Stephen Watts, Drawn Poem(s),
excerpted from A Book of Drawn Poems
(Sylvia, 2025).
Lemon Sun آفتاب لمانی
Ziba Karbassi
Translated from the Persian
by Stephen Watts
& Ziba Karbassi
Tenement Press #25
978-1-917304-13-9
175pp [Approx.]
£17.50
PREORDER DIRECT FROM TENEMENT HERE
Published 20th March 2026 (Nowruz.)
A book of breath / a breathing book /
a first English language edition of Karbassi’s
poetry / a collaborative inhale and exhale.
Ziba Karbassi
Translated from the Persian
by Stephen Watts
& Ziba Karbassi
Tenement Press #25
978-1-917304-13-9
175pp [Approx.]
£17.50
PREORDER DIRECT FROM TENEMENT HERE
Published 20th March 2026 (Nowruz.)
A book of breath / a breathing book /
a first English language edition of Karbassi’s
poetry / a collaborative inhale and exhale.
بهت و حیرت همین است
همین
خود این دره ست
که همینطور با دهان باز بر جا خشکش زده
از هیبت این کوه
این کوه بلند
همین
خود این دره ست
که همینطور با دهان باز بر جا خشکش زده
از هیبت این کوه
این کوه بلند
Astonishment is
this valley
lain on its back
and drained dry
its mouth cracked
open
and
astonished at
the sheer size
of its mountain
Ziba Karbassi was born in Tabriz in northwestern Iran, and had to flee the country with her mother and sisters when she was in her teens. She has lived in London for much of the last thirty-seven years, and gained attention with her astonishing poem ‘Sangsar’ / ‘Death By Stoning,’ a work concerning the stoning to death of a relative of her mother. The dense and open-meshed lyric of Karbassi’s poetry is mapped onto her senses of reality and justice, and achieves a balance rarely managed in contemporary poetry... At times her writing reminds me of Marina Tsvetaeva. Moreover, the risk of her work—its closeness to her own life and the rifts she allows into her language as a reflection of the traumas of much in all of our lives—surely gives the lie to the argument that exile or distance from ‘homeland’ deprives the ‘exiled’ poet of their urgency, relevance and jouissance.
I know of very few poets worldwide whose lyric intensity matches hers or whose language is as honest to terror and to love. She has written that ‘breath and language are equated’ and I feel that the poems included [in this volume] bear witness to this: that she becomes her poems; her poems become her. Her work is banned in Iran but can be widely accessed there through social media and surely that says a lot. The title of one of her finest poems precisely (and literally) is ‘Blood Home Land.’
The lyric density and fracturing within her language might be thought to provide real barriers to translation (from a ‘singing’ language to one less so) but in fact I think these zones of traumatic change precisely offer wonderful scope for translation. I am lucky to have the poet in the same city—in London—so that we have been able to sit down and make the first literal together rather than have it arrive as a document. I can see the poet’s reactions as she gives a first version, feel the language coming out from her, and I can open out with immediate questions her sometimes halting English. And then, because I sense that my own poetry is quite close to hers and because I think I have understood at least some of her experiences, I can try to empathise her poems into a translation that tries to remain close to her Persian while working inside the roots of English. I hope that these translations—works which have been bounced back and forth between the two of us until they feel ‘done’—may serve the purpose of ‘exploding’ something within the ‘target’ language to enrich our English.
That the poet was born and grew up in Tabriz, a city of more than one culture and many languages, is significant for the genesis of her work: her mother tongue is, so to speak, shared between Farsi and Azeri. I wish that she was better known here in her adopted home, but although a chapbook was published in London (Exiled Writers Ink, 2009)—and she regularly gives inspired readings of her poetry—the Tenement publication of Lemon Sun is Karbassi’s first full-length book in English.
Stephen Watts, an edited iteration of a text
first written for mpT: Modern Poetry in Translation
(Scorched Glass: Iranian Focus, 2015).
A reading at the Royal College of Physicians, London
for International Women’s Day, 2023 /
A reading for Jhina & Hasti Hossein Panahi
(Sponsored by One Law for All and the Woman, Life, Freedom Charter.)
Explosion of Words /
Karbassi & Watts at the National Poetry Library
Southbank Centre, London /
13th April 2022
An excerpt from an evening at the National Poetry Library—presented and curated by poet, translator and language activist, Stephen Watts—to mark, celebrate, and commemorate his exhibition (with Hannes Schüpbach), ‘Explosion of Words,’ held at the Nunnery Gallery (Bow, London). ‘Explosion of Words’ was a cinematic installation—gathering together film works and photography by Schüpbach—that drew from and refracted Watts’ ongoing Bibliography of Modern Poetry in English Language Translation, a singular and independent project that has developed over the course of some forty-years of archival research to portray a ‘cosmos of world poetry’ via a bibliographic assembly of titles published in English language edition. Pages from Watts’ Bibliography were printed as a frieze or wallpaper and adorned the gallery walls. The programme at the National Poetry Library featured contributions from Karbassi and Adnan al-Sayegh, alongside musician and storyteller Bird Radio.
