Blind Owl Research Articles

Sadeq Hedayat’s vegetarianism: a few notes on the representation of vegetarianism, animals and animal rights in Sadeq Hedayat’s Favāʾid-i giyāhkhārī (The benefits of vegetarianism) and Insān-u ḥayvān (Human and animal)

ABSTRACT Sadeq Hedayat (1903–1951) is an Iranian author known for his short stories and his novel Būf-i Kūr (The Blind Owl). An intellectual from an influential family, Hedayat traveled abroad at a young age and became a vegetarian in his youth. He wrote the essay Insān-u ḥayvān (Human and animal) in 1924, when he was only 21 years old. His later essay Favāʾid-i giyāhkhārī (The benefits of vegetarianism, 1927) is understood to be the more mature version of the ideas on animal rights presented in the essay of 1924. This article explores the contents, socio-historical context and the background of Insān-u ḥayvān and Favāʾid-i giyāhkhārī, focusing in particular on the way in which Hedayat represents vegetarianism and the rhetoric he employs to advocate animal welfare in relation to his perception of the human world.

Влияние традиции Достоевского на С. Хедаята («Записки из подполья» и «Слепая сова»)

Sadegh Hedayat, who is known as one of the intellectuals of his era, was one of the first Iranian writers who used an expressionism style in his works. Sadegh Hedayat’s mental perspective and existentialist thoughts are clearly visible in his works. Since Sadegh Hedayat was familiar with foreign literature, especially the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, he got influenced by him in some subjects. This study compares the two works “The Blind Owl” by Hedayat and “Notes from The Underground” by Dostoyevsky. Both works have a psychological feature – they both depicted their story’s protagonist similarly. Both Dostoevsky and Hedayat, with the help of the isolation and loneliness motifs (“Corner”, “Underground”), make the characters’ protest against the state of society comprehensible to the reader. But the main difference between the two works is the difference in the religious perspective of the two authors. Dostoyevsky’s main character suffers from unbelief, while Sadiq Hedayat’s hero is suffering by the misunderstanding of those around him and considers people who are bigots to be superstitious. Regardless of cultural and linguistic differences, as well as place and time of life, Dostoyevsky and Hedayat are equally concerned with belief issues and social vices. They lived in a suffocating social environment that made both writers protesting and unsatisfied. This dissatisfaction with the social situation is also reflected in the characteristics of the “Notes from The Underground” and “The Blind Owl” main characters.

Выражение символизма при помощи лексических средств выразительности на примере произведения Садека Хедаята «Слепая сова»

<p>This research paper analyzes the symbolism of images in the novel «The Blind Owl» and examines the lexical means of expression used by the author to achieve the goals of the fiction. The lexical means of expression in the work of Sadegh Hedayat «The Blind Owl» are represented by various Persian and Arabic words, word combinations and phrases that carry a certain imagery and symbolism. These word combinations, phrases and turns of phrase greatly enhance the emotional effect on the reader, making him empathize fully. The main means of expression containing symbolism are given with examples of their use in the text of the novel.</p>

The Poetics of Duality in the Works of Sadegh Hedayat

The article is devoted to the study of the semantic spectrum of duality in the works of S. Hedayat. The intertextual links between works of S. Hedayat, N. Gogol and F. Dostoevsky are considered.It is noted that F. Dostoyevsky’s novel “The Double” and the story of S. Hedayat “The Blind Owl” brings together the image of the protagonist – a man of the “underground” seeking to isolation from the hostile environment. The psychological complex of the underground acquires in the creative manner of S. Hedayat both behavioral and topological certainty, being realized in the image of the tomb room. The author considers the meanings of duality in the context of madness, going back to the story of N. Gogol “Notes of a madman”. The works of Russian classics are correlated in the article with the Iranian folklore heritage. It is noted that the imagery of “The Blind Owl” is organized in the logic of the twin myth. Zoroastrian model of the world order is manifested in the artistic interpretation of the Sizdah be dar holiday. In the two-part composition of the story the holiday formalizes the semantic constants of demonism and love. In the mythological context of the story “The Blind Owl” duality is realized as a confrontation of good and evil.Hedayat’s poetics of duality combines folklore and literary traditions, so that the phenomenon of the double is framed in an ontological scale. Hedayat’s poetic synthesis is understood as a pioneering work that defined the subsequent development of Iranian prose.

