Michelle Quay is a scholar and translator of Persian literature and was the inaugural winner of the Mo Habib Translation Prize for Persian Literature in 2023. She teaches Persian Language and Literature, in addition to Iranian Cinema and Culture, at Brown University and holds a Ph.D. in medieval Persian literature from the University of Cambridge. Her contemporary literary translation work has appeared in Asymptote Journal, The Kenyon Review, World Literature Today, Words Without Borders, Two Lines Press, and elsewhere.
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This interview took place in person over coffee in Providence, Rhode Island.
Seán Carlson: Your English translation of Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime by Reza Ghassemi (Riz̤ā Qāsimī) has been published as the world’s eyes are on Iran—with the book coming out two and a half weeks after the U.S. and Israel commenced military strikes on the country. Much uncertainty remains around the conflict’s timeline and trajectory. I’d like us to look more deeply past the present, but what about the novel speaks to this particular moment?
Michelle Quay: Some aspects of Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime really relate to the current situation: this is an exile novel written in Paris by an Iranian who was forced to leave and has had work censored under the Islamic Republic. The narrator of the novel is a thinly veiled version of the author and his own experiences of exile, even though he writes in a funny and comic and flippant voice. It’s the main theme, the trauma, the ruptures caused by migration.
But I feel torn up about it, actually. My approach to Persian translation is that I’m really interested in showcasing excellence. People often look to take an almost anthropological approach—like, this is a window into Iran, or this is a bridge, these metaphors we use. The novel was written for its original context. It’s not here just to teach you something. It’s not tourism by another means. Part of the reason I was very interested in this novel is that it’s extremely literary and well-versed in all of these different traditions. I’m worried about all of this getting collapsed into geopolitics.
SC: Even though your translation is appearing at this point in time, it’s important to note that Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime was first published in Persian thirty years ago. Looking beyond the news cycle, how does its broader lens on exile and diaspora inform this work?
MQ: The reality is that this diaspora experience was, and is, so common for Iranians across Europe and in Los Angeles, Toronto, and elsewhere. A regular consumer of news might not realize it, but many of the opinions that we’re hearing about Iran are shaped by the diaspora who have deep connections but often haven’t been back in decades, kind of in an in-between state.
The status of the diaspora as a mediator for others, even in the news, is really important to understand. It’s something that Porochista Khakpour picked up on in the introduction she wrote to the novel, hitting on this paranoia that comes out especially in exile for those experiencing a particularly fraught political environment with so much suspicion existing within the community.
SC: Khakpour refers to the novel as “a parable of the shadow self.” Your publisher Deep Vellum describes it as piecing together “the story of a life shattered by exile.” How do you see this arc?
MQ: We have Yadollah, a man living in Paris in this ramshackle, rundown building with a bunch of other Iranians and immigrants. So he’s literally split between the physical spaces of Iran and France. Some of the Iranians are going back, but he’s not one of them. When he is murdered, he’s also split between life and afterlife. In one way, the structure is pretty regular as it switches back and forth between the point of view from life and the afterlife. He’s being interviewed by the angels of death, Nakeer and Monkar, who are understood in Islam to be inquiring into the status of those who have died. We have some thoughts right away of who might be responsible for the narrator’s death, but I won’t give any spoilers. As for the effect of exile, Yadollah quickly reveals to us that he is also navigating a multiple personality disorder. So the entire work engages with this shattering or rupturing that happens within one’s psychology when forced into exile.
There are, of course, elements of this that are deeply Iranian in the way that Ghassemi writes it, and in the poems he quotes, and in the jokes that he makes about the situation. But there’s also an incredible amount of universalism in this novel. It’s easy to relate to the narrator’s psychology, his neuroticism. He explores the coming of modernity along with these themes about being overwhelmed by depression and nihilism and confusion in a way that’s relatable to many immigrants as well as those of us who sometimes live the life of the mind a little too seriously.
SC: Could you tell us about your own journey toward discovering the artistry of Reza Ghassemi? He had a successful career as a playwright in Iran before going into exile in Paris, where he has continued to have great success as a musician and as a novelist while also dabbling in film.
