Persian Lit with The Blind Owl

To read The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat today is to read a confession from a nation in crisis — then and now.

First, let me speak about the translation because with works like this it really matters. I read the 75th anniversary edition of The Blind Owl, translated by Naveed Noori and published in conjunction with the Sadegh Hedayat Foundation. It’s the only English version endorsed by the Foundation and the original text is the handwritten manuscript Hedayat composed in Mumbai. It is also the first English translation by a native Persian and English speaker. This is significant because Noori deliberately preserves the cadences of the Persian language rather than sanding them down into smooth, conventional English (or French, the first translated language of this novel). Noori maintains the almost hypnotic prose and chooses to keep certain Persian terms where English falters, trusting the reader to understand the cultural context as a vital part of the story.

Reading the novel and the preface took me back to The Politics of Translation, in which Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues that translation must preserve the texture of the original rather than flatten it for consumption: ‘[t]he task of the translator is to facilitate this love between the original and its shadow, a love that permits fraying, holds the agency of the translator and the demands of her imagined or actual audience at bay.’ In this translation of The Blind Owl,  there is resistance to that cultural erasure and it is clear that to understand this text, you must be situated in the Iranian context that thrums under the weight of the translation. 

In essence, I am grateful to have been able to interact with this text, as disturbing as it was. 

The book is split into two parts. The first part unfolds as an opium-fueled monologue addressed to a shadow on the wall. The shadow is an owl-shaped figure, which is has a dual symbolism I read into afterwards. In the ‘West’, the owl signifies wisdom but in both Indian and Iranian tradition it represents a bad omen. It’s likely that Hedayat draws from both meanings, as his own life and milieu did, and it begs the question: for the unreliable narrator, barely tethered to reality, what is the purpose of this confession — absolution or annihilation? He recounts an image that haunts him of an ethereal woman by a cypress tree, offering a water lily to an old man. The vision consumes him wholly and what ensues is death and decay in a myriad of gruesome fashions. Time collapses and is intertwined with memories of the past. It feels claustrophobic and reminded me of Jackson Pollock’s series of black paintings (I regret that I don’t yet have more references to Persian art).

The second part of the book has a more earthbound register. The idealised woman from the painting becomes his wife, becomes a whore. His love curdles into jealousy and paranoia. The ethereal aura is gone but we still have an unreliable narrator, and it appears to be another version of reality.  

The misogyny of the text is impossible to ignore and I’d say quite hard to read. Women appear split into two extremes: the silent, sacred muse and the degraded, sexualised wife. There is no fully realised female subjectivity and the violence he directs toward women is grotesque and relentless. 

It doesn’t read a glorification of violence against women but more so a text of male, dare I say, hysteria. And the context is important. Iran of the 1930s, under Reza Shah Pahlavi, was undergoing rapid modernisation: the establishment of the University of Tehran, the construction of the Trans-Iranian Railway, the push towards Western dress, and most dramatically, the 1936 Kashf-e hijab decree, which forcibly banned the veil in public. Education for women and girls expanded and they were able to join the public sphere. But these reforms were imposed authoritatively. If ‘liberation’ is compulsory, it’s not really liberation. This ‘unveiling’ was not a choice but a mandate, and some women withdrew even more from public life to avoid compliance.

At this time in Iran, intellectual debates were raging around how to define the ‘modern woman’ and women were frequently positioned as symbols of the nation’s progress rather than autonomous individuals. And that symbolic burden echoes eerily in The Blind Owl. The narrator cannot see women as people; they are vessels for either purity or corruption and his crisis mirrors a society struggling to reconcile tradition, modernity, sexuality, and control. The masculine panic and the burden of a society seeking to find unimposed identity was conveyed so clearly through the text. 

The novel does not offer a feminist vision; it thrusts upon us a misogynistic psyche full throttle. It both critiques and participates in gender anxieties that endure violently in today’s Iran. In today’s Iran, where this book is banned, the forcible veiling of women is enforced by an unsparingly brutal authoritarian regime. Roughly a century later, the command has changed — from forcible unveiling to forcible veiling — but the authoritarian instinct to regulate women’s autonomy persists. And that’s honestly mind-blowing. I cannot express enough how timely this book feels, especially in capturing masculine panic and the subjugation of women by stripping them of their vital right to CHOOSE. All while being the confession of an opium-soaked madman. 

This is not an easy read. It is dark, violent, and suffocating. You may want to check your state of mind before entering it. But it is short and it’s important. It’s hard for me to give this a rating because I didn’t like this book per se but I respect it enormously and recognise it as a classic I will come back to in a few years’ time.

“The presence of Death destroys and annihilates all superstitions. We are the children of Death and it is Death that rescues us from the falsehoods of life and at the end of life it is He that calls us and summons us closer to himself—During the tender age when we still do not understand human speech, if we pause for a moment while at play, it is to hear the sound of Death… and throughout life it is Death that is pointing at us—Has such an occurrence not happened for everyone whereby suddenly and without season they go into thoughts and so immersed are they in thought that they become unaware of their surroundings and time, and forget what it was that they were thinking of? Then one has to struggle to once more become aware of and familiar with their surroundings and the visible world—This is the sound of death.”