Sadeq Hedayat’s Three Drops of Blood and The Blind Owl and Nikolai Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District

After more than seven decades since its publication, Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl still remains a mystery to critical analysis. The appearance of Mustafa Farzane’s Rencontres avec Sadeqh Hedayat provides us with threads to finding answers to some of the ambiguities surrounding the Persian novella. According to Farzaneh, Hedayat advised him to read the story of Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo Uezda by the Russian writer Nicholas Leskov to find clues to the love aspects of The Blind Owl. This article is an attempt to determine the bearing Farzane’s testimony may have on the study of Hedayat’s novella and another shorter work of his entitled Three Drops of Blood. By referring to Shakespeare’s Macbeth that the Russian novel’s title is an allusion to, the study reveals that there are a number of interesting relations, from imagery to the theme of existences as penal colony, a Schopenhauerian notion, shared by these texts.

From self to double shadow in Sadegh Hedayat’s "Blind owl"

From self to double shadow in Sadegh Hedayat’s "Blind owl"

Իրանականի, իսլամականի և մոդեռնի սինթեզը որպես ազգային-մշակութային ինքնագիտակցության դրսևորում պարսից ժամանակակից արձակում

One of the characteristics of the modern Persian prose is the synthesis of centuries-old national literary traditions with new directions in world literature. In the formation of "the subjective prose" in the 20th century Persian literature, S. Hedayat's novel "Buf-e kur" (Blind owl, 1937) has been of fundamental importance. With this, Iranian literature enters the stage of psychoanalysis, observing the vital phenomena of man and the world around him with a new philosophy. The works with such content published in 1950-1960s. turned subjective prose into a separate direction, creating fertile ground for the emergence of the modernist second direction. The most improved version of the subjective prose was formed in the 60-70s with the active use of the method of "stream of consciousness", one of the pioneers of which is H. Golshiri's novel "Shazde Ehtejab" (Prince Ehtejab).

Hedayat’s rebellious child: multicultural rewriting of The Blind Owl in Porochista Khakpour’s Sons and Other Flammable Objects

ABSTRACT Divided along several ethnic, linguistic and religious lines, Iran is a multicultural country and the question of its national identity has been a matter of dispute since the beginning of the last century. Part of this dispute has been going on in literary works by national and diasporic authors. In this paper, Porochista Khakpour’s Sons and Other Flammable Objects has been read in terms of its contribution to the questions of nationalism and national identity famously addressed in Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl. It seems that Khakpour has modelled her debut novel on Hedayat’s magnum opus as an effective way to join the debate. Focusing on Khakpour’s narrative, this study demonstrates how the novel presents a multicultural narrative of national identity in response to what is sometimes considered as Hedayat’s ethnocentric nationalism in The Blind Owl.

Self-edition hypothesis

Abstract ‘Self-editing’ refers to the practice of translators who edit their own earlier translations. Self-editions have been less investigated than retranslations. No attempt has been made so far to formulate a hypothesis concerning self-edition. Therefore, the present piece of research was conducted to fill the gap. The corpus of the study includes the modern Persian novella The Blind Owl written by Sadeq Hedayat (1903–1951) and translated (and self-edited) by Iraj Bashiri (in 1974, 2013 and 2016). The findings showed that self-edited versions appeared to be more target-oriented than their original translations. Therefore, although they appeared after the original translation, and could somehow be thought of as ‘retranslations’, they do not seem to confirm the Retranslation-Hypothesis (RH). The main principle of the tentative ‘Self-edition Hypothesis’ is contrary to that of the Retranslation-Hypothesis. It was also found that a self-edited translation is more ‘natural’, ‘accurate’, and ‘expanded’, but slightly less clear than its original translation. It should, however, be underscored that the reduction in clarity of self-edited versions was not so significant. Future researchers are encouraged to focus their study on ‘comparing strategies used by translators with those adopted by editors’ and ‘taking into account socio-cultural factors involved in the production of new editions’. Prospective researchers can test the hypothesis by concentrating on various language pairs and other text-types.

