The Blind Owl
 Cover designed by Sadegh Hedayat | |
| Author | Sadegh Hedayat |
|---|---|
| Language | Persian |
Publication date | 1937 |
| Publication place | Iran |
Published in English | 1957 |
| ISBN | 978-1-84749-069-8 |
The Blind Owl(1936;Persian:بوف کور,Boof-e koor,) isSadegh Hedayat'smagnum opusand a major literary work of 20th-centuryIran.Written inPersian,it is narrated by an unnamed pen case painter, who addresses his murderous confessions to a shadow on his wall that resembles an owl. His confessions do not follow a linear progression of events and often repeat and layer themselves thematically, thus lending to the open-ended nature of interpretation of the story.
Background
[edit]The Blind Owlwas written during the latter years of the rule ofReza Shah.It is believed that much of the novel had already been completed by 1930 while Hedayat was still a student inParis.Hedayat was inspired by European literature and ideas, and challenged many traditional Iran conventions in the novel, a quality that has often marked him as the father of modernist Persian literature.[1]
Plot
[edit]The novel tells the story of an unnamed pen case painter, who, while in despair after losing a mysterious lover, addresses his morbid confessions to a shadow on his wall that looks like an owl. He sees in his macabre, feverish nightmares that "the presence of death annihilates all that is imaginary". Death hangs over the narrator, who claims that "[w]e are the offspring of death and death delivers us from the tantalizing, fraudulent attractions of life" and that, "[t]hroughout our lives, the finger of death points at us." The novel is in two parts. The first is a surrealist, dreamlike narrative of the opium-addicted narrator, the woman he both loves and loathes, and a cackling, turban-wearing old man. The second part retells that story in a more realistic tone, and includes details that appear to contradict the first part.
Translations
[edit]The Blind Owlwas first translated intoFrenchbyRoger LescotduringWorld War II,and published asLa Chouette Aveugle(1953), and later by Pasteur Vallery Radot, a member of the French Academy. The book was well received in the French literary circles.[2]The Blind Owlwas translated intoEnglishby D. P. Costello (1957), byIraj Bashiri(1974, revised in 1984 and again in 2013), by Naveed Noori (2011) and by Sassan Tabatabai (2022). It has subsequently been translated into many other languages. In 2023 a book was published in Tehran by Deed (Sight) press titledAround the World in Eighty Five Yearsby Jahangir Hedayat and Farzad Shahrusvand, young translator ofThe Blind Owl,in which they described exactly the whole presses of translations of the novella in 50 languages and also a lot of information about books, films, plays and paintings created under influence of the Blind Owl all over the world.
Film
[edit]The novel was made into a film in 1974, directed byKioumars Derambakhsh,starringParviz Fanizadeh,Farshid FarshoodandParvin Solaymani.[3]
It was also very loosely adapted into the 1987 filmThe Blind Owl[4]directed byRaúl Ruiz.
It was adapted into a 2018 feature film,The Blind Owl: Boofe Koorby Iranian-Canadian Mazdak Taebi.[5]
References
[edit]- ^Coulter, Yasamine C. "A Comparative Post-Colonial Approach to Hedayat's The Blind Owl." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 2.3 (2000)
- ^Ghanoonparvar, M. R. (2006), Moretti, Franco (ed.),"The Blind Owl (Sadeq Hedayat, Iran, 1941)",The Novel,vol. 1, Princeton University Press, pp. 794–802,doi:10.1515/9780691243757-040,ISBN978-0-691-24375-7,retrieved2023-04-30
- ^The Blind Owl on IMDB
- ^"La chouette aveugle".www.imdb.com.
- ^The Blind Owl: Boofe Koor on IMDB
External links
[edit]- Online Persian text
- Hedayat's original handwriting of The Blind Owl
- Iraj Bashiri's translation
- Symbolism of women in Hedayat's "Blind Owl",by Massoume Price,Iran Chamber.
- This Book Will End Your Life: The Greatest Modern Persian Novel Ever Writtenby Porochista Khakpour
- The Blind Owl in Internet Speculative Fiction Database