The Blind Owl and Other Stories

The Blind Owl

and Other Stories

Sadeq Hedayat

Translated by D.P. Costello
and Deborah Miller Mostaghel

calder publications
an imprint of

Alma BOOKS Ltd
3 Castle Yard
Richmond
Surrey TW10 6TF
United Kingdom
www.almaclassics.com

The Blind Owl first published as Buf-e Kur in 1937
Translated by D.P. Costello
First published by John Calder (Publishers) Limited in 1957
Translation © John Calder (Publishers) Limited, 1957
First published by Alma Classics in 2008. Repr. 2010, 2012

The other stories in this volume first published in Buried Alive (1930); Three Drops of Blood (1932); The Stray Dog (1942)
Translated by Deborah Miller Mostaghel, and edited by Nushin Arbabzadah
A translation of these stories first published by Alma Classics in the volume Three Drops of Blood in 2008. Reprinted 2010, 2012, 2017

This new edition of The Blind Owl and Other Stories first published by Calder Publications in 2017

Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

isbn: 978-0-7145-4458-8

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents

Sadeq Hedayat: His Life and Works

Bibliography

The Blind Owl

1

2

3

4

5

Hajji Morad

Three Drops of Blood

The Legalizer

Whirlpool

Fire-Worshipper

Abji Khanom

The Stray Dog

The Broken Mirror

Davoud the Hunchback

Madeleine

Dash Akol

The Man Who Killed His Passions

Buried Alive

Acknowledgements

Notes

Sadeq Hedayat: His Life and Works

Sadeq hedayat was born on 17th February 1903 and died on 9th April 1951. He was descended from Rezaqoli Khan Hedayat, a notable nine­teenth-century poet, historian of Persian literature and author of Majma’ al-Fosaha, Riyaz al-’Arefin and Rawza al-Safa-ye Naseri. Many members of his extended family were important state officials, political leaders and army generals, both in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Hedayat is the author of The Blind Owl, the most famous Persian novel both in Iran and in Europe and America. Many of his short stories are in a critical realist style and are regarded as some of the best written in twentieth-century Iran. But his most original contribution was the use of modernist, more often surrealist, techniques in Persian fiction. Thus, he was not only a great writer, but also the founder of modernism in Persian literature.

Having studied at the exclusive St Louis French missionary school in Tehran, Hedayat went to Europe, supported by a state grant, spending a year in Belgium in 1926–27, a year and a half in Paris in 1928–29, two terms in Reims in 1929 and a year in Besançon in 1929–30. Having still not finished his studies, he surrendered his scholarship and returned home in the summer of 1930. This provides a clue to his personality in general, and his perfectionist outlook in particular, which sometimes resulted in nervous paralysis.

Back in Tehran, Hedayat became the central figure among the Rab’eh, or Group of Four, which included Mojtaba Minovi, Bozorg Alavi and Mas’ud Farzad, but had an outer belt including Mohammad Moqaddam, Zabih Behruz and Shin Partaw. They were all modern-minded and critical of the literary establishment, both for its social traditionalism and intellectual classicism. They were also resentful of the literary establishment’s contemptuous attitude towards themselves, and its exclusive hold over academic posts and publications.

In the early 1930s, Hedayat drifted between clerical jobs. In 1936 he went to Bombay at the invitation of Sheen Partaw, who was then an Iranian diplomat in that city. Predictably, he had run afoul of the official censors, and in 1935 was made to give a pledge not to publish again. That was why, when he later issued the first, limited edition of The Blind Owl in Bombay, he wrote on the title page that it was not for publication in Iran, predicting the possibility of a copy finding its way to Iran and falling into the hands of the censors.

During the year in Bombay, he learnt the ancient Iranian language Pahlavi among the Parsee Zoroastrian community, wrote a number of short stories and published The Blind Owl in fifty duplicated copies, most of which he distributed among friends outside Iran.

He was back in Tehran in September 1937, although he had returned with great reluctance and simply because he did not feel justified in continuing to depend on his friend’s hospitality in Bombay. In 1939, he joined the newly founded Office of Music as an editor of its jour­nal, Majelleh-ye Musiqi (The Music Magazine). It was literary work among a small group of relatively young and modern intellectuals, including Nima Yushij, the founder of modernist Persian poetry. He might well have regarded that as the most satisfactory post he ever had.

It did not last long. After the Allied invasion of Iran and abdication of Reza Shah in 1941, the Office of Music and its journal were closed down, and Hedayat ended up as a translator at the College of Fine Arts, where he was to remain until the end of his life. He also became a member of the editorial board of Parviz Khanlari’s modern literary journal Sokhan, an unpaid but prestigious position. Even though the country had been occupied by foreign powers, there were high hopes and great optimism for democracy and freedom upon the collapse of the absolute and arbitrary government. The new freedom – indeed, licence – resulting from the Reza Shah’s abdication led to intense political, social and literary activities. The modern educated elite were centred on the newly organized Tudeh Party, which was then a broad democratic front led by Marxist intellectuals, although by the end of the ’40s it had turned into an orthodox communist party. Hedayat did not join the party even in the beginning, but had sympathy for it and had many friends among Tudeh intellectuals.

But the party’s support for the Soviet-inspired Azerbaijan revolt in 1946, which led to intense conflicts within its ranks, and the sudden collapse of the revolt a year later, deeply upset and alienated Hedayat from the movement. He had always been a severe and open critic of established Iranian politics and cultural traditions, and his break with radical intellectuals made him a virtual émigré in his own land.