The Blind Owl

Book by Sadegh Hedayat

For other uses, see Blind Owl (disambiguation).

The Blind Owl

Cover designed by Sadegh Hedayat

Author| Sadegh Hedayat
Language| Persian

Publication date

| 1937
Publication place| Iran

Published in English

| 1957
ISBN| 978-1-84749-069-8

The Blind Owl (1936; Persian: بوف کور, Boof-e koor, listenⓘ) is Sadegh Hedayat's magnum opus and a major literary work of 20th-century Iran. Written in Persian, it is narrated by an unnamed pen case painter, who addresses his murderous confessions to a shadow on his wall that resembles an owl. His confessions do not follow a linear progression of events and often repeat and layer themselves thematically, thus lending to the open-ended nature of interpretation of the story.

Sadegh Hedayat, Tehran, 1930

## Background

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The Blind Owl was written during the latter years of the rule of Reza Shah. It is believed that much of the novel had already been completed by 1930 while Hedayat was still a student in Paris. Hedayat was inspired by European literature and ideas, and challenged many traditional Iran conventions in the novel, a quality that has often marked him as the father of modernist Persian literature.[1]

## Plot

[edit]

The novel tells the story of an unnamed pen case painter, who, while in despair after losing a mysterious lover, addresses his morbid confessions to a shadow on his wall that looks like an owl. He sees in his macabre, feverish nightmares that "the presence of death annihilates all that is imaginary". Death hangs over the narrator, who claims that "[w]e are the offspring of death and death delivers us from the tantalizing, fraudulent attractions of life" and that, "[t]hroughout our lives, the finger of death points at us." The novel is in two parts. The first is a surrealist, dreamlike narrative of the opium-addicted narrator, the woman he both loves and loathes, and a cackling, turban-wearing old man. The second part retells that story in a more realistic tone, and includes details that appear to contradict the first part.

## Translations

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The Blind Owl was first translated into French by Roger Lescot during World War II, and published as La Chouette Aveugle (1953), and later by Pasteur Vallery Radot, a member of the French Academy. The book was well received in the French literary circles.[2] The Blind Owl was translated into English by D. P. Costello (1957), by Iraj Bashiri (1974, revised in 1984 and again in 2013), by Naveed Noori (2011) and by Sassan Tabatabai (2022). It has also been translated into many other languages.

In 2023 a book was published in Tehran by Deed (Sight) press titled Around the World in Eighty Five Years by Jahangir Hedayat and Farzad Shahrusvand, young translator of The Blind Owl, in which they described exactly the whole presses of translations of the novella in 50 languages and also a lot of information about books, films, plays and paintings created under influence of The Blind Owl all over the world.

## Film

[edit]

The novel was made into a film in 1974, directed by Kioumars Derambakhsh, starring Parviz Fanizadeh, Farshid Farshood and Parvin Solaymani.[3]

It was also very loosely adapted into the 1987 film The Blind Owl[4] directed by Raúl Ruiz.

It was adapted into a 2018 feature film, The Blind Owl: Boofe Koor by Iranian-Canadian Mazdak Taebi.[5]

## References

[edit]

1. ^ Coulter, Yasamine C. "A Comparative Post-Colonial Approach to Hedayat's The Blind Owl." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 2.3 (2000)
2. ^ Ghanoonparvar, M. R. (2006), Moretti, Franco (ed.), "The Blind Owl (Sadeq Hedayat, Iran, 1941)", The Novel, vol. 1, Princeton University Press, pp. 794–802, doi:10.1515/9780691243757-040, ISBN 978-0-691-24375-7, retrieved 2023-04-30
3. ^ The Blind Owl on IMDB
4. ^ "La chouette aveugle". www.imdb.com.
5. ^ The Blind Owl : Boofe Koor on IMDB

## External links

[edit]

* Online Persian text
* Hedayat's original handwriting of The Blind Owl
* Iraj Bashiri's translation
* Symbolism of women in Hedayat's "Blind Owl", by Massoume Price, Iran Chamber.
* This Book Will End Your Life: The Greatest Modern Persian Novel Ever Written by Porochista Khakpour
* The Blind Owl in Internet Speculative Fiction Database

* v
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Sadegh Hedayat

Books|

* The Benefits of Vegetarianism (1927)
* Three Drops of Blood (1932)
* The Blind Owl (1937)
* The Stray Dog (1942)

Short stories|

* "The Stray Dog" (1942)

Related films|

* Dash Akol (1971 adaptation)
* The Blind Owl (1987 adaptation)
* From No. 37 (2009 documentary)

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Contemporary Persian and Classical Persian are the same language, but writers since 1900 are classified as contemporary. At one time, Persian was a common cultural language of much of the non-Arabic Islamic world. Today it is the official language of Iran, Tajikistan and one of the two official languages of Afghanistan.
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