Bijan ElahiHigh Tide of the Eyes by Rebecca Ruth Gould Kayvan Tahmasebian

Abstract

effort against Germany. He and his companion are forced to adopt a veneer of savagery , a vestige Alfa begins to embrace after Mademba is mortally wounded. Unable to bring himself to mercifully kill his friend, Alfa begins viciously killing every German he can find and harvesting their hands, at first to his squadron’s encouragement. Their response quickly shifts to horror, however, as with each kill Alfa embodies the vicious animal his superiors believe him to be. Diop’s aforementioned focus on duality is apparent throughout almost every passage . Trenches are likened to a womb or a giant woman, as if Alfa’s deadly outings are bookended by a perverse source of life. Diop draws particular attention to how Alfa and his fellow “Chocolat soldiers” are presented: they hold a state-of-the-art rifle in one hand and a crude machete in the other. So far removed from any inclination toward this kind of behavior, Alfa feels himself slide into a cruel parody of his ancestral plight. Alfa, to the character’s credit, is presented as far from helpless. Despite dismembering Germans in an almost clinical routine, Diop never suggests that Alfa has utterly lost his humanity. In every life he takes, he sees a bit of himself die as the myth of the savage grows. Even then, he knows it is not conclusive, and the novel’s latter half is almost entirely centered on contemplating consequences. War as a literary theme is abundant but is rarely presented with tact when framed as visually as it is with All Blood Is Black. David Diop’s sophomore effort is readily adapted to the wartime canon. Daniel Bokemper Oklahoma City North American Gaels: Speech, Story, and Song in the Diaspora Ed. Natasha Sumner & Aidan Doyle Montreal. McGill-Queen’s University Press. 2020. 511 pages. THE MONOLITH OF American history often overshadows the continent’s early multiculturalism. This is especially true of the Age of Revolution, when Americanism as both noun and verb began its long echo across the world. So much has been written about the burgeoning American state of that time that the collective of cultures which made it tend to get lost in the noise. Here is a book that delivers on that lamentable gap, with a history and present-day analysis of two shared, but disparately rich, cultures: Irish and Scottish Gaelic. When the first cracks in the old-world Gaelic political systems spurred emigraBOOKS IN REVIEW Bijan Elahi High Tide of the Eyes Trans. Rebecca Ruth Gould & Kayvan Tahmasebian. Brooklyn. The Operating System. 2019. 106 pages. BIZHAN ELAHI (1945–2010) was not a prominent voice in Iranian poetry during his own lifetime. His relative obscurity might explain why High Tide of the Eyes, Rebecca Ruth Gould and Kayvan Tahmasebian ’s dual-language Persian-English translations of Elahi’s work, appears in a series titled Unsilenced Texts. Elahi’s silencing as a poet, it should be noted, was of the self-imposed variety. Born into “a wealthy family,” as the translators introduce him, and a “perfectionist” who was “indifferent to fame,” Elahi never endeavored to publish a poetry collection, apart from a single 1972 poem cycle that was scheduled to run in two hundred copies but that he withdrew before the poems ever saw their way to print. It was only with the posthumous publication of two collections , Vision (didan) and Youths (javānihā), from which Gould and Tahmasebian have selected twenty poems, that the poet’s voice could begin to be more widely heard. Elahi the translator, however, was not so reticent with his words. On the contrary , Elahi inserted his erudite and boldly experimental poetic voice into his many published and relatively well-received Persian translations of poets like Lorca, Eliot, Rimbaud, Hölderlin, and the ninthcentury mystic al-Hallaj. Echoes of Elahi ’s dialogues with other poetic traditions reverberate throughout the poems in High Tide of the Eyes and refract through Gould and Tahmasebian’s sensitive translations. Perhaps one of the collection’s best features is that it includes Elahi’s disparate statements on translation, drawn from various prefaces, introductions, and notes, so that readers can hear the poet-translator’s distinguished critical-theoretical voice as...