A quick glance at the current state of teaching, exploration, and translation of Persian literature on the global level shows the extent to which Afghan poets have been constantly overlooked or understudied by the major scholars of the field. Barely we come across modern Persian poetry or modern world literature anthologies, major literary translation or research projects which the works of pioneering modern poets of Afghanistan have been included as representatives of today’s Persian literature on the world stage. One of the consequences of such an exclusionary approach to engage this body of literature with the contemporary world literary narratives has been the absence of Afghan literature in the category of world border literature. This void becomes more palpable if we compare the case of Afghanistan with other similar examples such as the Mexican-US border literature on the world stage and mainstream awareness. This presentation briefly examines literary narratives of global migration in the poetry of Elyas Alavi who is often listed among the most prominent poets of Afghanistan but his outstanding work is yet to receive scholarly attention it deserves. I will focus on Alavi’s long poem Brother Khosrow (K?k Khosrow, 2013), published in his recent collection, Frontiers (Hod?d, 2014) as an example of world border literature with particular attention paid to three key themes: displacement, exilic existence and liminal living.

Bold Acts and Fluid Boundaries: "Worlding" Iranian Diaspora Literature Written in English or Published First in English This paper concerns itself with those writers who live outside the boundaries of Iran and whose work engages Iran, and the cultural maps of Iran, but also challenge the centrality of the category of Persian literature as a geographic and cultural marker. Considering the novels of Shahriar Mandanipour, the short stories of Omid Fallahazad, who both make strategic choices about which language to write in and where their audiences lie, I consider that their work has moved beyond the category of strictly Persian literature. Other writers of the Iranian diaspora, whose primary novelistic language is English, such as Salar Abdoh, Laleh Khadivi, and Jasmin Darznik, also bring Iran and Iranian culture to audiences of the English-speaking world. These choices--linguistic, cultural, and their ability to challenge the cultural hegemony of a sole location and a sole linguistic audience present us with a new and happy dilemma. Shall we consider instead these literary texts and authors as "world" authors and literature, and read them more critically through the lens of a transnational, globalized Iranian literary tradition in the making? What are the challenges, hazards, utilitarian aspects of rethinking this literary Iranian "worlding"?

When in 1827 Goethe declared “National literature is now rather an unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach” he had been long engaged in reading Persian, Chinese, and other non-Western literary works in translation. Goethe was so profoundly moved and inspired by Hafiz’s poetry that he wrote his own collection of poems, Die West-Östlicher Divan (The West-Eastern Divan. The worldliness of Persian literature acknowledged and embraced by Goethe has since been repeatedly confirmed in flows and exchanges between Persian and Western literatures. In this presentation, I would like to focus on one example of such circulation: the transmutation of Franz Kafka’s novella Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) in Iran. Kafka’s novella was first introduced to Iranians in 1950 through a Persian translation by Sadeq Hedayat, arguably modern Iran’s most prominent and influential literary figure. Well over three decades later in 1989, a renowned Iranian translator, Farzaneh Taheri, published a new translation of The Metamorphosis. Taheri’s translation was followed by Manuchehr Bigdeli Khamseh’s in 2008. Between these two translations in 2000, Mostafa Eslamieh, a writer and translator, published a novella entitled The Continuation of Metamorphosis or the Return of Gregor Samsa. I will argue that these translation and the rewriting of The Metamorphosis, demonstrate how Persian literati have engaged with the concept of world literature. Drawing both on theories of translation and the conceptualizations of world literature, my analysis will reveal how the instances of relay translation paved the way for The Continuation of The Metamorphosis, or the Return of Gregor Samsa. I will analyze this reworking of Kafka’s novella as a metaphor for reimagining Iran’s current cultural isolation and a reanimation of imaginative transfers and exchanges that have long placed Persian within the currents of world literature.

Ahmad Shamlu's (d. 2000) 1951 Qat'nameh, which we can productively translate as The Manifesto, announces the rebirth in commitment (ta'ahhod) of this Iranian luminary's poetic persona. The Manifesto, Shamlu's second poetic venture after the now roundly-dismissed and derided juvenilia of his first collection, Ahang-ha-ye faramush shodeh (Forgotten Songs; 1947), features a poetic persona suddenly awakened from an earlier Iranian jingoism-and, to have Shamlu himself explain it, the Romanticism that accompanied it-to an acute realization of his place in a nascent revolutionary Third World. Although The Manifesto predates the Bandung Conference by four years, the four poems within it feature a prescient Third Worldism that imagines transnational connections across national borders, particularly in the poem "Sorud-e bozorg" ("The Grand Anthem"), addressed to one Shen-Cho, "an unknown Korean comrade." Of the other poems in the collection, "Ode for the Man of the Month of Bahman" remembers the sacrifice of Taqi Arani (d. 1940) and the group of fifty-three Communists arrested by the Shah's government in 1937; "Until the Red Blossom of a Shirt" declares the poetic "I's" newfound dedication to a collective "shoma" ("You"); and, finally, "Song of a Man Who Killed Himself" tells the story of how the poet was politically awakened after his readings of Federico García Lorca's (d. 1936) poems. The poetic persona is so moved by the scene of Lorca's death at the hands of Franco's Nationalists that he "kills" himself, that is, the poet who wrote Forgotten Songs: "I killed him / -myself- / and I shrouded him in his forgotten song. / In the basement of my memory, / I buried him." This paper takes up Shamlu's political awakening in The Manifesto as a significant instance of "transnationalism-from-below" as explained by Lionnet and Shih in their Introduction to the 2005 collection Minor Transnationalism. While Shamlu expresses his solidarity with Marxist revolutionaries, he neither toes a specifically Soviet line nor adopts wholesale Communist socialist realism in the collection-a set of poems that has been for the most part ignored in Anglophone criticism until now. In its method, the paper thus proposes a way of reading Shamlu's Manifesto as representative of broader transnational trends in the Global South and Third World at the dawn of the Cold War and in the midst of American aggression in Korea (1950-1953).