In the distance a car was approaching. “Hurry up!” one of the revolutionary guards called out.
He looked at the patrol car and then at the prisoner.
“Try to get used to it,” he said. “Then, when the time comes, you won’t panic.”
The only movement in the landscape was the distant car. We could only just make it out, but because of the whiteness of the snow we could make out what type it was: either a Mercedes or a Hillman. Haji must have been lounging in the backseat.
“Make sure it doesn’t work loose,” the guard said. “I’ll be right back.”
The prisoner said, “What?”
But the guard had already moved off to the patrol car. From the weight in the backseat, the trunk of the approaching car sagged low to the ground. The guards were still eating their dates near the patrol car. Women were not allowed to watch because this was not their business; it had nothing to do with them. The prisoner tried to shift the rock with his feet. It refused to move. One of the spectators jumped forward but quickly froze to the spot. All of us were waiting for the approaching car. The revolutionary guards and the photographer were throwing the date stones into the snow. The snowflakes were melting as they hit the ground. The prisoner again tried to shift the rock. It moved but didn’t fall. The silent spectators stood stock-still, as if they were frozen to the spot and it wasn’t snowing. Our hands were red with cold. Red as the wine the guards found in the prisoner’s house the night of his arrest. One of the bottles was empty, the other still half full. The guards also took the two long-stemmed crystal glasses. By now we could see the car. It was a Hillman. One of the officers threw the date box away. The rest quickly ate up what they had left in their hands. One of the revolutionary guards went to meet the car and the rest followed. The photographer glanced at the gallows. He started to move closer, but changed his mind and walked over to the ambulance instead. The prisoner was kicking at the rock with his feet. It tottered, fell down, and left his bare feet hanging in the air. His long, thin toes were searching for the stone. But by then it was too late. Then the movement stopped and his feet hung motionless. The car finally arrived, dazzling us with its headlights. We went to warm our hands at the headlights of the ambulance, because that was what the photographer was doing.
— Translated by Neda Jalali
Footnotes
1 Haji: one who has been to Mecca; here, a cleric, a religious judge.
Farideh Kheradmand
Farideh Kheradmand was born in Tehran in 1957. She studied drama and literature and worked as a playwright, director, and radio actor. Since 1992, she has devoted her time to writing. Her published works include several plays and children’s books, as well as two collections of short stories, A Bird Exists and Peace of Night. She lives in Tehran.
PEACE OF NIGHT
Every night I sit in the pitch darkness of my room for hours, staring at one point.
On the window, my eyes fall on the cheerful profile of a clown projected through the needles of a pine tree. But I have closed the curtains for a while now, to shut out the clown. I no longer believe in his cheery smile.
Each and every night I stare at one point in the deep recesses of the room. Nothing is visible in the dark, and I find peace only when I hear that quiet chewing sound.
A hungry mouse slowly gnaws away at my papers and worthless notes, and I don’t even move a muscle. I just listen to his mellow tune: the constant grinding of teeth on paper. It has a hum that entertains me.
Sometimes I think, “Which story is up now?” or “Which word is he working on?” And a sweet trance takes hold of me, the kind of trance that works best through self-delusion.
Last night, in the middle of the night, he suddenly stopped chewing. It worried me. I waited, but there was no sound. I yearned to hear the sound of the papers being chewed once again. “Maybe he’s reached a plain white paper in the middle of my notes.” He has a strange habit: he doesn’t touch plain white paper. He only chews paper blackened with ink.
My anticipation grew. “He knows. He’s just torturing me.” A hatred rose inside me, but I did not let it seep out. Then I got worried that maybe something has happened to him. But I still couldn’t turn the light on. My eyes had become accustomed to the dark. Any kind of light, no matter how faint, would have bothered me. I waited. And then another ploy: complete indifference. A while later, when I heard the sound of the nibbling, I smiled, without, of course, letting him know. And then my nightly serenity descended through me.
