Camden Public Library welcomes poet, professor, and translator Sandra Lynn Hutchinson to share her recently published translation of A Tale of Love: More Prison Poems by Baháʼí prisoner of conscience Mahvash Sabet. This program will take place Tuesday, June 16, at 6:30 p.m., in the Picker Room.

 

What is a life of courage? The prison poems of Mahvash Sabet answer this question…

 

“My pen’s broken/ and it’s not in my hand./ They took my voice/as a spoil of oppression…”  — so PEN Pinter Writer of Courage and longtime prisoner of conscience Mahvash Sabet wrote from the depths of Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. What does it take to survive a twenty-year-long prison sentence as a poet who is a member of a persecuted minority? How do you write when you have no pen or paper?

 

Listen to Mahvash’s Sabet’s testimony about a life of letters lived against all odds, as set down in her second book of prison poems, A Tale of Love, translated from Persian to English by Dr. Sandra Lynn Hutchison of Orono and Shahin Mowzoon, with an introduction by the 2023 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Narges Mohammadi.

 

Hutchinson writes in her introduction: “It is hard to imagine a more consequential body of poetry than that which a skilled craftsperson might produce from within the confines of a prison cell. And, without doubt, the poems of Mahvash Sabet speak more powerfully than any other form of advocacy could ever hope to of the anguish suffered as well as the victories won in the course of an unjust imprisonment.”

 

Hutchinson continues: “In A Tale of Love, her second volume of poems, Mahvash Sabet, a Baháʼí imprisoned for practicing her faith in the Islamic Republic of Iran, bears witness to the horrors and hard-won triumphs of life in an Iranian prison, where she has been forced to work out her own salvation in the most solitary way: by setting down her thoughts and experiences in poetry.

 

“Readers with the courage to enter the world of Sabet’s prison cell… will be amply rewarded by the powerful testimony her poems give of the remarkable resilience of the human spirit.”

 

RSVP for this event at librarycamden.org/a-tale-of-love.

 

Sandra Lynn Hutchison is the author of a books of poetry, as well as numerous essays and articles. Her translation, with Shahin Mowzoon, of Mahvash Sabet’s second volume of prison poems, A Tale of Love, was published in 2024.

 

Hutchison holds a Ph.D. in English literature, with a specialization in modern poetry, from the University of Toronto. She has taught at universities in Canada, Hong Kong, China, India, and the United States, most recently at the University of Maine.