ABACUS OF LOSS - A MEMOIR IN VERSE (March 2022)

“One of 8 Beautiful, Contemporary Novels Written in Verse That Make Poetry Accessible” — MARY SUE MAGAZINE

“Abacus of Loss is a memoir of remembrance and loss but also a memoir of wisdom and expansiveness evoked in small beads of intense beauty.” —WORLD LITERATURE TODAY

“’Exile is a suitcase with a broken strap,’ writes Sholeh Wolpé in this autobiographical story that takes us across borders of language and time, from ‘a hill high above Tehran’ to the valley in Los Angeles. It is a journey where—we soon learn—‘loss is a language’ and the ‘fastest way out of a labyrinth / is up.’ So much to love about this brave and musical storytelling. I for one admire how much Wolpé loves our days, how much tenderness and insight each moment’s turn offers. There is much gusto, too, and such style and verve. ‘Make my curly hair your flag,’ the poet tells us, as she guides us on the trip via ‘boats crusted with our stories.’ Abacus of Loss is a terrific book, one that created its own genre—a thrill of lyric as it casts a narrative spell. Bravo!” — ILYA KAMINSKY, NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST AND AUTHOR OF DEAF REPUBLIC & DANCING IN ODESSA

“Wolpé’s work as a librettist fuels the shape and feeling of this book—the movements, the varying tempos and paces, the sense of story, and the precision of language translate to a narrative that stirs us emotionally. Sometimes familiar, other times a blossoming, This book also serves as a master plan for a collection that both adheres to a story and provides beautifully differing poetic strategies. Abacus of Loss finds its way under your skin before you know it—bead by bead.” — PRISM INTERNATIONAL, ELMAZ ABINADER

“The poet tallies her losses—loss of dear ones, loss of home and country, loss of language and faith. Yet, recollecting her life memory by memory, Sholeh Wolpé finds ways to love and to be thankful. She is truly a daughter of Rumi.” — MAXINE HONG KINGSTON, THE NATIONAL MEDAL OF ARTS RECIPIENT & AUTHOR OF THE WOMAN WARRIOR

“Sholeh Wolpé’s Abacus of Loss is a manual for living. How to stay permeable to wonder and joy in a world that so aggressively conspires against them? In a world that can be so corrosive to grace? In one poem Wolpé writes, ‘Our passports lie on the yellow Formica table / side by side, two countries at war.’ In another, ‘God is just a vagabond / peddling bombs and swords.’ There is a remarkable braid here of a woman’s journey through a world run by men drunk on their own power, through a cosmos governed by a God apparently hidden by his. Abacus of Loss is a remarkable achievement, an unforgettable text.” — KAVEH AKBAR, AUTHOR OF PILGRIM BELL & CALLING A WOLF A WOLF

“Loss fulfills the memoir’s promise to show us memory at work. The disjunctive, essayistic collage of moments feels more like the experience of memory than we are used to getting from conventional narrative prose. And like memory, it folds in on itself, as Wolpé’s investigation of loss shows us that, often, what has been lost is a past already suffused with a sense of loss. We mourn the young adulthood when we mourned the teenage years when we mourned our childhood when we mourned our lost innocence. A brilliant book.” — TOM LUTZ, THE LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS FOUNDING EDITOR

“I am immersed in the narrator’s world, unwilling to leave...she unpacks the complexities of exile, home, family, love, and everything in between.” — THE MARKAZ JOURNAL, SHERINE ELBANHAWY

“ Wolpé’s Abacus of Loss catches what’s torn up and battered by waves, giving the wrack back to the sands of time and memory.
One of 17 Poetry Collections to read during Women’s History Month” — ORION MAGAZINE, CAMILLE DUNGY

“Defying patriarchal traditions and religious prohibitions courts upheaval and discord, but the compensating development of agency and the poet’s freedom to choose for herself how to live increase in strength and importance.” — COLORADO REVIEW, LINDA SCHELLER

THE CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS (W.W. Norton)

Award-winning translator Sholeh Wolpé recaptures the beauty and lyricism of one of Persian literature’s most celebrated masterpieces.

Considered by Rumi to be “the master” of Sufi mystic poetry, Attar is best known for his epic poem The Conference of the Birds, a magnificent allegorical tale about the soul’s search for meaning. The poem recounts the perilous journey of the world’s birds to the faraway peaks of Mount Qaf—a mythical mountain that wraps around the earth—in search for the mysterious Simurgh, their king. Attar’s beguiling anecdotes and humor intermingle the sublime with the mundane, the spiritual with the worldly, and the religious with the metaphysical. Reflecting the entire evolution of Sufi mystic tradition, Attar’s poem models the soul’s escape from the mind’s rational embrace.

