Das Gewicht der anderen (The Weight of the Others)

Das Gewicht der anderen is not a quiet book. The text begins, repeats, condenses, until every scene is stretched tight. Peyman, thirteen years old, is wrongly arrested two years after the Iranian Revolution. Here, prison is part of an order that is just taking shape—and with Peyman, perception itself is imprisoned. Sounds become menacing, light becomes a constraint, time loses its direction. Moradi’s language is physical, it falters, pushes, as if it were following the action in the same breath. Peyman’s experience does not end with his release, continuing and shifting into memory, into the body, into a life that will never be unburdened. The weight remains as something that inscribes itself and cannot be cast off. Sarah Rauchfuß’ translation holds the tension, the rhythm, and the density of the original without smoothing off its rough edges. Individual passages can prove disconcerting, especially where characters use racist language. But this friction does not diminish the work. The power of the text derives precisely from its intransigence.
—Joy Denalane

Bahram Moradi (born 1960 in Borujerd) began working in the theatre in the 1970s as an actor, playwright and director. In the mid 1980s, he fled Iran and has been living in Berlin since 1994. In Germany, he began to write short stories and novels. He has to date published six book in Farsi. Das Gewicht der anderen was originally published in 2021.

Sarah Rauchfuß (born 1990 in Ottersberg) has been translating contemporary literature in Farsi from Afghanistan and Iran since 2019. As a freelance translator, she is involved, among others, in the Weiter Schreiben project, the DAAD, and various literary institutions and festivals in German-speaking countries. Her first translation, Hussein Mohammadi’s novel Scheherazades Erben, was published in 2022.