About the Panel
Since its first publication in 2008, Mahsa Mohebali’s edgy cult hit, Nigarān nabash, has been on and off the shelves in Tehran. Following Shadi, a cynic and opium addict who cross-dresses to evade hijab law, throughout an apocalyptic day of earthquakes that are destroying the city, the novel offers a view of contemporary Iran too seldom seen in the US – but now available to in translation under the title, In Case of Emergency (Feminist Press, 2021). Please join us for a conversation between scholar Dr. Nasrin Rahimieh and translator Dr. Mariam Rahmani on issues of translation and mistranslation – both literal and cultural– from a Persian Iranian to Anglophone American context.
About the Panelists
Mariam Rahmani is a writer and translator. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Granta, Gulf Coast, BOMB Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Rumpus as well as in exhibition catalogs and her translation in n+1, Columbia Journal, and the collected volume, After Cinema: Fictions From A Collective Memory (Archive Book, 2019). Her 2021 translation of Mahsa Mohebali’s In Case of Emergency, the 2008 Iranian cult hit, was well reviewed in the New York Times and has garnered other positive press in the New York Times “Globetrotting,” Publishers Weekly, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, World Literature Today, and the Center for the Art of Translation. Rahmani holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA and an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University. Among her honors and awards are the 2021 Henfield Prize, the Columbia MFA’s highest honor in fiction, a 2018 PEN/Heim translation grant, and a US Fulbright fellowship. Rahmani currently teaches at UCLA as a Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature.
Nasrin Rahimieh is Howard Baskerville Professor of Humanities and Professor Comparative Literature at the University of California. She is currently the Director of the Humanities Core program at UCI, former Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature (2016-19) and Maseeh Chair and Director of the Samuel Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture (2006-14). Her teaching and research are focused on modern Persian literature, the literature of Iranian exile and diaspora, contemporary Iranian women’s writing. Among her publications are Oriental Responses to the West: Comparative Essays in Select Writers from the Muslim World (1990), Missing Persians: Discovering Voices in Iranian Cultural History (2001), Forugh Farrokhzad, Poet of Modern Iran: Iconic Woman And Feminine Pioneer Of New Persian Poetry (2010) co-edited with Dominic Parviz Brookshaw and Iranian Culture: Representation and Identity (2015). She translated the late Taghi Modarressi’s last novel, The Virgin of Solitude (2008) from Persian into English.
Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies