The Idiot
آن سالهای دبیرستان این صحنهی ابله داستایفسکی برایم به قدری مقدس بود که آن را با اشکهایم در آن دفترچه ی کذایی ام نوشتم. کسی چه می دانست که با آن زندگی خواهم کرد.
He walked along the road towards his own house. His heart was beating, his thoughts were confused, everything around seemed to be part of a dream.
And suddenly, just as twice already he had awaked from sleep with the same vision, that very apparition now seemed to rise up before him. The woman appeared to step out from the park, and stand in the path in front of him, as though she had been waiting for him there.
He shuddered and stopped; she seized his hand and pressed it frenziedly.
No, this was no apparition!
There she stood at last, face to face with him, for the first time since their parting.
She said something, but he looked silently back at her. His heart ached with anguish. Oh! never would he banish the recollection of this meeting with her, and he never remembered it but with the same pain and agony of mind.
She went on her knees before him--there in the open road--like a madwoman. He retreated a step, but she caught his hand and kissed it, and, just as in his dream, the tears were sparkling on her long, beautiful lashes.
"Get up!" he said, in a frightened whisper, raising her. "Get up at once!"
"Are you happy--are you happy?" she asked. "Say this one word. Are you happy now? Today, this moment? Have you just been with her? What did she say?"
She did not rise from her knees; she would not listen to him; she put her questions hurriedly, as though she were pursued.
"I am going away tomorrow, as you bade me--I won't write--so that this is the last time I shall see you, the last time! This is really the last time!"
"Oh, be calm--be calm! Get up!" he entreated, in despair.
She gazed thirstily at him and clutched his hands.
"Good-bye!" she said at last, and rose and left him, very quickly.
Self Evidence - وضوح
But there was darkness also in men's hearts, and the true facts were as little calculated to reassure our townsfolk as the wild stories going round about the burials. The narrator cannot help talking about these burials, and a word of excuse is here in place. For he is well aware of the reproach that might be made him in this respect; his justification is that funerals were taking place throughout this period and, in a way, he was compelled, as indeed everybody was compelled, to give heed to them. In any case it should not be assumed that he has a morbid taste for such ceremonies; quite the contrary, he much prefers the society of the living and—to give a concrete illustration—sea-bathing. But the bathing-beaches were out of bounds and the company of the living ran a risk, increasing as the days went by, of being perforce converted into the company of the dead. That was, indeed, self-evident. True, one could always refuse to face this disagreeable fact, shut one's eyes to it, or thrust it out of mind, but there is a terrible cogency in the self-evident; ultimately it breaks down all defenses. How, for instance, continue to ignore the funerals on the day when somebody you loved needed one?
The Plague - Albert Camus - Translated by Stuart Gilbert
با «وضوح» روبرو بودیم. البته هرکسی می توانست خود را مجبور کند که آن را نبیند، چشمانش را بنندد و از آن رو بگرداند، اما «وضوح» نیروی عظیمی دارد که بالاخره همه چیز را با خود می برد.
ترجمهی رضا سیدحسینی
درباره ی بیگانه
وقتی که از محدودهی تغییرات استاندارد نرمال جامعه خارج می شوی و به سمت حاشیه های منحنی می روی جامعه تحملت نمی کند. یا تبعیدت می کند یا حذفت. سعی تو برای ارتباط برقرار کردن با محدودهی نرمال بیهوده است، آنها تو را نمی خواهند چون به آنها باور نداری. برای آنها تفاوت تو به این معنی است که تو غریبه ای و بیگانه و همین کافی است که جامعه را با تو دشمن کند. آنها تفاوت های تو را نه تنها ارزش نمی دانند بلکه ضد ارزشی می دانند که می خواهد ساختار آن را به هم بزند. ساختار عرفی که برایش نرمال است و همین نرمال بودن آن را مقدس کرده است.
مهم نیست که غیرطبیعی بودن تو یک ارزش نامیده شود یا نه. مهم این است که غیر طبیعی است و چیزی که غیر طبیعی است، محکوم است. زمانی که بخواهد ارزش های جامعه را تهدید کند غیر طبیعی می شود و محکوم.
دروغ نگفتن، اندیشیدن و عشق ورزیدن دو نمونه اند.
Don't get out too soon!
این رو امروز از یه مصاحبه با یه نویسنده افغانی کانادایی از رادیو شنیدم و بعد روی نت تونستم پیداش کنم. زیباست و واقعی.
One day I asked him why he hadn’t left; why he had stuck it through. He said something I ended up quoting in Wanting Mor. He said that when you want to make a clay pot strong, you put it in the fire. You cannot take the pot out of the fire too soon, or the pot will crack and be useless. He said that God made Adam out of clay, and we are the children of Adam. When we go through our hard times, that is like our firing. We have to endure it, and not take ourselves out of the fire too soon, or we will crack. We have to trust in God that He will take us out when the time is right.
