<i>Emerson in Iran: The American Appropriation of Persian Poetry</i> by Roger Sedarat (A Book Review)

In his recent book, Emerson in Iran: The American Appropriation of Persian Poetry, Roger Sedarat, professor of English at CUNY’s Queens College, has placed Ralph Waldo Emerson’s engagement with classical Persian poetry at the center of his study. Emerson found his way to Persian literature in the 1840s and, despite his illiteracy in Persian, translated nearly two thousand lines from Persian poets via the intermediary German renderings by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall. Building on and inspired by earlier scholarship, mostly in the form of essays and book chapters, Emerson in Iran, as one of the few monographs ever published in the field, sets out to illuminate the influence of Emerson’s practice of translation on his original works and, subsequently, American poetry. The book also demonstrates how American literary translation was influenced by Emerson’s appropriative renderings and his general attitude to foreign voices. The book’s cover shows a black and white image of Emerson whose contrast with the circular, oriental motifs of the colorful mosaics in the background is emphasized by two brilliant vertical borders. Dedicating the work to his two countries and foregrounding his hybrid identity as a poet-scholar inheritor of both Iranian Sara Khalili Jahromi Paris-Sorbonne University France