Poems

I Will Become a Traveller Again

Notes

This poem is written in the persona of a Sufi mystic, a wanderer who relinquishes earthly ties and routines in order to wander freely wherever life takes him.

Again, we changed only a handful of words in Alireza’s literal version. In the second stanza we changed the order of the second and third lines to bring them closer to English syntax by putting the simile after the verb. One word in Persian is difficult to translate in English; in his literal version Alireza translated the fourth line of the second stanza as ‘like a bid settling on the first tree of the world’ whereas, as he explained in the workshop, this word means the last in an infinite sequence – which in English is closest to a term first used in mathematics ‘nth’.

Sarah Maguire, Workshop Facilitator