Strange Times, My Dear

by Nahid Mozaffari

  AKH

  Ahmad Shamlu

  Ahmad Shamlu was born in 1925 in Tehran, but spent his childhood in various provincial towns. In his early youth he was a political activi-tist who became a political prisoner under the Shah’s regime. Later, like so many of his generation, he became a journalist, though his primary talent was as a gifted poet, taking on traditional Persian poetry with its set formulas of meter and rhyme. A follower of Nima Yushij (1897— I960), Iran’s first modernist poet, Shamlu went on to develop his own distinct style, searching for new means to expand the metrical and verbal resources of poetry. He firmly believed that poetry should speak the language of the people and reflect their hopes and pains, yet Shamlu’s poetry is effective because it mingles his intensely personal experience with his and other intellectuals’ political and social concerns.

  Shamlu published over twenty volumes of poetry. He translated Western poetry into Persian, including the work of Langston Hughes and Federico Garcia Lorca. He also edited and founded several artistic and literary journals, and translated both fiction and poetry from the French. For over thirty years, he collected the folk ballads, tales, games, and common street lore of the Persians, particularly natives of the capital city of Tehran, to form his Dictionary of Street Language. To date, his “Book of the Alley,” along with much of his work, has never been published due to censorship. Shortly before the revolution, Shamlu lived in exile in the United States and England for almost three years, but returned to Iran early in 1979. Between 1979 and his death in 2000, he remained in Iran and continued to write poetry and criticism, despite severe pressure from the authorities. Along with many other writers whose work appears in this anthology, Shamlu was active trying to establish an independent Iranian writers’ association, an effort that continues to evoke resistance from the state authorities even today. His accomplishments and the tremendous influence he has had on a younger generation of Persian-speaking poets made him one of the most revered literary figures in modern Iranian history.

  IN THIS BLIND ALLEY

  They smell your breath

  lest you have said: I love you,

  They smell your heart:

  These are strange times, my dear.

  They flog love

  at the roadblock.

  Let’s hide love in the larder.

  In this crooked blind alley, as the chill descends,

  they feed fires

  with logs of song and poetry.

  Hazard not a thought:

  These are strange times, my dear.

  The man who knocks at your door in the noon of the night has come to kill the light.

  Let’s hide light in the larder.

  There, butchers

  are posted in passageways

  with bloody chopping blocks and cleavers:

  These are strange times, my dear.

  They chop smiles off lips,

  and songs off the mouth:

  Let’s hide joy in the larder.

  Canaries barbecued

  on the flames of lilies and jasmines:

  These are strange times, my dear.

  Satan, drunk on victory,

  squats at the feast of our undoing. Let’s hide God in the larder.

  — Translated by Ahmad Karimi Hakkak

  LOVE SONG

  The man saying, “I love you,”

  is a sad minstrel who has lost his voice:

  if only love could speak.

  A thousand happy skylarks

  in your eyes

  a thousand silent canaries in my throat:

  only if love could speak.

  The man saying, “I love you,”

  is the dark heart of the night

  searching for moonlight:

  if love only could speak.

  A thousand gleaming sunbeams with each step you take,

  a thousand weeping stars

  of my desire:

  if love alone could speak.

  — Translated by Ahmad Karimi Hakkak

  END OF THE GAME

  The lovers

  passed through, downcast,

  disgraced by their untimely rhapsodies.

  The alleys

  were left with no murmurs and no sound of footsteps

  The soldiers

  passed by, shattered,

  weary

  on scrawny horses,

  faded rags of ousted pride

  upon their spears.

  What do you gain

  boasting

  to the world

  when

  every particle of dust on your cursed path damns you

  What do you gain from trees and orchards

  when

  you speak to the jasmine,

  holding a scythe in your hand?

  Where you have stepped,

  plants

  refrain from growing,

  since you never believed

  in the virtues of water and earth.

  Alas! Our story

  was the faithless ballad of your soldiers returning

  from the conquest of the harlots’ fortress.

  Wait for what the curse of the night shall make of you:

  mothers in black,

  mourning the most beautiful offspring of the wind and the sun, have yet to lift their heads

  from their prayer rugs.

  — Translated by Arthur Lane and Firoozeh Papan

  MORNING

  Lukewarm and slow,

  soiled water patterns of the summer rain

  on charmless leaves of rose mallow

  at five o’clock in the morning.

  In the martyrs’ graveyard

  professional preachers

  are still

  asleep.

  The hanging abyss of screams

  in the air

  is empty.

  And those wrapped in bloodstained shrouds

  turn over

  in their tombs

  weary.

