Bahman 1

Laila Bahman

WRIT 2

19 October 2021

The Road I Had Taken

Two roads lay ahead, surrounded by the burning remnants of my city as I stood in silence

and looked into my mother’s expressionless eyes. The choice left my mind foggy with the

conflict between alternative options, but I had to make this decision tonight. Would I stay to

serve my home country in this revolution and defend the territory of Iran? Or I could flee with

the help of the Taliban without being able to ever return, losing contact with my family and home

for what would be months. As an 18 year old man during the Iran-Iraq Revolutionary war, the

law would only permit the former of the two options. But I was unsure if I wanted to follow the

rules that would only lead me to my guaranteed dead end.

Neither path was easy or linear, but part of me just wanted to do what was expected. At

least my fate would be clear: death at the hands of the opponents. I doubted whether I was

willing to sell my life to my country, however deciding to flee did not lead to anything certain

either. It finally feels that my life was just getting started, as I transitioned into adulthood and

gained independence, just for it to all be taken away abruptly.

On December 6, 1982, I began my solitary journey of what I hoped would end in freedom

and a better life. I knew I would never return to my home country. I would never see the yard

that I used to run around in with my friends, or the pool I would swim in on hot summer days

with my eleven cousins. I was only given a few hours to say my final goodbyes before the

Taliban smugglers took me through Afghanistan and Pakistan. I had to dress like the Afghans to

avoid execution, but even then I was held at gunpoint multiple times. The overwhelming fear and
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anxiousness I felt made each day seem like an eternity. I was constantly rethinking my decision

to leave due to the constant uncertainty. I knew both paths had been taken before, but I doubted if

I would ever come back. Come back to a state of normalcy and peace. It seemed forever out of

reach.

After the grueling six months on the road without the ability to contact my family,

sleeping in cars and on beaches, and days without food, I finally made it to America. I might not

have known the language, but I did not feel like an outsider anymore. I felt free and able to

determine my future. I got a job, graduated from a university, started a family, and became truly

happy with the lifestyle I now live. Looking back I appreciate the path I took, even through all of

the nights without shelter or feeling a sense of safety. I may have taken the road less traveled by,

however it made all the difference.

Reflection

As a student born and raised in the United States, I had always heard about refugees from

other countries who flee to other countries with safer living conditions. It was not until recently

when I learned that my father was one of these refugees who left everything behind. It was so

hard for me to believe that he, as well as all other refugees, ever went through a period of time

without a stable shelter or source of food, let alone at such a young age. I realized that his story is

somewhat unique and is something that I want to share, as it has also become a large part of my

identity.

The intrinsic distinctions between poetry and narrative short stories makes for an open

ended translation when it comes to implementing genre conventions and other key elements. I

interpreted the poem “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost for my genre translation. This poem
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is a classic piece with the purpose of questioning the reader’s decisions. While the roads

mentioned in the poem remain a mystery, the reader is left wondering whether or not they made

the right choices in their own lives, and what would have happened if they had chosen to take

another path. Frost’s poem was intended to be a joke for his indecisive friend who would always

worry about choosing the wrong paths, both figuratively and literally. However, he captivated a

much larger audience of poets and students who refer to this poem frequently. Unlike the

audience of a narrative short story, which I translated the poem to, the poem is meant for a more

sophisticated audience. The narrative is meant more for the youth to understand the gravity of the

situation rather than to be analyzed by other poets, so the audience is generally meant to be

younger.