“Sholeh Wolpé’s stunning new translation—the first in over 30 years—renders Attar’s engaging, singular voice with wit and flourish.” — LITERARY HUB

“The Conference of the Birds has fascinated writers from Rumi to Borges, and Wolpé’s translation strives to make Attar’s unorthodox and mystical vision accessible to contemporary Western readers.”  — GUERNICA

“Sholeh Wolpé, the most recent translator of Attar’s epic into English, writes in the foreword to her new version that “the parables in this book trigger memories deep within us all. The stories inhabit the imagination, and slowly over time, their wisdom trickles down into the heart. The process of absorption is unique to every individual, as is each person’s journey. We are the birds in the story.” This is a plausible response to Attar’s pedagogic intentions. We are plainly meant as readers to identify ourselves (or at least our souls) with the birds.” — NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

“I was struck by this accomplished translation, which moves the reader along from one stanza to the next in strong, compelling rhythms. I think what Sholeh Wolpé has done exceedingly well is to bring this medieval poem over into lively, contemporary English that feels absolutely right and not at all forced. It was a real pleasure to read and enjoy this text from a literature and a world I know so little about.” —EDITH GROSSMAN, TRANSLATOR OF DON QUIXOTE AND LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

KEEPING TIME WITH BLUE HYACINTHS

 “When Sholeh Wolpé asks ‘How hard is it to write a long song?’ she is reflecting on beauty and love in times of war and personal upheaval. She is reflecting on poetry’s absurd covenant with pain, loss, and violence–and its promise to find beauty through these human horrors. Her beautiful poems are at once sensual, meditative, raw in their honesty, and judicious in their fit use of language. This collection delights and disturbs, often in the very same poem.” –KWAME DAWS, AUTHOR OF CITY OF BONES

“A gifted Iranian-American poet beautifully explores love and the loss of love, beauty and war and the ghosts of the past.” –SHELF AWARENESS MAGAZINE

“Like dreams with healing clues, Wolpe’s poems are rich with surrealism and harmony, telling deep truths of women across cultures and languages.” –ANNIE FINCH, AUTHOR OF A POET’S CRAFT

SIN - SELECTED POEMS OF FORUGH FARROKHZAD

Recipient of the Lois Roth Persian Translation Award

“In Wolpé’s fresh and vital translation, a musical and compelling English version that draws the reader along and captures a sense of the exquisitely balanced pacing of Farrokhzad’s language, and the immediacy and authenticity of her voice, the members of the Lois Roth jury found themselves experiencing Forugh’s Persian poems with new eyes.”   — FROM LOIS ROTH AWARD STATEMENT

“For the first time, the work of Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad is being brought to English-speaking readers through the perspective of a translator who is a poet in her own right, fluent in both Persian and English and intimately familiar with each culture. Sin includes the entirety of Farrokhzad’s last book, numerous selections from her fourth and most enduring book, Reborn, and selections from her earlier work and creates a collection that is true to the meaning, the intention, and the music of the original poems.
Farrokhzad was the most significant female Iranian poet of the twentieth century, as revolutionary as Russia’s Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva and America’s Plath and Sexton. She wrote with a sensuality and burgeoning political consciousness that pressed against the boundaries of what could be expressed by a woman in 1950s and 1960s Iran. She paid a high price for her art, shouldering the disapproval of society and her family, having her only child taken away, and spending time in mental institutions. Farrokhzad died in a car accident in 1967 at the age of thirty-two. Sin is a tribute to the work and life of this remarkable poet.” —AMERICAN POET

“Wolpé deserves much credit for the fluidity and freshness of her translations.”  —THE DAILY STAR, Lebanon

“Poetic modernism came to Iran as late as the 1960s, when Farrokhzad (1935-67) streaked across the literary horizon. Rebellious from childhood, Farrokhzad entered young womanhood as many more were to do in the West a decade later. She insisted on her sexuality and wrote of it rapturously in her earliest poems, which immediately appeal in their celebration of lovemaking, including sexual objectification of the male. Of course, she became a scandal, one that endures to this day. A family member of Wolpé’s, when told that she was translating Farrokhzad, responded,’Why are you wasting your time on that whore?’ The answer is obvious in the poems, which become more powerfully compelling as they take up the issues of life as a woman in modern Iran, issues that are realized through feelings and predicaments with which any Western reader can sympathize. Meanwhile, the poems’ long lines and musical repetitions sweep the reader away as effectively as any American projective verse (the Whitman to Hart Crane to Ginsberg tradition) or Vicente Huidobro’s Chilean modernist classic Altazor (1931).” —BOOKLIST

