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Event Details:
Join us for a virtual conversation with Dr. Abbas Milani and Dr. Alina Utrata to discuss the book An Encounter with Dylan Thomas by Ebrahim Golestan. Published by Mage Publishers in 2022, the book is edited and translated by Dr. Abbas Milani, and includes material found in the new Ebrahim Golestan archive at Stanford University.
About the book:
Abadan, 1951. Iran and Britain are bracing for battle over the continued British monopoly of Iran's oil. Twenty-nine-year-old Ebrahim Golestan, who was to become a towering figure in Iranian cinema and literature, encounters Dylan Thomas, the famous Welsh poet, who died two years later at the age of thirty-nine from bronchial disease and pneumonia. More for his celebrity than an intimate knowledge of the subject, Thomas had been sent to Iran by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company to write a script for a propaganda film about the company's supposedly salutary role in the country. But for a few hours, Golestan and Thomas pause amidst the escalating standoff between their two countries and speak candidly about poetry, history, philosophy, and the perils of translation.
Published here for the first time is the English translation (with facing pages in the original Persian) of Golestan's unflinching portrayal of that encounter, revealing, all too clearly, how unsuited Thomas was for the task in hand.
Accompanying this is an account of Thomas's time in Iran, written by Abbas Milani, together with Alina Utrata, then a Ph.D. candidate and Gates Cambridge scholar. Based on the poet's letters, journals, and archival material in England and Wales, it helps to shed further light on an episode long shrouded in mystery and plagued by controversy.
The publication coincided with the hundredth birthday of Ebrahim Golestan. To mark the occasion, Dr. Milani included a personal introductory essay on Golestan's life and work, examining his pioneering approach to film and his important contribution to Iranian literature, despite living in exile for most of his adult life.
Ebrahim Golestan was a towering Iranian filmmaker and literary figure. Born in Iran in 1922, he founded his own film studio, Golestan Films, and created documentary films as well as the feature films Brick and Mirror and The Secrets of the Treasure of the Jinn Valley. He was close with the eminent Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad until her death in 1958 and produced her film The House is Black. In 1975, he left Iran for the United Kingdom and continued his literary work in exile.
Dr. Abbas Milani is the Director of the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies at Stanford University, an Adjunct Professor, and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His expertise is U.S.-Iran relations as well as Iranian cultural, political, and security issues. Milani is the author of numerous books in Persian and English. Most recently, he published 30 Portraits (Persian Circle). Milani has also translated numerous books and articles into Persian and English. He has published more than 250 essays and book reviews in journals and papers.
Dr. Alina Utrata is a Career Development Research Fellow at St John's College, Oxford University. She recently completed her PhD in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge as a 2020 Gates-Cambridge, where her research focused on the political theory of corporations. She received her MA in Conflict Transformation and Social Justice from Queen’s University Belfast as a 2017 Marshall Scholar and her BA in History from Stanford University in 2017. Her work has appeared in the American Political Science Review and the Boston Review.
If you need a disability-related accommodation for this event, please contact us at iranianstudies@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by September 17, 2024.
Event is part of the Stanford Festival of Iranian Arts