LISTEN TO THE EVENING IN FULL HERE
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Breath: The Elixir of Poetry
Oxygen is the component of air that makes breath possible. Although it is only one fifth part of air itself, it is that crucial part that makes life possible. The poet begins the creative process from the body and the senses, from touching and from looking. It is the concentration on breath that takes the poet to a new level of perception, sharpening sight and hearing. Without this ‘elixir’ of the breath, poetry is like air without oxygen: the living word and energy of poetry is born from the metamorphosis of words that travel along the line of breath. The ‘born’ poet knows this and so knows how to recreate the word, turning it into a vector of energy: no longer merchandise but ‘happening,’ a force capable of lifting off the page and carrying us away. Language that is rooted in breath knows how to instil the pulse of rhythm into poetry. Or in other words, the pulse of the senses will be infused within language by the poet. This is how poetry becomes a music of the body, how it gradually transforms both the poet and the surrounding world to create a life of its own. The poetry of breath withholds and accumulates energy within language. And then suddenly it is set off in a leap of the senses. Words fixed in language don’t lose their life essence but give birth to one another, as if each word were the open womb of the next. Words that continually and sensually love one another, giving birth to the great emotions: grief, joy, hatred, love, affection, desire, obsession, vulnerability, folly, revenge. For a split second the poet is left breathless—it is in that split second that perception is crystallised around one sensation and, as in a chemical reaction, releases the word. It is then up to the poet as an expert technician to be able to do the rest.
Ziba Karbassi (1997)
Ziba Karbassi—born in Tabriz, northwestern Iran—began writing poems from an early age. Her first book in Persian was published in her early twenties and, since then she has published regularly, with more than twelve titles now available not only in her mother tongue but internationally. Having left Iran in 1989, Karbassi has been widely translated (to date, her work has appeared in over fifteen languages) and she is widely regarded as an acclaimed poet living in exile. Karbassi’s dense, revolutionary and lyrical work achieves an intensity of space rare in contemporary poetry, and she has performed her work widely across Europe and America. Chairperson of the Association of Iranian Writers in Exile, 2002 to 2004—in 2009—Karbassi was awarded the Golden Apple Poetry Prize (Azerbaijan) and served as chair of Exiled Writers Ink (a group that develops, champions and promotes the creative literary expression of refugees, migrants and exiles), 2012 to 2014. In 2012, Karbassi was chosen by the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre (CPRC, Birkbeck, University of London) as one of fifteen revolutionary poets in a worldwide survey of published writings from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. From 2019 to 2021, Karbassi was a director of the Iranian PEN Centre in Exile, and she continues to work as a committee member and editor with the Exiled Writers Ink group in London, where she lives and works.
Stephen Watts was born in 1952. His father was from Stoke-on-Trent and his mother’s family from villages high in the Italian and Swiss Alps. He spent very vital time—in place of university—in northern Scotland, especially the island of North Uist, but since 1977 has lived mainly in the richly multilingual communities of the Whitechapel area of East London. Geographies and location (as also their negative theologies) are urgent to his life and his work. Recent books include Ancient Sunlight (Enitharmon, 2014; reprinted 2020) and Republic Of Dogs / Republic Of Birds (Test Centre, 2016; Prototype, 2020). A 16mm, 70-minute experimental film—The Republics—was made from the latter by Huw Wahl, 2019. A book of Watts’ Drawn Poems was published by Joe Hales’s Sylvia imprint, 2025. Watts is also a translator, working closely with exiled poets and—inter alia—has co-translated Pages from the Biography of an Exile by the Iraqi poet Adnan al-Sayegh (Arc Publications, 2014) and Syrian poet Golan Haji’s A Tree Whose Name I Don’t Know (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2017). Watts’ translation research has been the subject of two exhibitions: ‘Swirl Of Words / Swirl Of Worlds,’ PEER Gallery (Hoxton, London) for which he edited a book of that title (its subtitle ‘Poems From 94 Languages Spoken Across Hackney’ describes it best), and ‘Explosion Of Words’ with the Swiss artist Hannes Schüpbach, which celebrated his 2000-page Bibliography of Modern Poetry in English Translation at the Straühof Gallery (Zurich, Switzerland) and Nunnery Gallery, (Bow, London) in summer 2021 and 2022 respectively. Watts own poetry has been translated into many languages, with full collections available in Italian, Czech, Arabic, German and Spanish. Watts is a contributing editor with Tenement Press.
