“The words are like a scrim upon a page, / Obscuring what might be there beyond the scrim. / I can dimly see there’s something or someone there... ”

// “Scrim” by David Ferry

This print brings together three poems—“Scrim”, “Soul”, and “That Now Are Wild And Do Not Remember”— from David Ferry's 2012 collection, Bewilderment, and sets them alongside Sassan Tabatabai's renderings into Persian. Ferry's poems appear here with his permission. Among his many achievements as a poet and translator, he is winner of the National Book Award.

Tabatabai's translations were originally commissioned by the publisher of Azadi magazine, for issue number 105, 2018.

About Tabatabai's work as a translator, Ferry has written:

“We hear tenderness and nobility i n the poems he translates from the Persian, in a voice always so careful and so respectful of the experiences the poems register, both personal and historical.”