'The Book of Sounds, ' released as a dual language edition as part of The Operating System's "Glossarium:: Unsilenced Texts" series, is Mehdi Navid's first novelette, translated from the Farsi by Tina Rahimi. The book was not publishable in Iran.
The Book of Sounds is an honest exploration of the socio-political context of contemporary Iran, the challenges, hopes and dreams of actual people living in this context, much like the book's characters, among the pages of an episode-- a space whose "door" is to be eventually "turned over as a page."
Through Navid's inventive poetic prose, sounds evolve into the main filter through which the narration takes place. Throughout the book, the reader will notice an unconventional use of syntax, and a fresh approach to auditory imagery, which is uniquely married to the common logic of everyday words.
Mehdi Navid (b. 1981) is an Iranian author, translator and editor. His works include a collection of poetry in Persian titled تو نیامدی بهنگام / جای تو سر شب آمد [You Didn't Arrive in Time / Dusk Fell Instead] published by Bon-Gah publications, an unpublished novella, بطری]ها و بدن]ها [Bottles and Bodies] and کتاب اصوات [The Book of Sounds]. He is currently working on two novellas, one concerning an infamous historical incident which occurred in Iran the 90s involving a number of Iranian authors and another on the assassination of secular intellectuals and writers in the mid-nineties, which is known as chain-murders. He has also translated numerous works from Samuel Beckett, Richard Brautigan and William S. Burroughs to Farsi. He worked as literary general editor for Ney Publication Company, and Rokhdad-e-No Publication House. He also worked as a journalist for Karnameh Magazine. Currently, he is editor-in-chief of Pagard Publications.
Tina Rahimi is an Iranian teacher, writer, and translator. She received her MA in English Language and Literature from Allameh Tabataba'i University in 2005, and her PhD in Media and Communication from the European Graduate School in 2013. She has worked as a writer and content-creator for language companies such as Living Language and Rosetta Stone. She has taught Farsi to students from around the world and has also participated in translation projects such as "Seeing Studies" by Documenta 13. She has translated articles by contemporary philosophers such as Slavoj Zizek and Judith Butler, poems by John Keats, and a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. She currently lives in Madrid, Spain.