The purpose of a narrative short story is to get the audience to focus on the details of a

specific moment or event in one’s life. This differs from the ambiguity and tempo used to build

poems like this one written by Robert Frost. Laura Bolin Carroll examines the components of a

rhetorical situation throughout her essay “Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps toward Rhetorical

Analysis.” She states that “constraints limit the way the discourse is delivered or

communicated.” 1 Poetry has many constraints that differ greatly from narrative short stories. For

example, many poems tend to have a certain rhythm or flow to it. Others, like haikus, have

requirements for the amount of syllables used in each line. Restrictions like these cause poets to

write using a tone that would be unconventional in daily conversations. In “The Road Not

Taken”, Frost uses a specific rhyme pattern as a stylistic choice. In each of the four stanzas, the

last words of the first, third and fourth lines rhyme, while the second and fifth lines rhyme. This

helps with keeping the fluidity of the piece. This is a constraint since the author is strictly limited
1
Laura Bolin Carroll, “Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps toward Rhetorical Analysis,” in Volume
1, Writing Spaces, eds. Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, 49,
https://writingspaces.org/?page_id=225
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to ending the lines with words that rhyme, so it adds a layer of difficulty to the storytelling aspect

of writing poetry. Frost may have had to leave out some details that he would have wanted to add

to the poem if there were no restrictions. The limitations of this poem make it inherently different

from my narrative short story translation of it. Since the purpose of a narrative is to tell and

provide details to the story, I am no longer presented with the same constraints, making it easier

to distinctly paint the picture of the event. Since narratives tend to be longer than poems, one

limitation is the audience’s attention span. The author must use a hook to engage the reader from

the moment they start to read the story. In order to successfully do so, I implemented rhetorical

questions in my translation.

It is important to note the differences in language used between the different genres. In

“Murder! (Rhetorically Speaking),” Janet Boyd explains the importance of word choices in

establishing a certain genre. She explains that “... each time you write you will find yourself in a

rhetorical situation, in other words within a context or genre, that nudges you to choose the right

diction or even jargon and to strike the right tone.” 2 The Robert Frost poem has its own unique

syntax and phrasing that is less common in other genres. His sentences are structured in a more

old fashioned way, one example being when Frost writes “and both that morning equally lay / In

leaves no step had trodden black”3 (Frost, lines 11-12). This essentially means that neither one of

the two paths seemed to have been traveled on much since there were leaves covering both of

them. Initially, it is not clear exactly what the author is trying to say in these two lines since it is

more complex. This is a part of the jargon that Robert Frost uses, which follows the constraints

2
Janet Boyd, “Murder! (Rhetorically Speaking),” in Volume 2, Writing Spaces, eds. Charles
Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, 100, https://writingspaces.org/?page_id=148
3
Frost, Robert. “The Road Not Taken.” 1916. Poetry Foundation, Accessed 19 October 2021,
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44272/the-road-not-taken.
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of the genre and helps the reader understand the setting of it. Since the purpose of the narrative is

much different, I used different sentence structures and phrasing.

While the translation was enjoyable for me to do, it did present some challenges for me.

It was difficult to determine which of the genre conventions from the poem I would keep in the

final translation. I tried to mimic some of the wording of Robert Frost at the beginning and end

of the narrative short story, so that the reader would pick up on the reference to the poem. I also

tried to utilize a similar structure. I used four paragraphs which each had similar ideas to the four

different stanzas. One last aspect of the poem I mimicked was the lengthy sentence structure. The

first 12 lines of the original poem is only one long sentence, so I tried to incorporate similar ideas

by having longer sentences in the first paragraph to emphasize the severity of the emotions.

Some conventions I left out include the ambiguity of the poem. Since the original poem did not

provide me with specific characters, I adapted and slightly modified the story of my father to fit

the outline provided by Robert Frost. Poems and narratives are innately different when it comes

to structure, constraints, and diction. However the contrast in these genre conventions and key

elements lead to a more creative translation.

Bibliography

Carroll, Laura Bolin. “Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps toward Rhetorical Analysis,” In Volume

1, Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing. Edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky,

49. Parlor Press, 2010.

Boyd, Janet. “Murder! (Rhetorically Speaking),” In Volume 2, Writing Spaces: Readings on

Writing. Edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, 100. Parlor Press, 2011.
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Frost, Robert. “The Road Not Taken.” 1916. Poetry Foundation, Accessed 19 October 2021,

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44272/the-road-not-taken.