Heshmatullah Kamrani is not allowed to die

Heshmatullah Kamrani is not allowed to die

Saeed Barabadi: “Hashmatullah Kamrani” is dead. Now and a few days after his death, I read the news on Telegram. The death toll is so high that his death, neither shocking nor sad, is included.

I wish it would be the same for Heshmatullah Kamrani’s family – if there is such a thing; An ordinary death, lost in the crowd of corona deaths.

I put his name in quotation marks at the beginning of the text, but for me it has been known and discovered for years. He was perhaps the first translator who introduced me to my favorite fictional world, the world of Milan Kundera.

It is true that many people had gone to Kundera before Heshmatullah Kamrani, but at that time, the publication of the novel “Javadangi” was a persian path for me, thirteen and fourteen years old, who wanted to understand life, death, love, God and father. .

Heshmatullah Kamrani is dead, but all the news about his death are limited to a few simple and copied biographical lines that emphasize that he was imprisoned in the years before the revolution because of his leftist beliefs, he translated several novels and articles and finally died on April 25 due to His heart is gone and he is sleeping in the cemetery.

The 79-year-old translator, who at least took a simple look at the works he translated, could remind the reporters of his death how obsessed he was in choosing books, how much he worked hard to think freely and stay away from the taste of the translation market, and how quietly he died.

I found only one interview with Heshmatullah Kamrani on the internet. From the same routine and ineffective interviews of my dear friend Mr. Sayer Mohammadi. The reporter went to the translator for the translation of a new book and asked the usual questions, and Heshmatullah Kamrani gave them sharp and clever answers and did not let him get away with it.

It is strange that even when, under the pretext of answering a question, he admitted that he has eye pain and cannot see easily, Mohammadi did not ask him what difficulties life with eye pain brings for a translator.

Heshmatullah Kamrani is dead. The translator of “immortality” but how can and is he allowed to die? How can a person born in the year of the coup d’état not die from the tyranny of the book license market in the years after the revolution? How can the prisoner of 1953 and the translator of “Neither Angel nor Devil” not tell about the prisons of “Ivan Kalima” for today’s prisoners and die?

Death is such a thing; Finding the strength to do the impossible, and he now has his eye, his painful eye, opened to death.
Heshmatullah Kamrani died during the outbreak of Corona, and the multitude of deaths does not allow the true dramatic burden of his death to be expressed in these few lines, especially that he had a strange obsession with solitude and reading and was one of the quarantined people of the time.

Now there is a chance to read something from his translations in this quarantine. And if we have read it, let’s review it and, by doing so, see the old man with little work and eye disease again, who himself, according to Shamlu, is the one whose eyes are hidden from the world.

@KhabGard

You can also read some of the last words of #Hashmatullah_Kamrani in an interview with Sayer Mohammadi here:

khabgard.com/4405

This post is written by monese_ghamgosar