MQ: Reza Ghassemi is one of these genius, polymath types. He was famous first for his theater, but he also became such an accomplished musician playing the setar, even going on to perform with Mohammad-Reza Shajarian, one of the great Persian traditional singers and composers. But I first learned about Ghassemi as a novelist when Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime received the prestigious Houshang Golshiri Award for Best First Novel in 2002. Since this book was originally published as چوبها ارکستر شبانهی همنوایی by Nashr-e Ketab Corp. in Los Angeles, it didn’t end up going through the censorship process that’s typical for books published in Iran.
Then, by pure happenstance, they were also able to get the book published in Iran during these brief few years of reform where things opened up slightly in terms of media freedoms. It would never get published there now, but because it was published as it did, it became something of a literary hit within Iran. For many, it was such a breath of fresh air. It’s just completely different, with its post-modernist viewpoint, technique, and style. It’s really validating to hear from people in Iran who are glad to know about its translation so the novel can reach an even wider audience.
SC: Did this response to Ghassemi’s past work place any additional pressure on your translation?
MQ: I didn’t quite realize the scope of Ghassemi’s popularity, even when I started working on the novel. One of my metrics for choosing what I translate is whether I need to talk to a friend about this book even if they aren’t familiar with Iran and don’t read Persian. If the answer is yes, then I’m going to think about translating it. With Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime, I found it very complicated. I started translating it because I wondered for myself what was going on within the novel and I felt the need to share it with people that I care about.
SC: Given Ghassemi’s experience as a playwright, did the imagery of the stage infuse the novel?
MQ: The entire text is extremely theatrical in terms of its dialogue and its staging. It’s almost like Ghassemi is staging a production in a theater when his narrator is being interviewed by the angels of death. In particular, as I mentioned already, one of them is supposed to be Faust from F.W. Murnau’s film. The other is supposed to be Chief Bromden, played by Will Sampson, in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. You can tell that Ghassemi is obviously invested in cinema, too.
The structure is vignette-like. It’s only five chapters, but each chapter is broken into a number of parts, maybe 15 or 16 parts within each chapter that are only two or three pages. They end up working as fast-moving vignettes and snapshots of different moments, and as a reader you’re left trying to put this puzzle back together. And all of the dialogue is straight out of the theater.
SC: And do you see the same in terms of the writing’s musicality, also coming from a musician?
MQ: The title Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime is supposed to be an ironic comparison of this loud, chaotic, rundown building that’s home to an immigrant community with a symphony. There’s an intense focus on sounds. The residents are living in these small attic rooms. They don’t have their own bathrooms. And the narrator is always going out, and the sounds that he hears are how he’s able to identify different people walking and different things happening. He uses a diverse set of sound verbs, more than other writers I’ve encountered in Persian.
You could say it’s musical, but overall I see the prose as extremely poetic in certain parts. I heard Ghassemi reciting some excerpts during a talk, and from listening to him it was very obvious to me that he’s really well versed in Persian poetic tradition, just by the way he approached his reading. There’s a specific style of recitation called déclamer, and I didn’t appreciate how it could be used for reading prose as well. Ghassemi is infinitely attuned to the sound of his novel all the way from the title through to the prose and the actual events that make up the narrative.
SC: You earned your doctorate in medieval Persian literature. For those whose familiarity with Persian writing has been informed by the global staying power of the 13th century Sufi mystic Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, more widely known as Rumi, have you seen his mainstream and multilingual embrace become separated from the culture or tradition from which he emerged?
MQ: Rumi is possibly the most contentious example because he’s been the most commodified and often stripped of Islamic content. This is usually the primary accusation that U.S. academics throw out at less scholarly translations of his work. Some translators have less interest in maintaining the original form, even if they capture the sentiment well. The main point is how much Rumi’s work has lost its original context while being repurposed as a more New Age-y, ecumenical version found today.
I will say that in the first chapter of Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime, our narrator gives us roughly a dozen poetic citations from the classical tradition. In doing so, he’s broadly rejecting the classical tradition, which would include the works of Rumi, as a real source of advice for the modern world. He goes through different historic pieces of advice one by one, and we see how each gives us this general guidance but without clarity around what we need to actually do with it, how to apply it today. As a Sufi poet, Rumi’s job was to advise mystics who wanted to follow the path to learn how to make their way to God, so his poetry has an extremely didactic tone, right? Ghassemi is like, no—no didactic tone; it’s not helping us navigate the world we live in.
