by Unknown
When Simin Behbahani wrote about the “three musketeers,” she also referred to another poet friend, Zhaleh Esfahani (1921–2007), who occasionally attended their meetings. Zhaleh Esfahani, like many writers of her generation in many parts of the world, responded positively to the siren call of communism, and quite early in her life became involved in leftist literary and political circles. In 1946 she married a prominent member of the Iranian communist party (Hezb-e Tudeh), and in 1947 she left Iran for the Soviet Union. She studied in Moscow, where she wrote a PhD dissertation on Malek al-Shoara Bahar, the poet laureate who had helped both Alam Taj and Parvin Etesami publish their adolescent poems. She stayed in the Soviet Union for over thirty years, until the Islamic Revolution of 1979, when she briefly returned to Iran (see her poem “Return” on this page). However, she soon became disillusioned with the course the Revolution was taking, and left Iran for London, where she lived until her death. Her poetry is strongly marked by her political sympathies, and in retrospect much of it can seem naïvely gullible about the promise of communism, but in this she is no different from many poets of her generation in many parts of the world, and her verse shows that she had a genuine lyric gift which never left her even in her most ideologically committed poems.
Zhaleh Esfahani, Lobat Vala, and Simin Behbahani all lived well into their eighties. All three poets were extraordinarily persistent and still occupied themselves in writing poems of hope at the end of their lives, never quite giving up the idealism of their youth. Whatever one thinks of their poetry in aesthetic terms, their sheer tenacity—to life, to their ideals, to their calling as poets—surely commands our admiration. To look at their achievements over such long lives, and often in such extremely difficult circumstances, brings to mind Edgar’s reverent valedictory words at the end of King Lear: “The oldest hath borne most; we that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long.”
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For a while the Islamic Revolution of 1979 seemed as though it would be as transformative of Iranian society as the Safavid revolution of 1501 had been, and in some ways this has proved to be the case. The gradual secularization of Iranian society that had been going on since the 1920s was halted and in so far as was possible reversed, and women in particular bore the brunt of this reversal. In 1936 the ruler at the time, Reza Shah, had banned the veil and headscarf, and the edict was forcefully implemented; his son, Mohammad Reza Shah (r. 1941–79), did not withdraw the edict but neither did he vigorously enforce it, and whether a woman veiled herself or not became more or less a question of personal choice. With the Islamic Revolution the veil became mandatory; some aspects of male dress (for example, the wearing of ties, which was seen as Western and therefore reprehensible) were also proscribed, and how a person dressed became a matter of political acquiescence or protest, with skirmishes between “guardians of public morality” and members of the public becoming a common occurrence. The dress codes have been relaxed at times and then tightened again, depending on which faction of the clerical government has the upper hand, and how much hair a woman was able to display uncovered by her veil became for many a daily preoccupation.
Of course the concern with how people dressed in public was only an outward symbol of a much deeper rethinking of gender roles throughout society, but there was no question of women being pushed back into a solely private and silent existence. Much of the female population of the country was now literate, and large numbers of middle-class women had gone on to undergraduate and graduate education; more women have been enrolled at Iranian universities than men for most years since the Revolution, outnumbering men by three to two in the 2012 entrance exams, and at one point the government became so concerned that women were becoming a major part of the country’s educated élite that many university courses were declared to be open to male students only. It seemed that a century of women’s activism, from the first stirrings of political consciousness expressed in the verse of such poets as Shahin Farahani, Jannat, Kasma’i, and Nimtaj, from the late nineteenth century until the present, would go for naught.