Sometimes I wonder, “How long does it take per word?” During these long nights, it has become clear to me that time is not something he squanders. All the papers and words that he deems superfluous, he simply ignores.
During the day, I write with the hope of hearing his whispers in the dark of the night. I write so he won’t go hungry. And he is silent throughout the day as he sleeps and rests his jaws.
We have become accustomed to each other. During the day, he hears the whispers of the gnawing of my soul; and I, at night, the peaceful tune of the gnawing of papers and words.
— Translated by Kuross Esmaili
Poetry
INTRODUCTION
The relationship between poetry and the social context out of which it arises — and in which it must be seen as anchored — is complex and multifaceted. Trying to articulate it, partially and ever so tentatively, we grope for metaphors that can make it palpable — mirrors, road maps, models — knowing well that such images flaunt their inadequacy and difference more than their likeness or illustrative power. In the end, clinging to the certainty that poems, these concentrated sites of meaning, relate to the realities of a community’s mind and life, we acknowledge that the exact nature and shape of a poem’s “relevance” remains unknowable. An anthologist must then leave it to the reader’s imagination to guess at the ways in which his offering may “reflect,” “recall,” or “reassemble” the social fabric in which it is etched.
For American readers of Persian poetry, the problem is compounded by misrepresentations, primarily based on information transmitted through the American media which not only simplifies but often deliberately distorts, crowding the mind with images that go against the grain of all art. No amount of pontificating on the ebb and flow of political events in Iran in the last two decades could even begin to account for the feverish mental activity of Iranian poets as they interpret their experiences or the emotions these have occasioned, not just for their immediate readers but for those outside their culture, as well as for posterity.
While to most Westerners the political events that have catapulted Iran to center stage of the world in the last two and a half decades may point to a historic retreat from modernity, Iranian poets, painters, and filmmakers are pulling at the sleeves of their muses to tell the world they not only have traversed all that is modern but are moving into the postmodern age (whatever that might mean) just as rapidly as they can. While to the outside viewer Iranian politics may appear to defy the linear logic of progress, Iranians see themselves as having passed the last twist in the winding spiral of their long, eventful history.
Witness the poems gathered here. In the midst of the turmoil and tumult associated with revolutions, wars, and an uneasy coexistence of a theocratic state with a society hungering for democracy, we have poems that still invite us, rather quietly, to contemplate the beauties of nature or to read the narrative of their maker’s existence with greater empathy. The poets whose work is assembled here are actively revisiting those governing principles of writing and reading that, a revolution ago, dominated the lives of their forebears and role models. Code words of a generation — literary engagement, social symbolism, and socialist realism — are fast exiting the scene of Persian poetry, albeit on tiptoe, making way for pensive moods or undisturbed moments of attention to minutiae.
The new wise men and women of the Persian tribe are trying to assure us that culture, still very much bent on capturing beauty, is alive in their minds and thei
r midst, if not on their streets. Witness also that the poets who are most instrumental in spearheading the new mood and mind — Royai, Atashi, Sepanlu — have begun to question the efficacy of the flat linear notions of literary history — all history, in fact — as it is expressed through the metaphors of the mirror or catch-phrases like “literary engagement” and “commitment” to revolutionary change that dominated the scene in the 1960s. The stone that the carvers set aside has indeed turned out to be the cornerstone, to paraphrase a well-known psalm.
The way this is accomplished is remarkable, and most worthy of our attention, even though it may involve a momentary digression in the direction of certain perennial building blocks of early Persian poetry, established in eastern Iran and Central Asia over a millennium ago. It was there in the tenth and eleventh centuries, in the courts of Bukhara, Ghazna, and Samarqand, that Persian poets — men like Rudaki, Manuchehri, Ferdowsi, or Khayyam — conjured the first images of Persian poetry, describing the beauty of a hoopoe or a horse, commenting on a battle or a royal feast, raising their glasses well past midnight to life, youth, and the pursuit of joy. Recalling strong historical connections and a rich oral tradition, they gave Persian literary culture, perhaps even the world, a kind of concrete poetry that modern Persian poets like Atashi or Kiarostami link up with today.
