The Blind Owl [Buf-e Kur]

This is the original Persian (Farsi) text of Sadegh Hedayat's The Blind Owl is a foundational work of modern Iranian literature, presented as a feverish, fragmented, and non-linear confession from an unnamed, reclusive narrator. Plagued by mental illness, solitude, and the use of opium, the narrator begins his account by describing a recurring vision he paints on pen cases: a mysterious, beautiful woman in black offering a flower to an old man under a cypress tree. This vision quickly becomes an obsession when the woman suddenly appears at his window. When she enters his room and dies, the narrator, in a bizarre and desperate act of preservation, has sex with her corpse, dismembers it, and buries it with the help of a hunchbacked old man who appears to be an avatar of death. The entire first part of the novella is shrouded in a surreal, dreamlike atmosphere where reality, hallucination, and the boundaries between life and death are terrifyingly blurred.

The second part of the novella presents a murky, more grounded, yet equally distressing account that echoes the first, suggesting an unsettling cycle of eternal recurrence and despair. The narrator now describes himself as a sickly invalid, married to a woman he refers to only as "the whore," who is perpetually unfaithful and whom he intensely hates. Through a series of morbid revelations and the reappearance of sinister, recurring figures-including the hunchbacked old man-the narrator's sense of self deteriorates. Driven to madness, he ultimately stabs and kills his wife. Looking in a mirror, he sees his face has transformed into the face of the old man, suggesting a collapse of identity and the cyclical nature of his suffering. The novella is a profound exploration of existentialism, alienation, the corruption of desire, and the overwhelming fear of death, leaving the reader trapped in the labyrinthine terror of the narrator's psyche.