Vernacular transactions: Aḥmad Shāmlū’s Persian translations of Langston Hughes’s poetry

ABSTRACT In 1973, Iranian poet Aḥmad Shāmlū (d. 2000) published a collection of Persian translations of world poetry, Hamchūn kūchah-ī bī intihā (Like an Endless Alley). This collection includes the translation into Persian of fifty-three poems by Langston Hughes (d. 1967). In these translations, Shāmlū and his co-translator Ḥasan Fayyād make a point of juxtaposing standard written Persian with the spoken vernacular. For instance, in “Tarānih-yi ṣābkhūnih” (“Ballad of the Landlord,” 1940), they mirror Hughes' use of the vernacular “Don't you 'member I told you about it / Way last week?” by using spoken Persian rather than the standard written variety. Even the poem's title uses the vernacular “ṣābkhūnih” for “landlord” instead of the written “ṣāḥibkhānah.” This article addresses how Hughes's Persian translators' process of “bāzsāzī” rebuilding creates something new in the target language by carrying over Hughes's original vernacular instead of breaking it down.