, Farsi To English, Persian, Iran, Politics, Banned Books
Publication date
2018
Language(s)
Farsi, English
Publication media type
Print Document
Translation
Dual-Language
Publication series
Glossarium: Unsilenced Texts
The Book Of Sounds
The Book of Sounds, released as a dual language edition as part of The Operating System’s Glossarium:: Unsilenced Texts series, is Mehdi Navid’s first novelette, translated from the Farsi by Tina Rahimi. The book was not publishable in Iran.
The Book of Sounds is an honest exploration of the socio-political context of contemporary Iran, the challenges, hopes and dreams of actual people living in this context, much like the book’s characters, among the pages of an episode — a space whose “door” is to be eventually “turned over as a page.”
Through Navid’s inventive poetic prose, sounds evolve into the main filter through which the narration takes place. Throughout the book, the reader will notice an unconventional use of syntax, and a fresh approach to auditory imagery, which is uniquely married to the common logic of everyday words.
About the Contributor(s)
Mehdi Navid (b. 1981) is an Iranian author, translator and editor. His works include a collection of poetry in Persian titled تو نیامدی بهنگام / جای تو سر شب آمد [You Didn't Arrive in Time / Dusk Fell Instead] published by Bon-Gah publications, an unpublished novella, بطریها و بدنها [Bottles and Bodies], and کتاب اصوات [The Book of Sounds]. He is currently working on two novellas, one concerning an infamous historical incident which occurred in Iran in the 90s involving a number of Iranian authors and another on the assassination of secular intellectuals and writers in the mid-90s, which is known as chain-murders. He has also translated numerous works from Samuel Beckett, Richard Brautigan, and William S. Burroughs to Farsi. He worked as literary general editor for Ney Publication Company and Rokhdad-e-No Publication House. He also worked as a journalist for Karnameh Magazine. Currently, he is editor-in-chief of Pagard Publications.
Tina Rahimi (translator) is an Iranian teacher, writer, and translator. She received her MA in English Language and Literature from Allameh Tabataba'i University in 2005, and her PhD in Media and Communication from the European Graduate School in 2013. She has worked as a writer and content-creator for language companies such as Living Language and Rosetta Stone. She has taught Farsi to students from around the world and has also participated in translation projects such as "Seeing Studies" by Documenta 13. She has translated articles by contemporary philosophers such as Slavoj Zizek and Judith Butler, poems by John Keats, and a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. She currently lives in Madrid, Spain.
Iman Raad (Mashhad, Iran 1979) received his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University (2017), was the Shandaken Projects’ Paint School fellow (2017-18) and artist in residence at the Queens Museum Studio Program (2018-20). He lives and works in New York City and teaches at The Cooper Union School of Art.
Iman Raad works across a variety of media, including painting, drawing, embroidery, graphic work and performance lectures. In these diverse works, he draws on influences such as Persian painting, Mughal painting, South-Asian Truck painting and internet image culture. He combines these local references with contemporary subject matter to create his mural-like installations. Using a vivid, high key palette, altered perspective, and repetition that mimics digital glitches, the result is a riot of colour and movement that is both seductive and unsettling. Traditionally ornamental elements such as birds, fruits and flowers are recalibrated into subjects that carry narrative import and are given animate, unnatural presences. These are intertwined with social events and historical moments rendered in fantastical ways to draw in the viewer.
Aside from painting, Raad is also an internationally acknowledged graphic designer, included in The Phaidon archive of five hundred designs that matter, representing the contemporary Persian graphic design movement.