Although the high clouds of mystical speculation that appeared on the horizon centuries later may have pushed heads upward or forced men inside the recesses of their airy imaginations, some sense of immediate wonder and joy, tied so much to time and place, continued to survive through the ages, eventually revivified by a new source of enrichment. When Persian poetry, always an elitist art, became too removed from the concrete concerns of the modern nation-states that had inherited the Persian aesthetic tradition, Romantic Europe contributed a much-needed midcourse correction. Still, in terms of Persian poetic modernity, this Romantic impulse was — or soon became — far more a return-to-nature movement than a wild-eyed fascination with the strange and the mysterious, or with the long ago and the far away. The grain of modern and modernist Persian aesthetics remained largely enmeshed in daily affairs and in its surroundings, be it in Iran itself, the new country of Afghanistan, or in Central Asia, dominated by the Russian culture and the Soviet ideology.
It was in response to the Iranian states’ shallow and rootless push toward a Westernized project of modernity — first in the 1930s and again in the 1960s and early 1970s — that Iran’s poets, recoiling from the pace far more than from the direction, formulated the notion of commitment that came to dominate aesthetic expressions of the time. Of course, the emergence in the last century of the Persian-speaking world’s proximity to the Soviet Union, and the channeling of progressive impulses into Soviet-style communism, also played a crucial role. Iran’s revolutionary movement, which began as an effort to return to the fountainhead of its native culture and ended up attempting to subordinate that culture to a religious ideology, brought intellectual Iranians back to the position they had traditionally occupied: visionaries positioned against a dogmatic power structure.
That is where I would situate many of the poems collected in this anthology. Doubts about dogma, pensive moods countering concentrated efforts in cultural engineering, fingers pointed toward life beyond politics — all combined with a newfound aversion to political revolutions — make up much of the fabric for the work found here. Above all, these poems radically rearticulate the past, both national and religious, and even the mythical past. The revolution is now in the text; it makes up the motive force of the creative mind behind it. No longer do we see nights of oppression automatically turn into the dawns of deliverance so prevalent in so-called Nimaic canon, or the mechanical and rather noisy clanking of the slaves’ chains (as in young Shamlu’s vision of future liberation), or retellings of ancient Iranian myths aimed at mobilizing our modern sense of patriotism (a la Akhavan). In their place is a new and often antithetical poetic impulse: a quiet invitation to view the soaring of a bird from underneath a turtle’s shell, or ancient myths carved in stone which may be read as prophesying the ephemerality of modern myths of nationalism. Gone are noisy incantations of revolutionary marches, replaced by quiet meditations on youthful love, questioning the operations of memory as it tries to revive something of the past, as we found in Atashi’s “A Woman out of Memory.”
More radical departures are not uncommon. Royai, a poet always on the side of free rein of the imagination, is represented here by four poems from his collection Seventy Tombstones. In them he revises the lives of luminaries of the past, not as one might hear at a wake or read on a tombstone, but as depicted by an imagination freed from the shackles of celebratory rituals, shaped by received ideas. In a poem like “Martyr’s Tombstone,” he bestows immortality upon the martyred heroes of the revolution and war, at the same time registering his protest against the culture of death propagated by some revolutionary clerics. Beyond all relevancies that might accrue to various sorts of external referentiality, the poet thus demonstrates the possibility that poetry can be image centered and relevant at one and the same time.
In “Love Song,” one of the earliest poems in our selection, Shamlu depicts a deeply dejected lover facing a joyful beloved, embodying a sense of abandon. In projecting love as a personage unable to speak, as if stifled by force into silence, the operations of the poem point to simultaneous and contradictory possibilities: love is there, but it cannot be consummated because it cannot be communicated. This is not unlike Sepanlu’s depiction in “Miniature” of the confrontation between beauty’s unstoppable urge to manifest itself and a restrictive social environment designed to banish all beauty.
