Returning to Only the Arrow Does Not Die

When I first wrote the novel that has now become Only the Arrow Does Not Die, I was almost twenty years younger. It was published in Persian as Kay Khusro, and for years people occasionally asked me whether I would translate it into English. I always thought I would, one day. I imagined it as a fairly straightforward task. I would sit down with the Persian text, translate it properly, perhaps make some adjustments where the English needed them, and that would be that. Of course, when I finally went back to the book, it did not work like that at all.

The first problem was quite simple. I had changed too much.

I could still recognise the person who had written the original novel. I remembered what mattered to him, what he was angry about, what he was trying to understand, and in many places I still agreed with him. But not everywhere. Some things that had once seemed profound to me now felt overstated. Some things I had almost passed over had become much more important. And there were passages where I found myself thinking, no, this is not quite true, or at least it is no longer true for me. That is an odd experience, because you cannot really argue with your younger self. He has already finished the argument and gone away.

A great deal had happened in the years between the two books. I had left Iran. I had lived long enough outside the country for places that had once been completely ordinary to become memories. People I had assumed would remain part of my life were gone. Some friendships had survived years and distance, some had disappeared almost without an event that could explain why. I had seen political hopes come and go, watched new wars begin while old ones never really ended, and discovered that some ideas are much easier to discuss when they are still only ideas.

So I started translating Kay Khusro, and quite quickly began rewriting it.

The strange thing was that I did not want to replace the old book with a new one. There were things in it that belonged very specifically to the person I had been, and I did not want to tidy him away simply because I could now write certain things better. At the same time, I could not pretend that twenty years had not passed. I ended up working with the book almost as if it had two authors, except unfortunately both of them were me. One had written the story with all the certainty and blindness that come with being younger. The other had the advantage of hindsight, but probably his own forms of blindness as well.

The basic shape of the story remained. It begins in contemporary Tehran, with Adura working in a publishing house and a strange photocopied booklet arriving on her desk. The booklet concerns Kay Khusro, an ancient Persian king, and the Sacred Grail, and contains information that should not really exist. Adura goes looking for its author and finds someone very different from the scholar she expected. From there the story moves between her life and the much older story of Kay Khusro, who is one of the most extraordinary figures in Iranian mythology.

For a Western reader, Kay Khusro probably means nothing at first, and I think that is perfectly fine. I did not want to write a book that required homework. In Iranian tradition, he is a king who is born into a conflict that has already consumed generations before him. He eventually defeats his enemies and ends the war, then gives up his throne and disappears. He does not quite die in the old stories. He remains somewhere outside ordinary history, waiting to return at the end of time.

When I wrote the first version of the novel, I was very interested in that idea of destiny. Going back to it years later, I found myself much more interested in something else: what it costs a person to spend a life fighting towards a victory, and what is left when the victory finally comes.

This probably has something to do with age. When you are younger, defeat seems tragic and victory seems self-explanatory. Later, I am not so sure. If a war, a cause, a grievance or even a loss has organised your whole life, what happens when it is gone? If you have shaped yourself entirely in opposition to something, have you really escaped it when you defeat it? Or has it already decided too much about who you became?

The old story of Kay Khusro is full of people inheriting things they did not choose. Not only kingdoms and names, but loyalties, humiliations, murders, debts, obligations and hatred. That part of the story felt much closer to me when I returned to it. We like to think of ourselves as people who make choices, but so much of a life has already happened to us before we begin choosing anything seriously. We are born in a particular country and family, into a particular history. Things happen that we cannot undo. Other people make choices that become part of our lives. We lose people. We leave places. Sometimes history enters the room whether we invited it or not.

This is probably why the idea of amor fati became more important to the English version. I do not mean fate in the sense that everything has already been decided somewhere, and I certainly do not mean that terrible things happen for some hidden reason. I have never been able to believe that. I mean something closer to Nietzsche’s question of whether we can finally stop demanding that our lives should have happened differently. Necessity and accident give us the material. We still have to make something out of it. I understand that idea differently now than I did twenty years ago, and perhaps less confidently too.

Writing the novel in English created another problem I had underestimated. In Persian I could mention Siyâvash or Kay Khusro or Afrasiab and assume a certain background resonance. Not that every Persian reader knows all the stories in detail, but the names are part of a cultural memory. In English, most readers will be meeting them for the first time. I had to find a way to make that world clear without stopping every few pages to explain Iran to the reader. I dislike novels that turn themselves into lectures the moment they encounter another culture, and I did not want to do that here.

That became one of the most interesting parts of the rewriting. I had to ask what a reader actually needs to know and what can simply be experienced. I wanted someone who had never read the Shahnameh, perhaps had never even heard the name Kay Khusro, to enter the story without feeling that they had arrived late to a conversation everyone else understood. At the same time, I did not want to flatten the mythology into something generically familiar. It had to remain itself.

At some point during that process, I realised I was no longer making an English version of Kay Khusro. I was writing Only the Arrow Does Not Die. The distinction matters to me, although perhaps it will matter less to anyone reading it. The old novel is still inside this one. So is the younger person who wrote it. But the book has had another twenty years of life imposed on it, including mine.

I suppose that is the real reason I wanted to write this rather than simply announce that the novel is out. Publishing a book is usually presented as an ending. You finish it, it appears, you move on. This one does not feel like that. It feels more like meeting something again after a very long separation and discovering that neither of you is quite what the other remembers.

Only the Arrow Does Not Die is now available in English. I am still not entirely sure whether I translated an old book, rewrote it, or finally understood what I had been trying to write the first time. Probably some mixture of all three.