Translating Parinaz Fahimi

Elhum Shakerifar with Poetry Translation Centre

06.08.2026

Thursday 6th August, 6.30pm

Join us for a poetry translation workshop with translator Elhum Shakerifar and the Poetry Translation Centre. Iranian and non-Iranian speakers are welcome to join the session.

In this special workshop, Elhum Shakerifar will introduce participants to the work of Iranian poet Parinaz Fahimi, offering a deeper insight into artist Armineh Negahdari's creative practice, which is rooted in an engagement with modern and contemporary Iranian poetry.

Beginning with an exploration of Persian poetry as a vessel for history, memory, and cultural continuity in modern Iranian society, Shakerifar will provide context for the enduring role of poetry in Iranian life before introducing Fahimi's work and literary practice. Fahimi's poetry explores the experiences of Iranians and the Iranian diaspora in the UK, reflecting on the ways poetry can serve as a tether to identity, language, and cultural memory.

Through close reading and collaborative translation, via non native Iranian, native and English speakers participants will gain a richer understanding of the resonances between poetry, migration, memory, and visual art.

The workshop will centre on a collaborative translation of Parinaz Fahimi's poem Piccadilly Line, led by Elhum Shakerifar. Guiding participants through the poem line by line, Shakerifar will unpack its grammar, rhythm, imagery, and cultural context, enabling the group to work together to create a vivid and nuanced English translation.

Written towards the end of Fahimi's life and after her cancer diagnosis, knowing she would not return to Iran, Piccadilly Line is both deeply rooted in London and haunted by memory. As the poet travels through the city, the faces she encounters evoke memories of people she once knew - weaving together exile, longing, and the enduring connections between place, identity, and remembrance.

The workshop offers new contexts and critical perspectives through which to experience Armineh Negahdari's exhibition, The Living River. Poetry is a constant presence throughout Negahdari's creative practice, suggesting an approach in which meaning is evoked rather than fixed, remaining open to interpretation and continual transformation.

The exhibition's title draws on contemporary Iranian poet Mohammad Shams Langeroodi's notion of the "living river": a space of continuous movement and change that resists static or singular meaning. This understanding of language as fluid and evolving provides a framework for an introduction to poetry translation, where meaning is not simply transferred from one language to another, but continually negotiated, reimagined, and remade.

Elhum Shakerifar is a writer, translator, producer and curator. Her writing explores multiplicity, in-between languages, opacity and erasure. Her translation work includes ‘Negative of a Group Photograph’ by Azita Ghahreman, co-translated with Maura Dooley (Bloodaxe Books, 2018), which won a PEN Translates Award and was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. She is one of Writerz & Scribez's inaugural Poetry Griots. Alongside her literary practice, Shakerifar is a BAFTA-nominated producer and curator, working through her London-based company Hakawati, named after the Arabic word for "storyteller".

Parinaz Fahimi (1981–2016) was an Iranian poet who studied architecture at SOAS University of London. Although she wrote poetry throughout her life, much of her work was produced during her final years. Her first collection, ‘Poppies with Alef’ (Khashkhāshī bā Alef), was published posthumously in 2015 by Tehran-based Meshki Publications, with an introduction by the acclaimed Iranian writer Ebrahim Golestan, and received widespread critical acclaim.

Elhum Shakerifar has translated a number of Fahimi's poems into English, including 'Cinnamon', which can be read on the Poetry Translation Centre website.

For all press and access related inquiries, please contact Michelle L Johnson, michelle[at]cellprojects[dot]org.

Produced by Bern Roche Farrelly, Head of Programmes, Poetry Translation Centre