Many partially or completely secularized families emigrated, with the result that there is a large diaspora of educated Iranians in most countries of the Western world. When families as a whole did not emigrate, their educated daughters often did. But many professional women, torn between patriotism and irritation at the structures imposed by the theocratic government, stayed in Iran; some, like the lawyer Shirin Ebadi, who was awarded the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize, have worked openly and tirelessly to promote the rights of women, while others have formed a kind of unofficial semi-underground intellectual opposition. One result of a large number of educated women feeling that their freedom was unnecessarily curtailed and their intellectual gifts largely discounted has been a veritable explosion of women’s writing in both prose and verse. Many and perhaps most of the best-known Iranian novelists to have emerged in the forty years since the Revolution are women, and in the same period very large numbers of women have published books of poetry. Much of it is not even implicitly in opposition to the values of the Islamic Revolution, but some of it is, and the more outspoken poets have either fled the country after clashing with the authorities, or done so as a precautionary measure.
It is the outspoken poets of course who have become best known, if often only among their fellow exiles, but there have been important women poets who have been supportive of the Revolution; the most significant of these is Tahereh Saffarzadeh (1936–2008), favored by Ayatollah Khomeini and highly praised by his successor, Ayatollah Khamenei. To a Western observer she can seem a paradoxical figure: unlike many poets who have supported the Revolution, she wrote in free verse rather than in the “classical” metrical system of pre-modern Persian verse; she earned an MA in creative writing and cinematography from the University of Iowa, but her poetry rarely seems deracinated in the way that verse by other Iranian poets who studied in the West can sometimes appear to be;* her Islamic faith was central to her sense of herself, and as well as poetry she wrote extensively on the Qor’an, but unlike many Moslem traditionalists she was also someone whose poetry insists on the central validity and importance of women’s experience, and their parity with men.
Saffarzadeh’s poetry is in the main direct and clearly comprehensible, and this is in sharp contrast to the poetry of some Iranian women writers who find themselves at odds with the values and practices of the Revolution, whose poetry is often cryptic, surreal, and oblique in ways that can recall the poetry of some Eastern European poets before the fall of the Soviet Union, and presumably for the same reasons. Such poems convey a sense of pervasive illogicality, dystopia, and anxiety because this is seen as the soul’s almost inevitable condition in such surroundings, and also because a more unambiguous statement of discontent might well provoke censorship and state retaliation. The practice has created a distinctive and recognizable poetic dialect, one that has become widely admired and adopted in dissident and consciously avant-garde circles, some members of which see obscurity as a badge of honor and the relative clarity of much of Saffarzadeh’s poetry as indicating, at best, both political and aesthetic naïveté.
Tahereh Saffarzadeh received what was in effect almost a state funeral,* and the then president Mahmud Ahmadinejad delivered a eulogy in her praise. But when Simin Daneshvar (the first Iranian woman novelist, and one of the most significant) died in 2012, and the major poet Simin Behbahani died in 2014, the state took virtually no notice of their deaths, and this indicates the extent to which the evaluation of artistic worth has become severely politicized. Ayatollah Khomeini was on record as admiring the poetry of Parvin Etesami, and so her poetry tends to be discounted by many who are opposed to the Islamic Revolution, even though she died long before it happened (and given her concern for women’s social and political emancipation—as expressed, for example, in her poem beginning “Once women in Iran . . .” on this page—it’s doubtful that she would have
thought very highly of the Ayatollah); Simin Behbahani espoused largely secular values in her poetry, and so supporters of the Revolution tend to disparage or ignore her work.
Selecting the Poems in this Volume
It is not a difficult task to select women poets from the pre-modern period for inclusion in an anthology like this one: from almost every century the anthologist’s task has already been largely completed over time, and he or she can only “select” among the few survivors; this would be as true for most European languages as it is for Persian. For the earlier centuries covered by this book, a high proportion of what is available is, necessarily, included here; for the present century only a very small proportion of what is available is, equally necessarily, included. Furthermore, as time has not yet begun its winnowing process on the work of contemporary poets, choosing whose work is likely to continue to be valued is at best something of a guessing game.
In her book-length poem Aurora Leigh, which, to expand slightly on Wordsworth’s subtitle to The Prelude, might be called “The Growth of a Woman Poet’s Mind,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning incidentally provides a metaphor for the difficulty of assessing the art and artists of one’s own time:
We’ll suppose
Mount Athos carved, as Persian Xerxes schemed,
To some colossal statue of a man.