Ajnabi, Or the Xenological Uncanny in Iranian Modernism

Within Iran, the transformation in the Islamic legal understanding of the foreign (ajnabi) into a political concept was accelerated by the encounter with Europe during the nineteenth century. The classical Iranian understanding of otherness as a domain fully demarcated from the self was replaced by an internalized other, resulting in what we call here the xenological uncanny. This article examines Iranian modernism through the lens of trauma theory, whereby haunted subjects fail in distinguishing between self and other, and modernization is perceived as demonization. The three works we discuss—Sadeq Hedayat’s Blind Owl (1937), Bahram Sadeqi’s Heavenly Kingdom (1961), and Hushang Golshiri’s Prince Ehtejab (1968)—each delineate a different register in the xenological uncanny. Our lineage reveals how modernist Persian prose recapitulates a trajectory of possession and dispossession by the foreign and in the process brings about the traumatic recognition of a foreign voice within the self. In focusing on the divided modernist self from a Persian point of view, we identify an unrecognized trajectory for the uncanny within global literary modernism.

Linguistic Silence and the Alienation of Female Characters in <em>Ulysses</em> and <em>The Blind Owl</em>

This article intends to demonstrate how female characters in Ulysses and The Blind Owl are deprived of full means of communication and expression. The connection with the concern with alienation in these two novels is that it is in the representation of female language that they show how characters—female characters and by extension women in general—are alienated from and marginalized by the masculine voices of the novels’ narrators and focalizers. It is noticeable that the narrative style of Ulysses and The Blind Owl, although very innovative and experimental, still allocates almost no space to female voices and language, with the major exception of Molly Bloom’s interior monologue. With the benefit of more recent perspectives, Molly’s narrative can be read as deriving in some ways (the lack of punctuation being one major indication) from the semiotic and subverting the established discipline of language use (the symbolic), thus, as an example of écriture féminine.

TÜRKİYE DE SADIK HİDAYET

For thousands of years Turks and Iranians have been living as neighbours in Central Asia as well as in Anatolia. Cultural contacts and interactions between these two communities have been inevitable. The linguistic and cultural elements on both sides have been effected by each other. Of course, the age-old Turan-Iran rivalry is continuing with a distinct feature according to the contemporary circumstances. Since the 10th century, Turks have migrated from Central Asia to the traditionally Iranian geography and have established nation-states. It can be undoubtedly said that after the 10th century it is not possible to talk about a state in the Iranian geography that traces its roots only to Iran. The Turks in this region have adopted the Persian literature and have benefited from it. Therefore, the golden century of Persian literature being experienced under the Seljuk dynasty is not just a coincidence. Both the societies in this region share a common fate. During the collapse of collonial empires in the 19th century both communities had gone through a similar period. The events that have altered the world’s politics, geography, culture and thoughts have been witnessed in a similar manner and at the same time in both the territories. The journey to the European countries, appointment of political envoys there, outflow of scholars and students to Europe, establishment of Darul-Funun and printing houses, emergence of constitutional ideas and establishment of parliaments and spread of newspapers took place at both the places. With all these changes there has also been a change in the perspective towards literature and literary issues. The ideas like socialization of literature have forced scholars in both the countries to drop the old literary format and substance and to explain new things in new literary styles. Stories, novels, theatres, free verses and newpapers are examples of the literary elements that have been adopted under European influence. Istanbul and Isfahan- once the centers of literature- were replaced by Paris and London. Sadiq Hedayat who was born during this transformational era and the period of constitutionalism in Iran, published a world famous novel called Buf-i Kur (The Blind Owl) with the understanding of the time he lived in. Buf-i Kur (The Blind Owl) can be considered as the first novel in Persian literature. Sadiq Hedayat closely analyzed the society by trying to describe the social problems in the tens of other stories he authored in the new literary format. This paper will discuss translations and academic works undertaken in Turkey on Sadiq Hedayat’s published works.

A Comparative Study of Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl in the Light of the German Theory of Novella

Using the novella as the European literary genre has divided the Iranian literary scholars due mostly to its unknown features. Lack of research in this area has caused many writers either to abandon this literary term or to opt for alternatives such as “novelette”,” long story”, “long short story” or “short story”. This article aims to introduce the theory and characteristics of the novella as a unique literary genre, based on German literature. Despite the Italian root of the novella, it reflects its Germanic roots as it was flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries Germany. In addition, the paper explores the concept of “long story” in Iranian literature as the synonym of the term novella. The Blind Owl clearly exhibits these characteristics of the genre, especially the dramatic structure and representing a new aspect of human trait. The analysis of The Blind Owl leads to a deeper understanding of one of the most important and well-formed European literary genres and a new look at Sadegh Hedayat’s ideology as a professional author in addition to familiarizing scholars with this genre.

Time Narrative Discourse in the Novel: The Blind Owl (Bofe Kor)

Narratology is relatively a new science that took on the scientific aspects by the structuralist studies. There are different, similar and even contradictory, ideas rose in this regard. Gerard Genette’s view of time is considered as one of the most significant elements of the narrative discourse in the review on the narrative in literature. The modern novel-in failing to comply with chronological time-is dramatically receptive to this type of criticism. This analytical research paper examines the novel The Blind Owl (Bofe Kor) by Sadeq Hedayat with the aim of helping to read and understand the novel approach according to narrative discourse. The results show that the time in this novel does not follow the chronographic rules; in other words, the time fluctuates under the influence of the retrospective and prospective time disorder and thus, the time disorders and other factors such as repetition, redundancy and etc. cause the slow acceleration in narrative that led to more prolong the narrative text than the story.

English

New York City in Paul Auster’s City of Glass and Ray in Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl testify to the presence of a wasteland, setting in motion an unavoidable sense of nostalgia, confusion and fragmentation upon the protagonists. The present article argues that the pictures painted of the two metropolises with their specific cramped urban spaces function as culpable agents influencing Quinn as a New Yorker and Hedayat’s narrator as a resident of Ray. The paper builds its argument upon Merlin Coverley’s concept of psychogeography which supports transformation of the city as an integral part of the main characters’ fates. Further, the article illustrates how in Hedayat and Auster’s pieces the city reigns triumphant as the main characters fall victim to hallucination and isolation, or are left with desperate choices: in Hedayat’s novella murder or acceptance of misery and in Auster’s the sudden disappearance from the city and the plot horizons. To further support the argument advanced in this research, we take into account Totosy de Zepetnek’s method of comparative literature and culture and its idea of parallelization that emphasizes the existence of similar social evolutions represented through the literature of various nations and carried out through the use of comparable literary conventions and symbols to stress their concerns. DOI: http://doi.org/10.17576/gema-2016-1602-09

Systems and accidents in 20th century magical realist literature: Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" and Sadegh Hedayat's "The blind owl" as critiques of modern nation-making experiments

This article compares two major 20th century magical realist novels - Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl – as critiques of modern nation-making practices, in Nehruvian post-independence India and Iran under Reza Shah Pahlavi. The analysis centers the interplay of accidents and systems, in political constructions and contestations of modern self, history and knowledge. The works are assessed in terms of two aesthetic paradigms of modernity: Baudelaire’s vision of modernity as traumatic deracination involving new creative possibilities and freedom, and Cocteau’s vision of modernity as an Infernal Machine where a pre-recorded universe annihilates creative freedom. The political significance of these aesthetics are evaluated against the two distinctive nationalist narratives which the authors set out to contest in their respective novels. Both novels offer important critiques of violence. Yet both reveal a Proustian aesthetic of nostalgia, rejecting organized political action in the public sphere to celebrate imaginative introversion.

Intertextuality in Novel: An Escape from Patriarchal Soliloquy

Hypertextuality is one of the intertextual relationships introduced by Gerard Genette. According to him, hypertextuality includes all the relationships which the hypertext has with the previous text, i.e. the hypotext. However, he does not consider the relationship between these two texts to be in such a way that the hypertext is the interpretation of the hypotext. On the other hand, other theorizers including Bakhtin, regard the conversation between texts a way to escape a one-voiced and dominant discourse. From this viewpoint, the intertextual relationships of Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl, with Shahrnoush Parsipour’s The Blue Mind and Abbas Maroufi’s The Body of Farhad are in such a way that The Blind Owl can be regarded as a hypotext for the other 2 novels but these two novels interpret the text differently. The present study aims to examine the intertextual relationships between these 3 novels and explore how a multiple-voiced conversation is formed between them.