Source -Interview with author Rukhsana Khan
How to read a novel?
Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table.
"You always look so cool," she repeated.
She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw. He was astounded. His mouth opened a little, and he looked at Gatsby, and then back at Daisy as if he had just recognized her as some one he knew a long time ago.
On one level, Daisy is simply telling Gatsby he looks cool and Fitzgerald is telling us that she still loves him, but he doesn't want to just say so. He wants to put us there in the room. Let's look at what he's done to give this scene the texture of a real experience. First he creates a tension between Gatsby and Daisy, and then he complicates it with Tom's sudden insight into their relationship. This moment, suspended in mid-air, is far more effective than if Nick had simply reported that Daisy tried to tell Gatsby that she loved him.
"Yes," cut in Mr. Farzan, "because he is in love with the money and not with Daisy. She is only a symbol."
No, she is Daisy, and he is in love with her. There is money too, but that is not all; that is not even the point. Fitzgerald does not tell you-he takes you inside the room and re-creates the sensual experience of that hot summer day so many decades ago, and we, the readers, draw our breath along with Tom as we realize what has just happened between Gatsby and Daisy.
"But what use is love in this world we live in?" said a voice from the back of the room.
"What kind of a world do you think is suitable for love?" I asked.
Mr. Nyazi's hand darted up. "We don't have time for love right now," he said. "We are committed to a higher, more sacred love."
Zarrin turned around and said sardonically, "Why else do you fight a revolution?"
Mr. Nyazi turned very red, bowed his head and after a short pause took up his pen and started to write furiously.
In retrospect it appears strange to me only now, as I write about it, that as I was standing there in that classroom talking about the American dream, we could hear from outside, beneath the window, the loudspeakers broadcasting songs whose refrain was "Marg bar Amrika!"-"Death to America!"
A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing. I just want you to remember this. That is all; class dismissed.
American Dream
I tried to explain to my students that Mike Gold and F. Scott Fitzgerald had written about the same subject: dreams or, more specifically, the American dream. What Gold had only dreamed of had been realized in this faraway country, now with an alien name, the Islamic Republic of Iran. "The old ideals must die..." he wrote. "Let us fling all we are into the cauldron of the Revolution. For out of our death shall arise glories." Such sentences could have come out of any newspaper in Iran. The revolution Gold desired was a Marxist one and ours was Islamic, but they had a great deal in common, in that they were both ideological and totalitarian. The Islamic Revolution, as it turned out, did more damage to Islam by using it as an instrument of oppression than any alien ever could have done.
Raeding Lolita in Tehran
Fairy Tale
After our first discussion of Lolita, I went to bed excited, thinking about Mitra's question. Why did Lolita or Madame Bovary fill us with so much joy? Was there something wrong with these novels, or with us?-were Flaubert and Nabokov unfeeling brutes? By the next Thursday, I had formulated my thoughts and could not wait to share them with the class.
Nabokov calls every great novel a fairy tale, I said. Well, I would agree. First, let me remind you that fairy tales abound with frightening witches who eat children and wicked stepmothers who poison their beautiful stepdaughters and weak fathers who leave their children behind in forests. But the magic comes from the power of good, that force which tells us we need not give in to the limitations and restrictions imposed on us by McFate, as Nabokov called it. Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabbiness of the subject matter. This is why we love Madame Bovary and cry for Emma, why we greedily read Lolita as our heart breaks for its small, vulgar, poetic and defiant orphaned heroine.
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Illegal Dream
Several months into the class, my girls and I discovered that almost every one of us had had at least one nightmare in some form or another in which we either had forgotten to wear our veil or had not worn it, and always in these dreams the dreamer was running, running away. In one, perhaps my own, the dreamer wanted to run but she couldn't: she was rooted to the ground, right outside her front door. She could not turn around, open the door and hide inside. The only one among us who claimed she had never experienced such fear was Nassrin. "I was always afraid of having to lie. You know what they say: to thine own self be true and all that. I believed in that sort of thing," she said with a shrug. "But I have improved," she added as an afterthought. Later, Nima told us that the son of one of his friends, a ten-year-old, had awakened his parents in horror telling them he had been having an "illegal dream." He had been dreaming that he was at the seaside with some men and women who were kissing, and he did not know what to do. He kept repeating to his parents that he was having illegal dreams.
In Invitation to a Beheading, on the wall of Cincinnatus C.'s jail, which is decorated like a third-rate hotel, there are certain instructions for the prisoners, such as: "A prisoner's meekness is a prison's pride." Rule number six, one that lies at the heart of the novel, is: "It is desirable that the inmate should not have dreams at all, or if he does, should immediately himself suppress nocturnal dreams whose context might be incompatible with the condition and status of the prisoner, such as: resplendent landscapes, outings with friends, family dinners, as well as sexual intercourse with persons who in real life and in the waking state would not suffer said individual to come near, which individual will therefore be considered by the law to be guilty of rape." .
Reading Lolita in Tehran