The peasants, gathering brushwood in his ear,
Had guessed as little as the browsing goats
Of form or feature of humanity
Up there,—in fact, had travelled five miles off
Or ere the giant image broke on them . . .
. . . ’Tis even thus
With times we live in . . .*
That we lack sufficient perspective on our own times to judge them with any but myopic eyes is borne out by many earlier anthologies that seem fine until they reach their compilers’ contemporaries. When W. B. Yeats made his selection of poets for his Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935, published in 1936, he chose a group of names that almost no lay reader or literary historian would now come up with. Yeats’s starting point was the death of Tennyson in 1892, and he included over ninety poets, a good half of whom have by now been almost completely forgotten by all but the most assiduous literary specialists in the period. He also excluded a number of poets that any modern anthologist would certainly include (for example, the poets of the First World War—Owen, Gurney, and Rosenberg—and although he included three Indian poets who wrote in English, the only Americans to have made the grade are those who were living or had lived in England; and even from that small number Robert Frost is absent). My point is obvious: it is very unlikely that subsequent generations will wholeheartedly agree with the selection of poetry by an earlier anthologist from the work of his or her contemporaries, and where Yeats failed it is at least equally likely that my guesses as to who and what will seem interesting in the future will be no better than his were.
Poetry of the past is best known to scholars; poetry of the present becomes known to scholars, but it is best known to the poets themselves and hence, because the field is so wide, for verse by living poets I have solicited the recommendations and advice of friends, poets, and scholars who are familiar with contemporary Persian poetry. Nevertheless, there may well be a number of modern poets whose work is absent from this volume whom others would have included, and not all of those whose suggestions I have followed would endorse all of this anthology’s inclusions. That said, the contemporary poems translated here have earned their place in this anthology by what I believe to be their aesthetic qualities, their representative importance, or the distinctiveness of a given poet’s voice, and usually by a combination of all three of these characteristics.
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To read through this anthology is to become aware of how a large number of motifs and tropes have continued to exist in women’s poetry written in Persian from its inception to the present. But although many persist, many are also transformed over time. For example, pre-modern Persian-language poets, men and women alike, often use the metaphor of the self as a bird that is trapped in a cage (Hafez is particularly fond of this image), and modern women poets also use the same metaphor from time to time. But the meaning has changed: in pre-modern poetry, the metaphor has a spiritual or metaphysical sense, as it refers to the soul trapped within the body while it longs to return to its original freedom in heaven; in contemporary poetry by women, it tends to refer to a woman trapped in an unwanted and resented relationship with a man, usually her husband.
Similarly, the subject of young women being married off to old men is one that we find in Persian poetry written by women in both medieval and contemporary poetry. But the medieval poets and the contemporary poets concentrate on different moments within the relationship, and have a quite different emotional tone. Medieval poets such as Mehri, Zaifi, and Bibi Mah Ofaq refer to the experience of the married woman, who has perhaps been married for some time, and who is complaining about her husband’s sexual inadequacy; the tone is contemptuous and mocking, the poems exist to express anger but also to elicit derisive laughter. And we feel that the poems are written primarily for an audience of other women who will know exactly what is being talked about and can join in the joke. Modern poets such as Alam Taj, Forugh Farrokhazad, and Fevzieh Rahgozar Barlas who refer to the same topic tend to concentrate on the moment of the wedding itself, and on the child-bride who is about to enter into a relationship which the poet implies will be cruelly shocking and humiliating for her, and which can hardly be expected to develop into a mutually satisfactory marriage. The tone is one of implied outrage, pity, and horror; there is no question of laughter, derisive or otherwise, and the audience is anyone, male or female, who has a conscience and is capable of sharing the poet’s indignation.