  Pockmarks of rain

  trifle

  on perfunctory tombstones

  at five o’clock in the morning.

  — Translated by Arthur Lane and Firoozeh Papan

  Simin Behbahani

  Simin Behbahani was born in Tehran in 1927. From the age of twelve she wrote poetry and published her first ghazal, a short lyrical genre in Persian poetry, when she was fourteen. She studied to become a midwife, but because she was suspected of belonging to the Tudeh, or Communist Party, initially she was not admitted to Tehran University. “From that time on,” Behbahani writes in A Cup of Sin: Selected Poems of Simin Behbahani, “the purpose of my poetry has been to fight injustice. Whenever I could, I have portrayed it, revealed it. I have considered freedom the cardinal requirement of being a poet, and have never bowed my head to any power or office.”

  Behbahani eventually earned a law degree from Tehran University and taught literature in various high schools, meanwhile writing poetry for the rest of her professional life. She writes:

  I have worked mainly in the ghazal style. I began writing poems with ghazals and linked couplets. From early on, my poems have reflected my social milieu and conditions, though in effect these reflections have been reflections of my individual and emotional reactions to the society and conditions in which I have lived. . . . Reacting to and provoked by the outside world, I reveal the world within.

  The advent of the Iranian revolution seems to have strengthened this dimension of Behbahani’s work. In fact, her first post-revolution collection, titled “A Line of Speed and Fire,” impressed the Tehran literary establishment as a book inspired by the revolutionary movement and replete with stunningly clear images of fleeting moments expressed in flowing rhymes not typical of the genre of the ghazal in modern times. It seemed as though the poet had internalized the tradition of the best imagistic utterances in Persian poetry and was combining it with uncanny intuitions and keen observations on the flow of events through a revolutionary moment.

  For the past tw
enty years, I have tried to change the current meters of the ghazal by incorporating parts of natural, everyday speech, which in their natural setting may seem devoid of any obvious metrical design. By repeating and extending the meters of a beginning segment, I create a new pattern, free of the set patterns in traditional ghazals and free of the set themes and expressions associated with them. Thus I have created a new container ready for new contents.

  In all, she has published fifteen volumes of poetry. The poems here are from A Cup of Sin: Selected Poems of Simin Behbahani, edited and translated by Farzaneh Milani and Kaveh Safa (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1999).

  A MAN WITH A MISSING LEG

  A man with a missing leg

  has one leg of his pants folded.

  His eyes burn with anger

  Is this a spectacle? they cry.

  Though I turn my face away, his image lingers:

  his extreme youth, less than twenty, perhaps.

  I pray he will not be like me,

  having to endure another forty years.

  Yet, the suffering that comes with existence

  is impervious to such pleas.

  Though my feet were quick,

  the trail was difficult for me.

  How will he manage with just one leg?

  Tap, tap, he stamps the pavement with his cane,

  though he needs no signature

  to register his presence.

  My tender smiles turned to thorns and daggers in his eyes.

  Used to rough treatment,

  he has no appetite for tenderness.

  Lines of bitterness mark his cold, parched face.

  As if, with his body diminished,

  his spirit too had lost its resilience.

  To help him persevere, I thought, I would offer him

  some kindness and motherly advice.

  But I realized it was more than he could bear.

  I turned to him to start a conversation.

  The spot where he stood was empty.

  He was gone, the man with a missing leg.

  — Translated by Farzaneh Milani and Kaveh Safa

  I WRITE, I CROSS OUT

  I write, I cross out, to find what I’ve lost,

  to find words for turbulent thoughts.

  I scratch the back of my skull

  with a finger like an ivory dowel

  to untangle braid by braid the tangled yarn.

  In my mind filled with dust

  the colors of your face have faded.

  I close my tired eyes to contemplate

  what remains.

  I wanted to remember you. You changed into a cloud

  on the far side of the sea.

  How can I picture you in this scattered vapor?

  Is this the tired wind breathing

  or the sound of your voice in the streets?

  Who is this and what is he saying?

  I wish to know, that I may prepare an answer.

  What is this turbulence

  below the surface of my consciousness?

  I am not the foam that breathes

  with joy in the waves of the sea.

  Your memories flee, and I have no remedy.

  I cannot fold them in piles

  like clothes in a closet.

  You have asked what I want from you?

  You should ask what I wanted.

  Desires were drained from my heart

  before I could desire.

  — Translated by Farzaneh Milani and Kaveh Safa

  IF THE SNAKE IS DOMESTIC

  If the snake is domestic

  I will give it shelter.

  I will be fond of it still,

  even if it does cruel things.

