**A new English translation of one of the most important, controversial Iranian novels of the twentieth century

Winner of the 2023 Lois Roth Persian Translation Award

A Penguin Classic**

Written by one of the greatest Iranian writers of the twentieth century, Blind Owl tells a two-part story of an isolated narrator with a fragile relationship with time and reality. In first person, the narrator offers a string of hazy, dreamlike recollections fueled by opium and alcohol. He spends time painting the exact same scene on the covers of pen cases: an old man wearing a cape and turban sitting under a cypress tree, separated by a small stream from a beautiful woman in black who offers him a water lily. In a one-page transition, the reader finds the narrator covered in blood and waiting for the police to arrest him. In part two, readers glimpse the grim realities that unlock the mysteries of the first part. In a new translation that reflects Hedayat s conversational, confessional tone, Blind Owl joins the ranks of classics by Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky that explore the dark recesses of the human psyche.

Autorentext

Sadeq Hedayat (Author)
Sadegh Hedayat (1903 - 1951) was an Iranian writer and translator. Born in Tehran to an aristocratic Iranian family, Hedayat - after a brief period studying in France - became a devotee of Western literature and an exponent of Iranian folklore and history. He is credited with introducing many modern European writers to Iran, translating works from now-seminal authors such as Franz Kafka, Anton Chekhov and Jean-Paul Sartre. His novel Blind Owl is considered to be the earliest modernist work written in Persian and one of the great Iranian novels of twentieth century. He later returned to France, where, in 1951, he died by suicide.

Sassan Tabatabai (Translator)
Sassan Tabatabai is a poet, translator, editor, and lecturer of Persian literature at Boston University.

Klappentext

Blind Owl, Sadeq Hedayat's masterpiece, tells the story of a young pen-case painter and his heartbreak. Isolated and alone, he mourns the loss of a mysterious love while descending into recollections and dreams frosted over by opium and alcohol, and imbued with the images he paints: an old man, a cypress tree, a beautiful woman, a waterlily. In stark, lyrical terms, the puzzle of the pen-case painter's grief is slowly unveiled ...

As inscrutable as it is universal, Blind Owl is the seminal work of Persian modernism, and one of the great novels of the twentieth century.