Iran Blocks Travel By Poet Simin Behbahani

About the Flaneur

I walk through my blindness the way I saunter down streets in Paris: unfettered and alive, enchanted and engaged by the raw material of the senses. I am a blind flaneur. Come along with me. Just don’t try to take my arm, unless I ask. What’s a flaneur? Read the first post, Return of the Flaneur to Galerie Vivienne. After that, try Foot Rage and the Blind Flaneur. If you don’t find me on the street, take a look in the Fair Use Lab. You can browse the archives or contact me.

Brendan the Navigator

Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]

"Brendan, this is what the world looks like all the time to me. Just a little fog. It’s a fine day for boating on the Great Lakes.” Without missing a stroke he turned to dart a skeptical glance at me. Brendan the Navigator. When we named him I didn’t tell his mother everything the legendary Irish name implied. But I imagined him taking on the role of navigator for me. Growing up with Coastal Survey charts and tales of Great Lakes shipwrecks, he came to know Superior as another home. He never doubted the wisdom of canoeing there with a father who was half blind. Read more.

Iran Blocks Travel By Poet Simin Behbahani

0 March 19, 2010 at 7:07am by Mark Willis

Iranian poet Simin Behbahani speaks at a press conference in Tehran in 2007. [Photo by Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty Images/NPR]

The repressive regime in Tehran has seized the passport of poet Simin Behbahani, blocking her travel to Paris to give a poetry reading. According to NPR:

Known as the “lioness of Iran,” Simin Behbahani has been writing fierce poetry for decades, during the reign of Iran’s Shah, during the Islamic Revolution, during the reign of the ayatollahs, and over the past year’s political turmoil.

Through it all, she was not imprisoned and continued to enjoy the freedom to travel, says Farzaneh Milani, who teaches Persian literature at the University of Virginia and is one of Behbahani’s translators.

“We all thought that she was untouchable. And it’s amazing that a woman of 82, a woman who can barely see anymore, a woman who has brought nothing but pride for Iran, is now a prisoner in her own country,” Milani says.

Simin Behbahani spoke to NPR producer Davar Ardalan during the protests following the Iranian election last June. She read two poems over the phone, with Ardalan reading their English translations. NPR’s Thomas Pierce produced this video of the interview. See the NPR post for texts of the English translations by Kaveh Safa and Farzaneh Milani.

I received an unexpected gift recently from an Iranian blogger named Mannoushka, who translated an essay of mine into Persian and published it on the blog streetspirit.

A Word Is The Search For It is a study of “secret writing” by the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam and the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who took great risk in the 1930s to preserve their freedom of thought in the shadow of Stalin’s Terror. It seems hauntingly relevant to Simin Behbahani’s situation today.

“A Word Is The Search For It” on streetspirit.ir: