Saba Pakdel : part one

Saba Pakdel was born into a family of artists in Tehran, Iran. Growing up in a home of theatre, literature, and cinema, Saba breathed in the quality air of arts from an early age. She completed her BA and MA in English; attended and coordinated literary workshops and poetry readings; published poems, translations, and essays in Persian journals before leaving her home country to Canada in 2017. Once settled, she continued her studies at Simon Fraser University where she worked with Dr. Stephen Collis, Canadian poet and professor. She is currently studying her Ph.D. in English at University of Victoria under the supervision of Dr. Stephen Ross, modernist scholar and professor.

Photo credit: Hossein Pakdel

What are you working on?

My current project is my sweet struggle with the composition of a bilingual book of poetry that gives equal space to both English and Persian languages. The thesis is to use both languages semantically while I strongly intend to avoid exoticizing Persian as an unreadable language in an English environment. The tricky concept here is when a language is unreadable to some, it is ornamental, decorative, and objectified. I started thinking through conditions of possibility for a project as such after attending Summer Writers Session 2021 at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity last summer which included one-on-one sessions with Dr. Jordan Abel and Kaie Kellough. Also, I am currently working on my PhD project which overlaps with the idea of language stuck in a state of in-betweenness in migration theories. Hopefully, the two projects on both sides of research and poetry meet somewhere in the middle to help me with that struggle!