Strange Times, My Dear
Page 46
I LOVE YOU, ANCIENT HOMELAND
If I love anything in the world
I love you, ancient homeland
venerable aged one, ever so young
I love you, if I have ever loved
noble, antique Iran
I love you, precious pearl
eternal land of the grand
nurturer of the great, I love you
your mind shines forth like a work of art
and I am a lover both of your mind and art
I love your stories, myth or history
your traditions, accounts of your exploits
your scripts I love, let chisel be the pen
words inscribed on rocky pages of mount and hill
or be they recorded in books with black ink
with reed pens, or feathery plumes, I love it all
I admire your suppositions as if they were certainties
I love your declarations as if they were manifest
I worship your Ahura Mazda, your gods all
I love your divine glory, your splendor
with my life I love your ancient prophet
who is an old guide, beholder of light
I love the noble Zarathustra more than all guides and prophets
man has not seen better than him nor will
I love that best of all humans
his three “goods” are the worlds best guide1
I love maxims thus sweet and short
he was a leader, an Iranian superman
I love my leader to be Iranian
he neither killed nor ordered anyone killed
for that too I love him eminently
I love that true, ancient guide
be he gone beyond all legends
then that enlightened son of yours, Bamdad
bright-faced man of Nayshabur I love
and the glorious Mazdak I love in every regard
that eternal intelligence of all time
he gave his life bravely fighting injustice
man of justice with a lion’s heart I love
he had an intellect universal and righteous
on that account I love him even more
With reverence I love Manes the worthy
both as painter and as prophet
that painter of superior souls I love
and the Arjang, his book of paintings
I love all your farms, dry or irrigated
your fields and pastures, your streams and brooks
I love your desert as well as your sea, dry and wet
your mountain as much as your forest, plain, hill
I love your discerning, life-offering martyrs
who were the pride of humanity
their souls, delicate as the breeze of dawn
and their steely courage I love
their thoughts as well I love
which have inspired revolutions of many ages
and their legacy, advice or admonishment
or even scattered tidings I love
I love those immortally memorable men
so many of whom have graced every century
your poets and their works I love
pure as the breeze of dawn
of Ferdowsi I love that palace of legends
which he built on the horizon of pride and victory
the rage and wrath of Khayyam I love
which forever works on the heart and the mind
and the pained burning and clamor of Attar
which ignites sparks in the soul, I love
and in Shams’s lover the passion and fire
I love which sets the spirit aflame
and in Sa’di, Hafez and Nizami I love
the fervor, the poetry, and the tale
blessed be your regions, Rasht, Gorgan, Mazandaran
which I love as enormously as the Caspian Sea
blessed be the land watered by Karun
which I love as sweetly as its sugar
hallowed be your Azerbaijan the magnificent
I love that vanguard in the line of hazard
your Esfahan, known as “half the world”
I love better than the other half
blessed be Khorasan, the land that begets the select
that vast expanse I love with my soul and heart
glory to your Shiraz, peer of paradise
that cradle of talent and art I love
your land of the Kurd and the Baluch I love
as a tree bearing fruit of nobility
happy Kerman and the southern coast
which I love wet and dry, land and sea
I love the Afghans, a shoot of our common root
today in the claws of one worse than the Tartar
I love Sughd, Khwarezm and its desert
which the house of the Qajars lost
your Iraq and your Gulf I love
as much as Transoxania, gate to the Wall of China
I love Eran and our ancient Caucases
as a son loves the paternal abode
your legendary yesteryears and your dreamy morrows
both I love equally, with all my life
your legends I love for they let me
grow wings, more raptured than children
and I love your dreamy horizons, as forever
I have loved journeying through wondrous climes
like dreams and legends, your yesterday and tomorrow
I love both ends each in its place
but more than these I love your today
o living soul, o wealth at hand
you were at the zenith, in form, in substance
I love that zenith of prize and peril
rise up again to the zenith of substance
for I would love your new color, new forms
I love you, o homeland, to remain
neither western, nor eastern, nor Arab
may you be victorious so long as the world turns
may you be joyful and mindful and fruitful.
— Translated by Ahmad Karimi Hakkak
Footnotes
1 “Goods” refers to the prophet Zoroaster’s guidance for a virtuous life: good thoughts, good speech, good deeds.
Esmail Khoi
Esmail Khoi is a leading Iranian poet living in exile. Born in 1938 in Mashad, he published his first volume of poetry when he was eighteen. Educated at Tehran Teachers Training College, Khoi went to England in 1961 for his graduate studies. Five years later, he received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of London. After his return from England, he published a second collection, On the Galloping Stallion of the Earth. In the 1960s and 1970s, as a founding member of the Writers Association of Iran, he opposed the restrictions on the freedom of expression under the Shah. After the Iranian revolution of 1979, Khoi found the conditions even more oppressive under the Islamic Republic. He went into hiding, and in 1983 left his homeland for England, where for the past twenty years he has been an outspoken opponent of the Iranian Islamic regime. Beyond politics, his poetry has attracted attention as an arena for the study of the aesthetics of exile, particularly as it relates to Iranian intellectuals. In his poems, exile appears as a condition disruptive to consciousness, evident in poetic settings where space and time cease to unfold predictably.
Khoi’s publications in English translation include Edges of Poetry: Selected Poems of Esmail Khoi (edited by Ahmad Karimi Hakkak and Michael Beard, Blue Logos Press, 1995) and Outlandia: Songs of Exile (edited by Ahmad Karimi Hakkak and Michael Beard, Nik Publications, 1999).
