Jul 09 2022 to Jul 09 2022 6:30 p.m.

EVENT HAS ENDED

Where

Bangalore International Centre

7 4th Main Rd, Stage 2, Domlur 560071

Event Description

Prashant Keshavmurthy and Mani Rao discuss Keshavmurthy’s recently published co-translation of Sohrab Sepehri’s collected poems. This conversation, accompanied by images, will introduce you to the Persian poetry of Sohrab Sepehri (1928-1980), one of Iran’s most famous modernists in literature as well as painting. The poet and translator Mani Rao will engage Prashant Keshavmurthy in conversation over the latter’s English co-translation of Sepehri’s collected poems. If there is a consensus about the poetry of Sohrab Sepehri (1928-1980) it is that it has remained as difficult as it has been widely appealing across generations in Iran within his lifetime and to this day. He is not the only poet – Persian or otherwise, modern or premodern – whose reception has been compounded in equal parts of the experience of beauty and bewilderment. How might we understand the distinctly modern quality of the difficulty of his poetry? How have Sepehri’s poems offered generations of Iranians lyric models for discovering temporary order and intensity in the distraction and dispersal of modern urban life? How do these lyric models of intense experience relate to the ideological claims on us of family, community, religion and nation? These are some of the questions that this conversation between the poet-translator Mani Rao and Sepehri’s co-translator into English Prashant Keshavmurthy will aim to answer.