New York-letters: An Ode to New York, a Panegyric to Persia

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite the fact that a significant number of Iranians have lived in or visited the United States for more than half a century, they have produced very few accounts of their lives in or visits to the country. In the last decade, however, a number of narratives of travel to the United States have been published by Iranian authors, of which professor Mir Jalaleddin Kazzazi’s New York-Letters merits special attention. This paper analyzes Kazzazi’s text to highlight its distinctive features as a travelogue, which have led to the work claiming its own place among contemporary Iranian narratives of travel to America. More specifically, this study argues how, especially as a narrative in verse, the book challenges some of the conventional modes of travel writing; how it engages in its own mode of defamiliarising not only its content (that is, the all-too-familiar New York), but also the book’s own epitext; how the author exploits a vast array of images from the repertoire of classical Persian literature to narrate New York; and, finally, how the ode narrative is interrupted to shift from the poet’s account of New York to a lengthy panegyric to Persia.