mtvU, U.Va. and an Iranian Poet
I’ll admit that sometimes I’m a bit out of touch with popular culture, or at least youthful popular culture. So until this week, I did not know there was such thing as mtvU, which bills itself as “MTV Networks’ Peabody and Emmy Award-winning 24-hour college network-the largest and most comprehensive media network just for college students.”
Surprisingly, the person who called my attention to mtvU’s existence is Farzaneh Milani, a U.Va. professor who teaches in both Studies in Women and Gender and the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Culture.
Here’s how it all ties together …
It seems that mtvU annually appoints a poet laureate. on Thursday, it announced its second laureate, and 82-year-old Iranian female poet named Simin Behbahani (pictured). She is considered a voice of the Iranian opposition.
Alas for American audiences, that voice speaks only Persian. Enter U.Va.’s Milani, who is currently teaching in the Semester at Sea program. Milani, it turns out, is one of Behbahani’s English translators.
Thus, Milani took time out the other day from her marine teaching duties to spend more than two hours translating Behbahani for interviews with the Wall Street Journal and Poets and Writers magazine. (You can read the Wall Street Journal piece here.)
“This is truly an amazing event,” Milani wrote in an e-mail. “Imagine a woman in her eighties — and from Iran — as mtvU’s poet laureate.”
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