Mehdi Sahabi can be considered one of the most creative artists, he even gave this opinion about cooking:

“Cooking, in my opinion, is one of the best jobs in the world and it is a creative job, because you produce something that comes to life from a series of simple things, many of which are very insignificant on their own.”

Mehdi Sahabi in a conversation with Hori Etisam (conversation with Mehdi Sahabi, published by the Center) says something about the translation in search of the lost time and the way of translating his books:

“The French I learned was like this, and by the way, there was no book French. I didn’t go to school or class in France, it was the French of the streets, but the French of a person on the street, whose support was, for example, all the education and all the knowledge I had. In the discussions we had, we did not fall below Michel Foucault, Ho Chi Minh, and Engels, that is, we had very serious discussions. But with this oral French, so my France is also a book French. It didn’t have anything to do with the method, but it had to do with the fact that because I had learned French very early, I learned it well, maybe that’s why I read Proust. Maybe because it was very interesting to me.

I want to say one thing. This princess is an interesting incident. It is right there that I not only read books, but because of this word Shah Harze Khanum, you can say that I worked for almost three months, not that I sat behind the desk, but it was a word. This harlot king is famous. One of the most famous places of Mehdi Sahabi’s translation is. The issue is that there is a term in France that refers to a group of women everywhere, a group of women whose job is not this, but they are usually found in high circles and there they play this role, but they are not professionals. It’s very clear in French what it means, but in other cases we have other ladies. All these have names in Farsi, this one has no equivalent. Now the word is that they come and tell this to the aunt, who is very sharp and foul-mouthed, and hates Odette very much. Now her French is that someone tells her that she was with a princess, then her aunt says a sentence that does not translate into Persian, and we do not have an equivalent for such a lady in Persian. In Persian language, all women are either noble and respectable or, excuse me, they are. We have these three. We don’t have anything other than the fact that I worked very hard on this word and for two or three months I was walking in the street saying, well, what should we put for this from my aunt’s tongue. The fact that I put Shah Harze Khanum, everyone who is a so-called sewing person liked it very much, considering the princess and Shah Harze Khanum and these two idiots.

I am satisfied with this word because it is the right word

He says somewhere: “With all the respect I have for Proust and the book In Search of Lost Time, I enjoyed Celine’s Death by installments more. He even says that I would have liked to have written it more than any other book I have ever written.” And he even finds working on Celine’s books more interesting than the books of Simon de Boir, Italo Calvino and Marcel Proust, and says that Celine is a fantastic being. He was also the chosen translator of the French Embassy as the best translator of French literature into Persian. Regarding the effectiveness of Iranian literature, he says: “Our literature has been fed from two breasts of modern literature, one is French and the other is Russian. Russian literature is complex in itself, and French literature is deliberately complex with a little pretense and principles.” As for music, I am a Bach, as he says, and he used to listen to Johann Sebastian Bach a lot. In Iranian music, he was more interested in folk music and did not have a good middle ground with Iranian instrumental and vocal music, and he disliked dry and tie-dyed music. He liked Iranian classical music only in solo form. He liked rap music very much, but original rap. The book of Nebula paintings is a selection of the works of a great artist. The works of a man who said that I am a “multi-functional spanner” and who was truly a man of all skills: painter, graphic artist, novelist, translator, literary critic, journalist of social issues, who acted in a play in his youth and wrote in a prestigious film magazine in his middle age. In the meantime, Sahabhi’s fame was due to his two works: the books he translated and the paintings he drew.  Many times, in response to the question of what are you doing these days, Mehdi would say: “Mr. Painting! ». He once admitted: “You know, my dream was to paint only. Or make from these boxes. His paintings may remind the audience of “Andy Warhol” and pop art, but no “name” is attached to his works. It is not an expressionist, nor a cubist, nor anything else; It is only “Mehdi Sahabhi”. He says this about life: “Philosophically, I am a complete pessimist, maybe that’s why I’m an optimist and I don’t think the world is worth the trouble. And I don’t like cemeteries, not because of superstitions or fear of death, no. My feeling is that cemeteries are a place for people who are important to themselves and we are not very important to them, and I believe that the more people you love, the less or not at all you should go to. Their grave, like a grave, is a kind of embodiment of a person who has finished.”