ROOFTOPS OF TEHRAN

“In Sholeh Wolpe’s Rooftops of Tehran, and unforgettable cast of characters emerges, from the morality policeman with the poison razor blade to the crow-girls flapping their black garments, from the woman with the bee-swarm tattoo emerging from her crotch to the author as a young girl on a Tehran rooftop with a God’s eye view ‘hovering above a city / where beatings, cheatings, prayers, songs, / and kindness are all one color’s shades.’ Here is a delicious book of poems, redolent of saffron and stained with pomegranate in its vision of Iran and of the immigrant life in California. Wolpe’s poems are at once humorous, sad, and sexy, which is to say that they are capriciously human, human even in that they dream of wings and are always threatening to take flight.” —TONY BARNESTONE, AUTHOR OF TONGUE OF WAR, & BEAST IN THE APARTMENT

“Sholeh Wolpe’s Rooftops of Tehran is that truly rare event: an important book of poetry. Brushing against the grain of Persian-Islamic culture, she sings a deep affection for what she ruffles. Her righteous aversion to male oppression is as broad as the span from Tehran to L.A., as deep as a wise woman’s heart. This is a powerful, elegant book.” —RICHARD KATROVAS, AUTHOR OF POETS AND THE FOOLS WHO LOVE THEM

THE FORBIDDEN - POEMS FROM IRAN AND ITS EXILES

During the 1979 revolution, Iranians from all walks of life, whether Muslim, Jewish, Christian, socialist, or atheist, fought side-by-side to end one tyrannical regime, only to find themselves in the clutches of another. When Khomeini came to power, freedom of the press was eliminated, religious tolerance disappeared, women’s rights narrowed to fit within a conservative interpretation of the Quran, and non-Islamic music and literature were banned. Poets, writers, and artists were driven deep underground and, in many cases, out of the country altogether. This moving anthology is a testament to both the centuries-old tradition of Persian poetry and the enduring will of the Iranian people to resist injustice. The poems selected for this collection represent the young, the old, and the ancient. They are written by poets who call or have called Iran home, many of whom have become part of a diverse and thriving diaspora.

“Red marks a state of emergency in the state of the heart. This collection powerfully testifies to the emergency in beloved Iran. Every human, no matter culture or nation, has a heart. Every culture and nation has a heart. We here on this small earth share a heart. Poets are the heart’s singers. Iran’s singers call out from the kitchen tables, prisons, streets, and homelands. What demon can withstand against these beautiful and truthful singers? What heart will not open when they hear these poems?”     –JOY HARJO, FORMER US POET LAUREATE AND AUTHOR OF POET WARRIOR

“I need say little more beyond praise for the editor’s keen introductory essay on literature and politics, and the exceptional quality of the poems, which is to praise also the translators.  Wolpe distinguishes well between the empathy of literature and ‘religious and ideological fanaticism.’   And I hope she is right for the entire world that in Iran literature is like rain.  I can praise the poems despite my ignorance of the original language because the editor understands translation as ‘a recreation, a re-rendering of what cannot be literally duplicated.’   Hence when I say I admire these poems, I mean poems co-created by author and translator.   Comparison of original with translation is a different, scholarly enterprise.”     —DR JAMES RICHARD BENNET, FOUNDER OF OMNI CENTER FOR PEACE, JUSTICE AND ECOLOGY

“These poems put a very human face on a people, country, and culture often deeply misunderstood in the West while reminding us once again that poetry embraces and illuminates our deepest human bonds and hopes. They are a most welcome gift.”    –SAM HAMILL, AUTHOR OF POETRY OF ZEN

FOUR FACES OF LOSS

PUBLISHED IN IRAQ (2021)

Four poets in poetic conversation with each other and with the world.

Afghanistan: Mujib Mehrdad

Iraq: Sadek Mohamed

US: Brian Turner

Iran: Sholeh Wolpé

To obtain a copy of this book, please contact Sadek R. Mohamed via facebook

Cómo Escribir Una Canción de Amor

Olifante Ediciones de Poesía, España

La traducción es una parte inseparable del oficio poético de Sholeh Wolpé. En inglés, Wolpé excava tres dimensiones de su vida por la traducción y profundiza en ellas: el exilio, la feminidad y el misticismo. El misticismo, que en sí es una experiencia poética, juega un papel importante en la historia del pensamiento, afrontando el monopolio de lo divino. Ilan Berk escribió: solo los poetas tienen una infancia más larga. Es decir, Wolpé, cuando traduce un poema, traduce su infancia en lengua persa a su infancia poética en lengua inglesa. Hace la traducción de una infancia a otra, de un asombro a otro. Sin embargo, entre estos dos entornos de la subjetividad, vive el abismo. El abismo entre «yo» y «yo» es el mismo abismo donde reside el motor de la subjetividad poética.

