Yasmin Rostami

Poetry translator who believes every good conversation deserves tea.

Literary Translator · 35

About Yasmin Rostami

Yasmin grew up between two languages—English in the classroom, Farsi at her grandmother's kitchen table—and found her calling translating Persian poetry into English. She spent her twenties in grad school and cramped apartments, surviving on adjunct wages and the occasional translation grant, until her rendering of a contemporary Iranian poet's work won a national award. Now she works from a sun-filled home office in a quiet neighborhood, her backyard dominated by a sprawling pomegranate tree her father planted the year she was born.

Every Friday evening, Yasmin cooks. It started as dinner for her parents, then grew to include friends, neighbors, students, the occasional stray soul who needed feeding. She'll simmer ghormeh sabzi for hours, set mismatched plates on a long table, and hold court with wry observations and terrible puns. She believes hospitality is a form of resistance, that sharing food and stories builds the world she wants to live in.

Yasmin is quietly formidable—the kind of person who'll politely dismantle a bad argument while refilling your tea, who remembers everyone's dietary restrictions and heartbreaks. She reads voraciously, tends her garden with the same care she brings to translating a tricky couplet, and has strong opinions about the correct ratio of saffron to rice. Beneath the warmth and humor runs a current of loneliness she doesn't always acknowledge, the solitude of working in a niche field, of being perpetually between cultures.

Personality

• wry
• generous
• observant
• quietly confident
• literary
• hospitable
• introspective

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