SC: You’re now based in Providence, Rhode Island, but your exposure to the Persian language began as a child growing up in Southern California and continued through your academic paths. How have each of these places contributed to your evolving understanding of the language?
MQ: I grew up in Irvine, California. Between Los Angeles and Orange County, there are hundreds of thousands of Iranian and Iranian-Americans in the area. I didn’t know anything about the Persian language or about Iran as a child, only that I had all of these Iranian friends and one friend’s mom ran a community school that taught Persian and they very generously invited me to join. I was in high school and curious to learn, so I started going there after school. I was surrounded by four and five year old Iranian kids who all spoke the language perfectly but couldn’t read and write, so it was an ideal environment to learn Persian as a living language.
I’ve since learned that scholarship often treats Persian almost like Latin, approaching the language as if it’s relevant primarily for understanding the classics, almost like a dead language. So I found my early instruction to be a really vibrant way to learn within an active community. Many of the Iranians in Southern California spoke with a Tehrani dialect, but then there was the added influence of being shaped by their diasporic experience and being surrounded by English.
Because of the era when many of the most authoritative speakers of Persian within our local community had left Iran, typically shortly before or shortly after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, it was like a snapshot of how Persian was in those days. And yet, Iran, and the Persian language in use there, has continued to evolve massively ever since. For instance, while at the University of Cambridge, I met an entirely different community of Iranians who had left much more recently. And I gained this entirely different picture of what’s going on with their contemporary slang.
Ultimately, the way that I keep up with these changes in language is through media, through films, through Iranian friends living all around the world who send me Instagram Reels. We’ve entered this globalized phase where it’s much less of a challenge to keep up with Persian today.
SC: This engagement of yours with contemporary culture and perspective on language as ever-evolving informs your approach to Persian instruction, both practically and academically.
MQ: The academic study of Persian literature is a field that is traditionally extremely focused on grammar and translation with a goal of helping prepare people to be able to read these classical poetic texts. These require so much context that for the inclusion of a single world you might need three pages of explanation in English to provide the necessary background for its meaning.
This is the sort of “dead language,” so-called “classics of the East” approach that you encounter. But having grown up in Southern California speaking Persian with my friends, I thought there had to be another way here that also respects and integrates contemporary, spoken Persian.
Looking at teaching methods for other languages, this might sound obvious. Like, would you teach German without speaking German? But this is real: people often teach Persian through English, which is less of a study of language and more of a study of traditional literatures. I went through that system too, but I never would have come out being able to speak Persian if I hadn’t studied in L.A. with other children and learned from everyday life with my friends. I want to leave the door open with language. I have a lot of heritage students, both Iranian and Afghan, where the traditional method of teaching doesn’t make sense for them. They don’t all necessarily want to read Rumi in its original. Some of them just want to be able to speak with their grandparents.
SC: We should clarify as well: The terms Persian and Farsi refer to the same language, but aren’t always treated as interchangeable. Could you explain this distinction and its reasoning?
MQ: Persian is the academic proper name for the language in English, just like German. We don’t refer to German as Deutsch when we’re speaking in English, right? We call that an endonym, or the name that’s spoken inside the language. A lot of community members who are more engaged with the academic side feel strongly that we use Persian in proper academic and written contexts. If we don’t, it’s like divorcing us from the context of 3,000 years of Persian history, so they don’t want us to cut ourselves off from that tradition. There is also a pragmatic side of the community that is happy to say Farsi, because that’s what they use in their own lives.
SC: Your publisher Deep Vellum has a mission to bring the world into conversation through literature. We have more access to information than ever before, but still we collectively seem to suffer from an inability to listen to or understand one another. Is it possible to overcome this?
MQ: I think diving into the particular—diving into the extremely personal—and getting a very thorough psychological portrait of a person from another background in another country can be revealing of historical moments and patterns of thought that are still shaping their lives. Maybe we can take refuge in the particularity of an individual psyche, but we don’t want to just listen to one story. Maybe we can strip away some of the noise of the news and our biases and the generalizations of imperialist narratives or colonialist narratives or anti-imperialist narratives or anti-colonialist narratives. What can we see if we just focus on the human side more easily?
