Poetry: Five different translations of Shervin Hajipour’s Persian protest song ‘Baraye’

Published under this note are five different English translations of Shervin Hajipour’s Persian protest song “Baraye.” Released in 2022, in the wake of Mahsa Amini’s death in police custody, this single rapidly and contagiously became an anthem for the uprisings in the aftermath, within and outside Iran, in institutions and in streets, and has since then rippled out towards other shores, translated and performed by crowds, groups, and individuals in different, related contexts.

The translations here were prepared by the participants of the “Multilingual Poetry” strand of SummerSALT 2024 (of which I was a part), the intensive translation summer school for emerging translators held at Colombo, Sri Lanka as part of The SALT project, and were performed at the concluding presentations.

To listen to five renditions one after the other was to see how each translation was supplementing the other (and the poem), one opening up a line where the other had chosen concision, another abstracting a specificity, another embellishing a suggestion; it was also to be roused socially and emotionally, to be reminded again and again that there is so much for which we fight, and so much more for which we live. Read more