LYRICAL
You are like the smell of a dove
like that clear silence
like the rainbow around her neck
like the warmth under her wings.
I long for no far-off flights
not anymore:
this piece of the sky for me
is enough.
My throat bears the marks
of an eagle’s claws.
May the balm of yo
ur fragrance
be sincere and plentiful.
And so
I shall become a woodpecker
building my nest
kiss by kiss
at the curve of your neck.
— Translated by Ahmad Karimi Hakkak and Michael Beard
OUTLANDIA
There’s an essence to Outlandia,
it has everything your loving heart
might desire.
No, the air here is not that polluted
and the water is wholesome.
What is more,
reason rules here, in all matters.
People abide by their laws
and the laws are made for the people:
Reflecting a combination
of reason and experience,
and there are structures here
open, flexible,
that resist underground tremors, the trembling that warns of abrupt shifts and changes.
Not only its cities,
its villages, too,
are well cared for, and its history:
rub off greed and blood, conquest and cruelty
from its surface,
and it begins to reflect the human yearning for freedom.
Why is it then, O God,
that here, too, in this paradise,
happiness is still my forbidden fruit?
Over many years, in a place that is not mine,
I have learned a thousand points, as we say,
“finer than a hair,”
like the feeling that this land
would not let you be its master and lord,
that you cannot but be a beggar at its door,
not in those words, of course, but an uninvited guest,
seated at a table of condescending hospitality
where some helping hand
has invited multitudes of prideless outsiders,
stripped of self-respect.
I now see
as clearly as can be
that happiness is
witnessing your creation:
seeing the mark of your hand
upon a door or a wall
on a rose petal,
on a falling leaf,
in any paltry thing.
Nowhere in this paradise, though
need I say it,
have my hands planted or set anything in place
not a rose bush
nor a brick or building block,
neither in a rose garden
nor in a wall around a home.
I look around me
and I see
that no human edifice
standing in Outlandia
holds a mark from me.
And thus I decree:
nothing
here
belongs to me.
Yes, Outlandia may be paradise on earth,
a place where no one minds what you do
yet, alas,
this is also the land
where none minds you!
And here
among these throngs so much minding
their work and their world
I find no mate for my soul
to whisper to her heart
my wish for the hour
to say farewell
to this paradise
and to go back to
my hell my homeland.
— Translated by Ahmad Karimi Hakkak and Michael Beard
AN ALLUSION
Heaven forbid,
heaven
forbid,
that the dot, doodle, dot of the crows
on winters blank page,
every one of them,
should be some sort of an allusion
to the impotence of the spring’s
joy-soaked nature
to sing
the lyric of blossoming
with colored words.
— Translated by Ahmad Karimi Hakkak and Michael Beard
BAD BOY
They won’t let you —
you see,
they won’t let you rest
in your crib of loneliness,
far away from Mom’s breath and the fragrance
of her kindness,
sucking on your fancy’s pacifier
or play
with the talking doll of poetry
(a keepsake from your little sister)
and drive away fear,
the black bogeyman of fear,
with the rattle of words
and be content,
like the remembrance of a pleasant dream
or a picture in a nicely carved frame
with the mere fact
of being.
But
they won’t let you,
no,
they won’t let you.
Crouched, gingerly,
at God knows how much past midnight
from who knows what corner of this droning forest
the bogeyman appears,
slashes the bad boy’s throat,
opens up his chest,
takes out his desires,
carries them away,
and eats them up raw.
— Translated by Ahmad Karimi Hakkak and Michael Beard
Nader Naderpur
Born and educated in Tehran, Nader Naderpur traveled to Europe upon completion of his secondary education and for the next five years lived in France and Italy, studying Western languages and literature. Upon his return to Iran, he translated poems and articles from the French, and published his first book of poetry, Eyes and Hands, followed by two other collections.
Naderpur’s poetry, lyrical or otherwise, is rich in imagery and deeply embedded in the texture of the Persian language, occupying a poetic space between Behbahami and Shamlu. He experimented with such forms as charpareh, which slightly loosens the classical requirements of rhyme but remains well within the formal divisions of that tradition. After a few years, he began to experiment with freer forms in the style of Nima, Shamlu, and other modernists. What distinguishes his poetry is the polished language and meticulous observance of poetic diction as distinct from all that may appear prosaic and therefore without precedence in poetry. Many of his poems reveal a genuine, spontaneous feeling that drives through their diction and formalism. Naderpur has created masterpieces that have made him a most emulated poet, particularly among the Persian speakers of Afghanistan and Central Asia.
Naderpur left Iran in 1981. The experience of exile proved a powerful, if agonizing, source of inspiration for his latest works. In exile, Naderpur inhabits two places at once: an inner, remembered place, now evoked in ever-more-nostalgic images, and an outer, physical place where he dwells and spends his days. These places are separate but related.
Naderpur died in Los Angeles in 2000 and is buried there. His tomb has since become a focal point for those expatriate Iranians who see in his poetry reflections of their own situation as exiles unprepared for life outside their native environment. In all, he has published nine volumes of poetry.
A SPRING TALE
I said to myself, Well, man without a country!
Why have you turned away from the world?
What good did you gain in your own land
that you long for it so?
In this city of exile that is your home,
live the way you did where you were born,
and if the blood in your eyes is no less than tears,
don’t shed another glance upon that bloody land!
If, as you see, fate did not favor you,
revenge yourself gallantly!
If you did not prevail in your own land,
reap what you desire from a foreign land.
Stroll out of your house at night,