Not surprisingly, the most radical visible trait separating the poetry written in the last quarter-century from the entire modernist canon, at least insofar as the centrality of the image to the idea is concerned, comes from the pen of a filmmaker. Abbas Kiarostami’s poems in Walking with the Wind confirm the impression that he conceptualizes poetry and film as ontologically the same. His poetic personages—some making a single appearance, others quite ubiquitous—come from an array of contexts, the most evident being fauna and flora: the foal, the nag, and the horse; pigeons and doves and wild geese; butterflies and grasshoppers; a mosquito here, two dragonflies there, spiders everywhere; honeybees and worker bees and queen bees; lizards and snakes and turtles.
They appear as direct manifestations of specific states of being. The pine and the box tree, the sycamore and the oak, the mulberry and the cherry, the weeping willow and the towering cypress, all grow and decay side by side with the rattan, the cotton, the poppy, the violet, the begonia. Among these, nuns young and old move, seemingly directionless, mostly arguing and disagreeing, as small children play their games.
Finally, no twenty-first-century account of Persian poetry will be complete without taking note of the poetry produced by Iranian expatriates in the last two decades. In these, too, we witness a perceptible move toward a more image-conscious aesthetic. It seems as though the loss of the familiar territory we call home has in this case led to a new search for poetic expression, one marked by a relevance and coherence that together can make a poem universal as well as Iranian at the same time. While an inevitable sense of fractured ego may be most evident in more established poets like Nader Naderpur and Esmail Khoi, depictions of the mood of restorative nostalgia are on the ascendance. While in the works of early exile differences in the climate, the physical environment, and the nature of human relations are emblematic of the condition of exile and therefore a barometer of the speaker’s mood, in more recent writings a genuine sense of wonder and appreciation often appears.
Younger expatriates even seem at times prepared to view their severance from the homeland more as a voyage of initiation. Far from rendering the speaker dysfunctional, the past is often recollected as a benign but not ideal point of entry to the present, thus allowing a pleasantly sad but not debilitating dialogue between the two. Summary rejection
s of the immediate environment, such as we are likely to see in texts of the older exiles, gives way to perceptible movements toward greater engagement with it. Often the presence of an interlocutor — a friend, a companion, a beloved child — acts to moderate the speaker’s internalization of the environment. Here the backward glance tends to set up a model for creative inspiration and possible source of emulation for the world of the here and now. Establishing a link between the “self in present” and a remembered image of a “self in the past,” the subsequent elevated mood plays a significant part in recovering the continuity of the individual and a modified sense of individual and collective identity.
Future historians of Persian poetry may well focus on the twentieth century as the time when it began to regain much of the glory it once possessed. The universal appeal of poets like Ferdowsi and Nezami, Attar and Rumi, Khayyam and Hafez, to nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers the world over may well have as much to do with the need in the recipient cultures to enrich or renew themselves with the aesthetics developed in the Persian-speaking world. It certainly owes a great deal to the creative and transformative strategies that their translators devised to make those texts their own. Similarly, the flourishing, at times feverish translation activity has played a decisive part in the evolution of the modernist poetic tradition, particularly in the manner in which this poetry has extended its appeal and social reach.
It is entirely possible to envision a future for Persian poetry in which it might be able to graft its newfound strength — in the ideas it proffers, its expressive strategies, and above all in the images it creates — to the eternal and universal human need for emotive expression. As a living and growing aesthetic tradition, it may well extend its domain further and wider than ever before. The outlook for Persian poetry appears bright at the dawn of the second millennium of its existence, just as it did when the grand epic The Shahnameh, the haiku-like Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam, or the dense lyrical expression of Rumi gave this poetic tradition its universal appeal.
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