Karbassi & Watts at the National Poetry Library
Southbank Centre, London /
13th April 2022
An excerpt from an evening at the National Poetry Library—presented and curated by poet, translator and language activist, Stephen Watts—to mark, celebrate, and commemorate his exhibition (with Hannes Schüpbach), ‘Explosion of Words,’ held at the Nunnery Gallery (Bow, London). ‘Explosion of Words’ was a cinematic installation—gathering together film works and photography by Schüpbach—that drew from and refracted Watts’ ongoing Bibliography of Modern Poetry in English Language Translation, a singular and independent project that has developed over the course of some forty-years of archival research to portray a ‘cosmos of world poetry’ via a bibliographic assembly of titles published in English language edition. Pages from Watts’ Bibliography were printed as a frieze or wallpaper and adorned the gallery walls. The programme at the National Poetry Library featured contributions from Karbassi and Adnan al-Sayegh, alongside musician and storyteller Bird Radio.
LISTEN TO THE EVENING IN FULL HERE
Breath: The Elixir of Poetry
Oxygen is the component of air that makes breath possible. Although it is only one fifth part of air itself, it is that crucial part that makes life possible. The poet begins the creative process from the body and the senses, from touching and from looking. It is the concentration on breath that takes the poet to a new level of perception, sharpening sight and hearing. Without this ‘elixir’ of the breath, poetry is like air without oxygen: the living word and energy of poetry is born from the metamorphosis of words that travel along the line of breath. The ‘born’ poet knows this and so knows how to recreate the word, turning it into a vector of energy: no longer merchandise but ‘happening,’ a force capable of lifting off the page and carrying us away. Language that is rooted in breath knows how to instil the pulse of rhythm into poetry. Or in other words, the pulse of the senses will be infused within language by the poet. This is how poetry becomes a music of the body, how it gradually transforms both the poet and the surrounding world to create a life of its own. The poetry of breath withholds and accumulates energy within language. And then suddenly it is set off in a leap of the senses. Words fixed in language don’t lose their life essence but give birth to one another, as if each word were the open womb of the next. Words that continually and sensually love one another, giving birth to the great emotions: grief, joy, hatred, love, affection, desire, obsession, vulnerability, folly, revenge. For a split second the poet is left breathless—it is in that split second that perception is crystallised around one sensation and, as in a chemical reaction, releases the word. It is then up to the poet as an expert technician to be able to do the rest.
Ziba Karbassi (1997)
Ziba Karbassi—born in Tabriz, northwestern Iran—began writing poems from an early age. Her first book in Persian was published in her early twenties and, since then she has published regularly, with more than twelve titles now available not only in her mother tongue but internationally. Having left Iran in 1989, Karbassi has been widely translated (to date, her work has appeared in over fifteen languages) and she is widely regarded as an acclaimed poet living in exile. Karbassi’s dense, revolutionary and lyrical work achieves an intensity of space rare in contemporary poetry, and she has performed her work widely across Europe and America. Chairperson of the Association of Iranian Writers in Exile, 2002 to 2004—in 2009—Karbassi was awarded the Golden Apple Poetry Prize (Azerbaijan) and served as chair of Exiled Writers Ink (a group that develops, champions and promotes the creative literary expression of refugees, migrants and exiles), 2012 to 2014. In 2012, Karbassi was chosen by the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre (CPRC, Birkbeck, University of London) as one of fifteen revolutionary poets in a worldwide survey of published writings from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. From 2019 to 2021, Karbassi was a director of the Iranian PEN Centre in Exile, and she continues to work as a committee member and editor with the Exiled Writers Ink group in London, where she lives and works.
Stephen Watts was born in 1952. His father was from Stoke-on-Trent and his mother’s family from villages high in the Italian and Swiss Alps. He spent very vital time—in place of university—in northern Scotland, especially the island of North Uist, but since 1977 has lived mainly in the richly multilingual communities of the Whitechapel area of East London. Geographies and location (as also their negative theologies) are urgent to his life and his work. Recent books include Ancient Sunlight (Enitharmon, 2014; reprinted 2020) and Republic Of Dogs / Republic Of Birds (Test Centre, 2016; Prototype, 2020). A 16mm, 70-minute experimental film—The Republics—was made from the latter by Huw Wahl, 2019. A book of Watts’ Drawn Poems was published by Joe Hales’s Sylvia imprint, 2025. Watts is also a translator, working closely with exiled poets and—inter alia—has co-translated Pages from the Biography of an Exile by the Iraqi poet Adnan al-Sayegh (Arc Publications, 2014) and Syrian poet Golan Haji’s A Tree Whose Name I Don’t Know (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2017). Watts’ translation research has been the subject of two exhibitions: ‘Swirl Of Words / Swirl Of Worlds,’ PEER Gallery (Hoxton, London) for which he edited a book of that title (its subtitle ‘Poems From 94 Languages Spoken Across Hackney’ describes it best), and ‘Explosion Of Words’ with the Swiss artist Hannes Schüpbach, which celebrated his 2000-page Bibliography of Modern Poetry in English Translation at the Straühof Gallery (Zurich, Switzerland) and Nunnery Gallery, (Bow, London) in summer 2021 and 2022 respectively. Watts own poetry has been translated into many languages, with full collections available in Italian, Czech, Arabic, German and Spanish. Watts is a contributing editor with Tenement Press.