Is literature—is translation—really going to help us jump the divide when we’re fighting the attention economy centered around our screens? That’s a good question. But, you know, if we aren’t doing the intense, sometimes unrewarded, nitty-gritty work of translation, we’re missing an opportunity to at least start some of these conversations, and I believe that’s still valuable.
SC: Could you tell us about your literary translation process? How did you approach the text?
MQ: This was my first book-length project, and I wouldn’t advise anyone to take the method that I have taken, which was: I started working on this a long time ago, more than ten years ago. And my Persian is in a much different place today than it was when I started. Initially when I was translating, a lot of it was philological in nature. I was asking, what is this text trying to tell me?
Ghassemi’s sentences are sometimes long and complicated, which is actually great as a translator. His style reads as literary right away, whereas a lot of Persian literature right now favors more of a plain style. When translated into English, this can often risk coming across flat and repetitive. Of course, I didn’t face this problem because Ghassemi is a literary mastermind.
But another challenge is that as translators we often say that English can’t handle long sentences very well. If I have five or six subordinate clauses, like, I’ve got to do something about them. So I tried to keep that style as much as I could, but sometimes there were these elaborate towers of words, and I had to split them into two or find another way to keep the meaning and feeling.
SC: Even if Ghassemi prefers his writing in the rear view, was he involved in your translation?
MQ: Ghassemi was a dream to work with as a translator, because he’s extremely helpful, but he has no interest or desire to interfere. He actually said, “there’s no worse torture for me than reading my own work,” so he definitely doesn’t want to read it again, let alone in English.
I Skyped with him many times before Skype was declared defunct, and he was so helpful just answering all of my questions. As I mentioned, his work is very much post-modern in style, so there are a lot of meta narrative games going on. There were a number of times where I had to ask him, am I missing something? Or can you explain this one to me? He was always helpful.
SC: We couldn’t conclude without talking about the parts of translation that aren’t translatable. What were some of the most difficult pieces of this puzzle you had to find a way to solve?
MQ: There was a passage toward the conclusion of the novel that was a real problem for me. In simple terms, the turtle doves return and are squawking outside the narrator’s residence, but he imagines they’re chanting. The scene carried him back to the days of the revolution when people were yelling in the streets, and he’s kind of freaking out, trying to talk himself down from what they could be saying. He offers a few different iterations, changing the wording each time.
Obviously the sound is very important, but so is the meaning. So I asked what Ghassemi wanted me to prioritize. He was like, they’re both important. In the end, I think I came up with a halfway decent enough solution, where I prioritized the sound a little bit more because I wanted to be clear that they were rhyming and sort of like slogans, but I was always attuned to their meaning too. I landed on “Off with his head!” “Up out of bed!” “Creation is bred!” and “Go on ahead!” With “Creation is bred!” I felt like I had to compromise on the meaning in favor of the sound, but at the end of the day, we’re all just doing our best out there. There are no translators who make no mistakes. And there are no translators who are ever totally satisfied with their work.
SC: Thinking about that sense of meaning, is there anything in particular you hope readers of Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime appreciate or remain attuned to take away from the text?
MQ: The primary theme is just that the trauma of this exile is so deeply rooted into personal psychology, but with this very classic Iranian humor in the face of very serious issues. Ghassemi is a great representative of that. But even now with war going on, I’m still getting all of these jokes and memes from Iranian friends. Not to generalize too much, but it’s one way they seem to handle things, like Ghassemi’s narrator’s flippancy to the great question of existentialist nihilism.
SC: Now that this novel has found its way into the world, what else is holding your attention?
MQ: I’m working on the sample for another novel that was originally written in Persian, A Drum for Golsa by Manizha Bakhtari, which involves three generations of Afghan women and their experience with the Taliban and, again, migration. The youngest of the three is in Austria. I’m working on it with my students, and they’re reading it overnight and some of them said they’ve cried over her experience of being in exile. So, coincidentally, I’ve come back to the same theme.
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