Black Light, White Revolution: Translation, Adaptation, and Appropriation in Galway Kinnell’s Cold War Writings on Iran

In 1959, the American poet Galway Kinnell won a Fulbright fellowship to live and teach for a year in Iran. Although he did not learn more than ‘500 or so words’ of Persian during his stay, he acknowledged the impact his fellowship year had on him, and set his only novel, Black Light (1966. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin), in Iran. In story and content, Black Light is almost certainly an imitation of Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl (1957. New York: John Calder), although the poet has no memory of reading Hedayat’s masterwork, and indeed maintains that he never read it at all. The history of American practices of translation assumes new significance when considering the products of Kinnell’s time in Iran. This essay focuses on Black Light and Kinnell’s ethnographic travel writing, which appeared under the title ‘Persian Journals’ in a series in the Tehran Journal magazine, arguing that each of these texts is a translation into an American idiom of the different encounters Kinnell was having with Iran.

"To Thine Own Self Be True": Existentialism in Hamlet and The Blind Owl

This article aims at exploring the key concepts of Existential thought in two masterpieces of the world literature, namely, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl ( Buf-e Kur ). Freedom, free will, authenticity, self-realization, self-becoming, and awareness of death are among the main concerns of both writers. Shakespeare depicts authenticity in the character of Hamlet, and it is in contrast to him that the reader finds many instances of in authenticity. The Danish prince has no tolerance whatsoever for in authentic or self-deceiving. The same thing is visible in The Blind Owl in which the narrator-protagonist feels himself above all the low, petty desires of mankind. All in all, both characters’ main challenge is to live authentically . Keywords: Existential philosophy, authenticity, angst, death, being, existence, self-realization

Unlikely Works of Iranian Origin

6 WLT NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2015 IN THE PAST DECADE, especially, much has been written about Iranian memoirs and particularly the nonfiction of Iranian females of the diaspora. Within that, many Iranian American fiction writers (such as myself) have also earned some recognition . But I chose to look at some work that might have escaped the eye of those scanning for Iran. From old and obscure Iranian classics to new work by writers of Iranian ancestry who don’t identify with Iran or Iranian subject matters, this list features some off-the-beaten-track masterpieces for those interested in seeing just how eclectic Iran and the Iranian psyche can be. Vita Sackville-West Passenger to Teheran Hogarth Vita Sackville-West’s Passenger to Teheran is a 1926 travelogue based on her travels from London to Persia to visit her diplomat husband. Egypt, India, and Iraq are featured as well. The humor is especially notable in this outsider memoir. Ottessa Moshfegh Eileen Penguin Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen (2015) is a period noir dressed in modern minimal experimental prose. Moshfegh’s claustrophobic, often repulsive novel of self-hatred, female friendship, and New England suburban isolation —no Iran here—is beautifully bleak but with some wild turns. Saïd Sayrafiezadeh Brief Encounters with the Enemy The Dial Press Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s Brief Encounters with the Enemy (2013) is a story collection narrated by young men in wartime but focuses on civic life. Short on specifics—and his own Iranian heritage—his realism seems classic and timeless in a way rarely found these days. Shahriar Mandanipour Censoring an Iranian Love Story Sara Khalili, tr. Alfred A. Knopf Neustadt Prize nominee Shahriar Mandanipour is an icon in Iran, but Censoring an Iranian Love Story (2010) was his first foray into English translation. A dark comic novel as much about life in contemporary Iran as it is about storytelling. Sadegh Hedayat The Blind Owl D. P. Costello, tr. Grove Press Sadegh Hedayat’s 1957 cult classic The Blind Owl is horror at its finest—Kafka and Poe haunt this cyclical fever dream about art, madness, love, and death. The novel has been one of the most widely translated of all modern Iranian classics, which is interesting considering its reputation for causing suicides in Iran. what to read now Unlikely Works of Iranian Origin by Porochista Khakpour Notebook Porochista Khakpour is the author of the forthcoming memoir, Sick (HarperPerennial, 2017), and the novels The Last Illusion (2014) and Sons and Other Flammable Objects (2007). Her writing has appeared in Bookforum, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, Salon, Spin, Elle, and many others. She is Writer in Residence at Bard College. ...