• Mohsen Emadi (Fragmento de Prólogo)

TABLET & PEN : LITERARY LANDSCAPE FROM THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST

EDITED BY REZA ASLAN, REGIONAL EDITOR: SHOLEH WOLPE (IRAN)

The countries that stretch along the broad horizons of the Middle East—from Morocco to Iran, from Turkey to Pakistan—boast different cultures, different languages, and different religions. Yet the literary landscape of this dynamic part of the world has been bound together not by borders and nationalities, but by a common experience of Western imperialism. Keenly aware of the collected scars left by a legacy of colonial rule, the acclaimed writer Reza Aslan, with a team of four regional editors and seventy-seven translators, cogently demonstrates with Tablet & Pen how literature can, in fact, be used to form identity and serve as an extraordinary chronicle of the disrupted histories of the region.

Acting with Words Without Borders, which fosters international exchange through translation and publication of the world’s finest literature, Aslan has purposefully situated this volume in the twentieth century, beyond the familiar confines of the Ottoman past, believing that the writers who have emerged in the last hundred years have not received their full due. This monumental collection, therefore, of nearly two hundred pieces, including short stories, novels, memoirs, essays and works of drama—many of them presented in English for the first time—features translated works from Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Turkish. Organized chronologically, the volume spans a century of literature—from the famed Arab poet Khalil Gibran to the Nobel laureates Naguib Mahfouz and Orhan Pamuk, from the great Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis to the grand dame of Urdu fiction, Ismat Chughtai—connected by the extraordinarily rich tradition of resplendent cultures that have been all too often ignored by the Western canon.

By shifting America’s perception of the Middle Eastern world away from religion and politics, Tablet & Pen evokes the splendors of a region through the voices of its writers and poets, whose literature tells an urgent and liberating story. With a wealth of contextual information that places the writing within the historical, political, and cultural breadth of the region, Tablet & Pen is transcendent, a book to be devoured as a single sustained narrative, from the first page to the last. Creating a vital bridge between two estranged cultures, "this is that rare anthology: cohesive, affecting, and informing."

—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

BREAKING THE JAWS OF SILENCE

“A deeply humane and aesthetically exhilarating collection.”  —ROBERT OLEN BUTLER, AUTHOR OF LATE CITY

“Every piece in this anthology situates the poet in a world at war with its citizens throughout history and around the globe. They seek to expose both tyranny and tarnished examples of liberty: the bloodied, ill-fitting coat of General Washington, the “stained cheeks” and “weathered plumage” of Lady Liberty who wanders the streets of New York, the ghosts of Tiananmen Square, and the protesters in white shirts “on the other side of the world.”  —WORLD LITERATURE TODAY

“Sholeh Wolpe provides generous service in showing readers the different ways that poets commit to their own voices as they call out The Deadly Silencer, sounding off in a world that does not listen, indifferent to their commitment. (Robert Bly’s poem, beginning the collection, speaks to this indifference and apathy.) Despite the world’s resistance, this collection affirms that what Shelley said is true: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. —THE HUFFINGTON POST

“A truly miraculous collection. Sholeh Wolpe has not only brought together some of the most prominent poets in the world today, she has created a work of both truth and beauty that gives voice to the voiceless across the globe.” —REZA ASLAN, AUTHOR OF NO GOD BUT GOT & ZEALOT

THE SCAR SALOON

“Sholeh Wolpé’s poems are political, satirical, and unflinching in the face of war, tyranny and loss. Talismanic and alchemical, they attempt to transmute experience into the magic of the imagined. But they also dare to be tender and funny lyrical moments.” — CHRIS ABANI, AUTHOR OF SMOKING THE BIBLE

“In a world where cultures and religions are recklessly facing off, Sholeh Wolpé writes careful poems that cast a light on some of what we all hold in common.” — BILLY COLLINS, U.S. Poet Laureate 2001-2003

“The Scar Saloon is a humane and compassionate book in which horror is balanced by love, pain by pleasure, denial by sensuality, seriousness with humor. Many of the poems are set in the Middle East, but Sholeh Wolpé is clearly a poet of the world.” — CHARLES HARPER WEBB, AUTHOR OF SIDEBEND WORLD

SONG OF MYSELF

Whitman is even more delicious in Persian!

Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, translated into Persian by Sholeh Wolpé and Mohsen Emadi.

Commissioned by The University of Iowa International Writing Program