  It slithered down the ceiling

  with angry carnelian eyes

  and a quick poisonous tongue,

  and it coiled itself by my side.

  People tell me, bring it salt:

  as salt consumed will

  make one beholden to its giver.

  I will bring what is needed

  from my poems: images like emeralds

  formed in my lover’s soul.

  I shall lay them in front of it

  and enumerate them, one by one.

  Dazzled by the colors and light,

  it will begin warming up to me.

  It will move its head,

  expecting me to scratch its back and neck.

  Its fangs glistening like brass,

  a snake intoxicated —

  what need to destroy it?

  Oh, this is a domestic snake.

  You can’t kill it in anger.

  Even though it does cruel things,

  I let it be.

  — Translated by Farzaneh Milani and Kaveh Sofa

  AND BEHOLD

  Do they not consider the camel, how it was created?

  — From the Quran, Sura 88:37

  And behold the camel, how it was created:

  not from mud and water,

  but, as if, from patience and a mirage.

  And you know how the mirage deceives the eyes.

  And the mirage knows not the secret of your patience:

  how you endure thirst, sand, and salt marshes,

  gazing at the immense presence with your weary eyes.

  And behold how this gaze is marked with salt grooves

  like the dry lines remaining on your cheeks after a stream of tears.

  And behold the tears that have drained from you

  all the means of consciousness.

  With what nothingness should you fill this emptied space? And behold in this emptied space the agitation of a thirsty camel, made mad beyond the limits of its patience, reluctant to meekly carry its heavy burden.

  And behold its two incisors gleaming madly in a row of angry teeth.

  Patience spawns hatred and hatred the fatal wound:

  behold with what vengeance the camel

  bites through the arteries of its driver.

  The mirage lost its patience.

  And behold the camel.

  — Translated by Farzaneh Milani and Kaveh Safa

  IT’S TIME TO MOW THE FLOWERS

  It’s time to mow the flowers,

  don’t procrastinate.

  Fetch the sickles, come,

  don’t spare a single tulip in the fields.

  The meadows are in bloom:

  who has ever seen such insolence?

  The grass is growing again:

  step nowhere else but on its head.

  Blossoms are opening on every branch,

  exposing the happiness in their hearts:

  such colorful exhibitions must be stopped.

  Bring your scalpels to the meadow

  to cut out the eyes of flowers.

  So that none may see or desire,

  let not a seeing eye remain.

  I fear the narcissus is spreading its corruption:

  stop its displays in a golden bowl

  on a six-sided tray.

  What is the use of your ax,

  if not to chop down the elm tree?

  In the maple’s branches

  allow not a single bird a moment’s rest.

  My poems and the wild mint

  bear messages and perfumes.

  Don’t let them create a riot with their wild singing. My heart is greener than green, flowers sprout from the mud and water of my being. Don’t let me stand, if you are the enemies of Spring.

  — Translated by Farzaneh Milani and Kaveh Sofa

  Mehdi Akhavan Saless

  Born in 1928 in Mashhad in the province of Khorassan, Mehdi Akhavan Saless (a.k.a. M. Omid) began his career as a teacher. He became involved in politics in the 1950s and was imprisoned after the 1953 coup d’état. After his release, he worked at the Ministry of Education, and later as a literary commentator for Iran’s radio and television organization.

  His stature as a major modernist poet was established after the publication of h
is second volume of poetry, Winter (1956). Like so many others in the post-World War II generation of Iran’s poets, Akhavan Saless was influenced by the modernist Nima Yushij’s views on form, yet he never lost connection to the tone of the classical tradition. In his longer poems, Akhavan Saless brings together in a tight poetic structure the epic tradition of Ferdowsi, the dramatic qualities of Zoroastrian hymns, and themes from the simple folk ballads and tales of the Persian oral tradition. His shorter poems are sometimes cynical and sinister, sometimes playful and witty, and sometimes bitingly satirical. Akhavan Saless, a towering figure in contemporary Persian poetry, died in Tehran in 1990.

  The following poem is a qasida — an important genre in classical and modern poetry — in praise of Iran as a nation. It has relevance in the context of post-revolutionary poetry, because with the establishment of the Islamic regime, the speech and actions of the leaders implied that they were more preoccupied with Islam than with Iran as a nation. In this poem, the speaker roams freely, first through Persian mythology and folklore and then through the history and geography of the land of Iran, expressing his abundant and unabashed love for it. Shortly after this poem was published, Akhavan Saless was summoned to the revolutionary court in Tehran and asked to declare his allegiance to the Islamic state, an episode that has stained the record of the Islamic Republic in its dealings with the country’s leading intellectuals.