In 1973, Iranian poet Ahmad Shamlu (d. 2000) published a collection of Persian translations of world poetry, Hamchun kuchah-i bi intiha (Like an Endless Alley). The collection begins with a short essay, also by Shamlu, titled “An Introduction to African-American Poetry,” which is followed by the translation into Persian of fifty-three (!) poems by Langston Hughes (d. 1967). Later on in 1986, Shamlu released a stand-alone volume containing twenty-two of the translations, titled Siyah hamchun a'maq-i Afriqa-yi khudam (Black Like the Depths of My Africa). In his translations, Shamlu makes a point of juxtaposing standard written Persian with the spoken vernacular. For instance, in “Taranah-yi sabkhunah” (“Ballad of the Landlord,” 1940), Shamlu mirrors 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: “agih yadat bashah haftah-yi pisham / inu bit guftam.” Even the title uses the vernacular “sabkhunah” for “landlord” instead of the written “sahibkhanah,” which only appears in the Persian translation at the end of the poem where we find in the English original a news headline: “MAN THREATENS LANDLORD.” This paper explores Shamlu’s translations of Hughes’ poems as an instance of “vernacular transaction.” That is, I show how Shamlu’s choice to render certain of Hughes’ lines into a spoken Persian register enacts what Shamlu calls “bazsazi,” or the “reconstruction” of the original poem in the target language. In Shamlu’s translations we find an unusual textual transaction that seriously engages with the function of African-American vernacular language in Hughes’ poems. I thus highlight how the vernacular operates when carried across different cultural contexts and how Shamlu’s translations work to specific political ends in Iran under the Shah, in the 1970s, and again in 1986 after the Islamic Revolution. Finally, as these Persian translations of Hughes’s poetry have not received much attention in Anglophone scholarship, the paper also covers some as-yet-unaddressed aspects of their translation history, including Shamlu’s failure to mention the role his co-translator, Hasan Fayyad, played in the process. I have been in touch with Fayyad to clarify several questions in this regard, and the paper will include new information about his collaboration with Shamlu to translate Hughes’s work into Persian.