Blind Owl

by Sadeq Hedayat, Sassan Tabatabai

Genres: Classics; Literary Fiction; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

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

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.

Release date: April 12, 2022

Publisher: Penguin Classics

Print pages: 112

Sample

Introduction

On April 9, 1951, Parisian police were called to a small flat on 37 Rue de Championnet. There they found the dead body of a forty-eight-year-old Iranian writer identified as Sadeq Hedayat, who had apparently committed suicide by gas inhalation. He was found lying on a blanket on the floor of the small kitchen in his apartment. He had sealed the flat to keep the gas from escaping the room as best he could. There was no suicide note. Thus ended the life of one of the most consequential Iranian prose writers of the twentieth century.

Sadeq Hedayat is generally lauded as the father of modernist Persian literature. He is seen as the inheritor of the mantle of Mohammad-Ali Jamalzadeh, the great Persian prose writer of the turn of the century, and is credited with bringing modern Persian literature onto the international scene. Although born into a prominent aristocratic family, his writings display an obsession with characters who populate the fringes of society—the base and the marginalized. Hedayat came of age in the period following Iran’s Constitutional Revolution of 1906, but his most prolific years as a writer coincided with the reign of Reza Shah, who ruled Iran as the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty from 1925 until his forced abdication by the Allies in 1941. This was a period of autocracy in Iran when freedom of speech was severely restricted. In this environment, some intellectuals embraced the new regime and were rewarded accordingly with government positions and comfortable lives, whereas others took an active stance against the curtailed freedoms and the restrictive atmosphere and revolted against the establishment. Hedayat, as a man with little respect for sycophancy and the privileges enjoyed by the upper class, shunned the former group, and as a recluse who kept society at arm’s length, did not join the latter. Instead, he took refuge in the solitary enterprise of the writer. His writings reflect a disdain for both the monarchy and the clerical establishment in Iran. The theme of a people abused by these two powers is a prevalent feature of his works.

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Sadeq Hedayat was born on February 17, 1903, in Tehran, Iran, and was educated in Tehran’s College Saint-Louis (a French Catholic school). In 1925, he received a scholarship to be part of a group of Iranian students to continue their higher education in France. After a number of false starts in different fields, in 1927, a disillusioned Hedayat attempted suicide by throwing himself into the river Marne. In 1930, he returned to Iran without having acquired a degree. Around this time, he started writing Blind Owl, which would become his most famous work. In 1936, Hedayat moved to Bombay to live with the Parsi community and study Zoroastrianism and Pahlavi (Middle Persian). In the same year, he published Blind Owl as a handwritten volume with original illustrations. Only fifty mimeographed copies were made of this edition. He returned to Paris in 1950, where he took his own life on April 9 of the following year.

During his short literary life, Hedayat dedicated himself to the study of Western literature, in particular the works of Kafka, Sartre, Chekhov, and Gogol, and showed great interest in Iranian folklore, Zoroastrianism, and the Pahlavi language (he published a work titled, “Pahlavi Script and Phonetic Alphabet”). Hedayat eventually became one of the central figures in Iranian intellectual circles and joined the literary group known as Rab’eh (“Group of Four”), which also included Mas’ud Farzad, Mojtaba Minovi and Bozorg Alavi. Despite his short literary life, Hedayat was a prolific writer and published a wide range of material, including short stories, plays, travelogues, satires, literary criticism, studies in Persian folklore, and translations from both French and Pahlavi. He is buried in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Hedayat is justifiably considered one of the greatest Iranian writers of the twentieth century.

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Note: The following pages contain details of the story that can spoil the plot. The first-time reader of Blind Owl is urged to skip over this part of the Introduction and return to it after having read the novel.

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Blind Owl tells the story of an isolated narrator with a fragile relationship with time and reality, who relates his own story in the first person, in a string of hazy, dreamlike recollections. The book is divided into two main parts, each of which is followed by a transitional passage that shifts the time and space of the narrative.

In the first part, we are introduced to the unnamed protagonist, a painter of pen-case covers who lives alone in a remote and uninhabited area on the outskirts of an unnamed city. In the opening pages, he tells us that he is trying to relate the story of one incident from his life that has left an enduring, “poisoned” mark on him. He is writing what he remembers, not for the sake of posterity but in order to get to know himself better. The reason he is writing his recollections, he tells us, “is to introduce myself to my shadow—which is hunched over on the wall and swallows everything I write with a voracious appetite.”

The narrator always paints the exact same scene on the pen cases: a hunched old man wearing a cape and turban sitting under a cypress tree, separated by a small stream from a beautiful young woman in black who is bending down to offer him a water lily. One day, a man comes to his door and identifies himself as the uncle who he has never seen. He is a hunched old man wearing a cape and turban. Our protagonist realizes the only thing he has in his house to offer his uncle is a flask of aged wine that was his birthright. ...