2025 Readings 2

 There are some works of culture, books or films or whatever, that seem to exist on your intellectual frontier, sometimes for years. You've heard or them or sometimes you even own them, but you never, for myriad reasons, never get around to reading or watching them. A good example of that is Sadegh Hedayat's The Blind Owl, which is my second book of this year. Hell, for that matter, I think I actually, somewhere, own or at least owned a copy of The Blind Owl, which now means that I have two copies of it floating around. It's a classic of contemporary Iranian fiction, although it was written in exile, either completed in France or at least started in France and later finished in India. It was published in 1937, with it's most popular English translation being D.P. Costello's 1957 edition, although I read Naveed Noori's 2011 translation, which Noori argues is a translation that is truer to the original (and less "domesticated," a new cultural translation term to me, at least the term, although not the concept). I enjoyed it a lot, but I could also see others groaning and giving up in frustration. I described it to my friend Sheila as sort of mad, laudanum-induced fever dream that Fernando Pessoa might have if he fell asleep reading Poe.