A third example of how something that was there from the beginnings of Persian poetry has persisted, and in doing so become something new, is the trope of longing for someone who is absent. This is a very common theme in pre-modern Persian poetry, expressed in words that mean “far away,” “separation,” “exile,” “yearning,” part of a vocabulary which has for centuries been devoted to the subject, with the result that these words are redolent with connotations of aching, unfulfilled need. Among the numerous female poets now living in the Persian-speaking diaspora, exactly the same vocabulary, with the same connotations, is used to indicate longing for the place that was once home, for Iran, or for Afghanistan.
I have emphasized in this introduction the importance of poetic conventions in the development of Persian poetry, and the way that these conventions have persisted, sometimes for many centuries. But I hope it goes without saying that the poets represented in this book are much more than skillful deployers of a set of poetic rules dictating the subject matter of a particular genre of poems, and how such poems should be written. Each of the poets here was of course a specific individual with her own experiences who lived in a particular time and place, and if she used poetic convention she did so in a way that ensured that at least some of her poems survived, unlike the vast majority of poems written within the same conventions; if she belonged to a particular time, she was not merely a representative of her time. As the biographer Lytton Strachey observed, “Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past.”* The social and poetic constraints within which these poets wrote are the “past” to which Strachey refers; such constraints are real and insistent, omnipresent even, and are the chief context within which this poetry was written. But the individuals who wrote the poems are “too important,” too distinctive, to be defined solely in this way, and this is obvious when we look at examples from this volume: Mehri’s high-spirited irritation with her husband; Makhfi’s isolation that is both anguished and flirtatious; Jahan Khatun bewailing her family’s loss of power; Aysheh Afghani lamenting her son killed in battle; Tahereh striking out as a new kind of woman in a new religion
; Alam Taj foreseeing a better future for the women of Iran; Parvin preoccupied with the privations of the poor . . . and so on.
A further constraint on these women’s lives, and on our knowledge of them, is indicated by the fact that history has usually defined them almost entirely in terms of their male relatives; they are the daughter of so and so, or the wife of so and so, or the mother of so and so, and often this is all we know about them. If they come from the lower reaches of society, they may be defined solely by their professions—they are “female singers,” or “entertainers,” or “courtesans,” and frequently we don’t even know their names. It is undeniable that almost all of the poets represented in this anthology lived or live in a male-dominated and directed society, and their relative anonymity should come as no surprise; but as anyone who is familiar with Iranian society and history knows, the presence of tough, strong-minded, highly intelligent, and eminently capable women has been a constant in that history. This was perhaps most spectacularly shown in the widespread and very active participation of women in the events surrounding the Constitutional Revolution in the early years of the twentieth century, but it has been a persistent presence from the beginning until the present. The conventions of pre-modern Persian lyric poetry, both male and female, presupposed that the poet wrote in a supplicatory tone to or about the object of his or her attentions, but in women’s poetry written within this tradition a strain of defiance, independence, audacity, effrontery, and sheer cheek, is there from the beginning; it rises to a crescendo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and resolves into a consciously female-oriented poetics in the mid and late twentieth century.
It will be clear to any reader that while women’s poetry in Persian has its own distinguishing characteristics, it also shares many of its themes, moods, and strategies with women’s poetry in other languages. Poems of longing for an absent or negligent lover are particularly common among women poets in many cultures, for example: Sulpicia in ancient Rome; Ono no Komachi in ninth-century Japan; Jahan Khatun in fourteenth-century Iran; Louise Labé in sixteenth-century France; Gaspara Stampa in sixteenth-century Italy. We might argue that such poems are common among male poets too, but there is a difference, in that social constraint has almost always been much more inhibiting in the case of a woman, who for much of human history has been powerless in ways that do not affect a male lover. He has his beloved’s indifference to complain about; she has her beloved’s indifference and her relative social helplessness, which compounds this, to be concerned about. There is a sense that if worse comes to worst, a man can go off and find someone else, but the socially curtailed life of a woman writing such a poem meant that such choices were unlikely to be available to her, so that, especially in the throes of erotic obsession, her situation can present itself as much more desperate than that of the male lover.