a number of years ago I read a French translation of one of Sadeq Hedayat’s books, Enterré vivant, and I remember enjoying it, albeit in a vague / indistinct way — I couldn’t tell you now what it’s about. since then I’ve intended to read more, and Sassan Tabatabai’s new translation of Blind Owl is my first foray into this.
Blind Owl is a short, extremely dark novel about a man descending into some kind of “madness”. in the first part (roughly the first third of the novel) he recounts his encounter with a mysterious, beautiful woman he glimpsed in a vision who then showed up at his house, lay down on his bed, and died, leaving him to dispose of her corpse. in the second part, we get what is either the man’s backstory or, perhaps, an alternate version of these events, presented as some kind of testimony, documenting the man’s complicated family situation — not knowing, for example, whether the man identified as his “uncle” is actually his father or his father’s identical twin brother; one of them was killed by a cobra during a test of love but no-one is sure which — and especially troubled relationship with his wife, whom he refers to almost exclusively as “the slut” or “my slut wife” and similar, because he believes-slash-knows that she is cheating on him, while the two of them have never actually had sex. as the man becomes increasingly paranoid and disconnected from reality, he becomes obsessed with an “old oddments guy” in the neighborhood who he believes is sleeping with his wife, and ultimately, during an ill-fated sexual encounter, he stabs his wife and she, too, dies.
some aspect of this worked for me; I was particularly interested in the collapse of time as the narrator vacillates between memories of his childhood and his present(s) but also as the narrator is guided by the oddments guy through the process of dismembering and burying the mysterious woman of the first section: led out of the city to a cemetery at the food of the mountains, below the ruins of an ancient village; given a ceramic jug that is a relic of this past. I was reminded of some of the poems in George Seferis’s Mythistorema (albeit crossed with Kim Young-ha’s “Diary of a Murderer”), the way archaeology and present life bleed together. later the narrator’s contemporary coins are replaced by third-century Sasanian coins, though he does not comment on this (it’s pointed out by one of Tabatabai’s endnotes).
this is secondary, though, to the misogyny and the violence as the narrator’s obsession with his wife’s affairs becomes all-consuming. I was less compelled by this, and the repetitions in the prose (everything tests like “the butt end of a cucumber”) that I think were meant to emphasize the narrator’s deteriorating mental state didn’t quite work for me. the one moment here that stood out to me was the narrator’s realization, when he offends her at one point, that his wife actually has feelings — but this disconnect is never followed up on.
Tabatabai’s translation is mostly good, especially knowing that this is from Hedayat’s original manuscript (apparently “the most reliable, and the only unaltered text of Blind Owl”); this excuses some of its idiosyncrasies. nonetheless, there kept being misplaced or missing commas that sometimes made things difficult to parse:
He put the earthen jug, which he had wrapped in a filthy cloth under his arm and went toward the hearse-wagon and climbed to the seat with unusual nimbleness.
I had to go back and reread this twice to figure out there’s supposed to be a comma after “cloth” (or possibly after “arm”, but I think that’s less likely).
I enjoyed this enough that I would read more of Hedayat’s work, but not enough that I’d say it’s a strong, general rec. if you like extremely dark psychological novels with a hint of the speculative, though, this might be more your speed than it was mine.
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