Oh dear God who is always in the kitchenreading the names of my pill bottles,please stand back!I must do the dishesand cook something for lunch, whiletalking with you.No, no need to help me, No!I can handle things on my own,I should vacuum my living roomand I won’t serve burnt food,I will also answer the phone,and should clean my picture frame, do you remember this photo?I was a little baby girl in this oneand you were so generous to me,I didn’t take tranquilizers so often!I could feel your anger after eating strawberries and falling asleep,the day I was thirteen, those white bed sheets and my dreams…sorry to be rude,but you were jealous of my pockets, my girlish purse, and even my wooden jewelry box.Oh dear God who sits in my kitchen!Now I’m a mature woman andI don’t hide the things in my pockets.My purse lies open on the table,and I take one tranquilizer every eight hoursand my doctor has given me a prescription: Do not thinkOh, dear God, please pick up your feet.I want to scrub the floor!
Kitchen God
Feature Date
- April 2, 2019
Series
- Translation
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Copyright © 2018 by Nahid Arjouni
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Shohreh Laici is a Tehran-based author and literary translator. Her works are forthcoming in Asheville Poetry Review, Two Lines Press, and Ezra: An Online Journal of Translation. In addition, Laici has produced a variety of video art and performance-art pieces exploring notions of femininity, language, and social taboos. Her controversial performance work Hills Like White Elephants, loosely based on Ernest Hemingway’s short story, explored the concept of abortion in Iranian patriarchal society.
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San Francisco, California
Center for the Art of Translation
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CJ Evans
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Jessica Sevey
Senior Editor
Emily Wolahan
Two Lines Press is an award-winning press committed to publishing outstanding literature in translation.
With the rich publication history of Two Lines serving as its foundation, Two Lines Press specializes in exceptional new writing and overlooked classics that have not previously been translated into English. With books such as Naja Marie Aidt’s Baboon (translated by Denise Newman), which won the 2015 PEN Translation Prize, and Marie NDiaye’s Self-Portrait in Green (translated by Jordan Stump), which won the 2015 CLMP Firecracker Award, Two Lines Press seeks to publish daring and original voices in striking editions.
The biannual journal Two Lines amplifies the aims of the press by capturing the most exciting work being done today by the world’s best translators—and by forging a space to celebrate the art of translation. Within our pages you’ll find work by writers such as Yuri Herrera, Kim Hyesoon, Christos Ikonomou, Rabee Jaber, Emmanuel Moses, Anne Parian, Chika Sagawa, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Jan Wagner—in translations by Lisa Dillman, Don Mee Choi, Karen Emmerich, Kareem Abu-Zeid, Marilyn Hacker, Emma Ramadan, Sawako Nakayasu, Margaret Jull Costa, and David Keplinger, respectively. You’ll also encounter arresting insights on language, literature, and translation from the point of view of writers such as Lydia Davis, Johannes Göransson, Wayne Miller, and Jeffrey Yang.
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