Gallery readings inspire students
"Staff in hand, prayer mat on shoulder, I was a zealous worker of miracles."
So wrote the great Persian poet Attar 800 years ago. He could have been referring to the writer's path today as his words, read in English at La Trobe University recently by Iranian–born writer and translator Ali Alizadeh, crossed the gap of centuries.
Attar's poem is known as a 'ghazal' — a philosophical genre in which meanings remain hidden. It recently moved elegantly into the post–modern world of the Bundoora campus, at a literary event arranged by the English Department.
Alizadeh's translation of Attar is playful, even contentious. As a young writer born to 'the clamour of the revolution' who migrated to Australia at 15, Alizadeh says the heretical tradition of the ancient Persian poets has kept him going.
His novel The New Angel (Transit Lounge Publishing, 2008) plugs into his disturbing early years in Iran. 'Fiction provides a way of giving clarity to things forgotten,' he says.
Lecturer in English, Dr Alexis Harley is organiser of La Trobe's new series of Gallery Readings which are held in association with the University's Art Museum. She says while the printed word today is more accessible than ever, it hasn't made the relationship between authors and readers any more intimate.
'Sometimes writers need to imagine themselves in a social vacuum, but at some point they need to emerge: it's only when you read your writing aloud, see and hear people's reactions, that you realise what it is you've written.'
The La Trobe English Program Gallery Readings give emerging writers — and some very established ones — the opportunity to converse with their readers, she says. Equally, they give readers the opportunity to listen and to respond.
'The difference between reading a novel on the sofa and watching an author read is something like the difference between listening to a CD and sitting five metres from a chamber orchestra. Meeting the body behind the mind behind the text illuminates that text in all sorts of surprising ways.
'For our students, those who study writing — and those many members of the University who are themselves writers — it's an opportunity to get a deeper sense of where stories, poems, and words come from.'
Miles Franklin winner in October
Other writers in the Gallery Readings include La Trobe history prize winning author, Robert Kenny, (see Top award for book on early Aboriginal Christian conversion). The series culminates on October 23 with a reading by Steven Carroll, a La Trobe graduate and winner of this year's Miles Franklin award for his novel The Time We Have Taken.