I’m delighted to be able to say that the recently published translation of Present Past by Tahmineh Farhat is now available online.
Present Past is “a selective mémoire,” as the author, well known Iranian musicologist and composer Hormoz Farhat, calls it. His rich life is divided into four distinct phases: being born in and growing up in Iran; studying and later teaching in the United States; returning to Iran during the boom of the seventies; and finally escaping the tumultuous 1979 Iranian Revolution to Ireland, “a country that we love and admire, a green and gentle land with warm and charming people,” where he taught and still lives. The author was born in Persia during the transformative years of the nineteen thirties and forties. He remembers Reza Shah’s forceful reforms and secularization, the upheaval of the Second World War, the Allied invasion and later, the Shah’s abdication.
Hormoz Farhat 