sip wine the color of dusk!
Hand over the reins of wisdom to drink,
forget the grief of living!
The streets and lanes are thronging with beauties,
take one of them as a lover!
As our poets have declared:
“Get tangled up in the folds of her locks!”
Imagine that under the azure sky
you exist, and she exists, and there is no one else.
The whole world of the night is yours,
reveling and carousing your only tasks!
As my heart took in what I declared,
it abandoned despair and took courage.
The world now seemed a more gracious place,
time now seemed a more compassionate friend.
The sky was still light from the day
when I shaved my cheeks,
I taught my lips to smile,
and put on my best attire.
I left home with such joyous gait
the grief inside me recoiled in shame,
my copious hair windswept by
the drunken breeze that caressed me.
No more than two steps in the crowd,
an aged beggar blocked my way:
He wore an old sackcloth robe
and held an empty wine bottle in his hand.
He begged for a coin, I gave it to him.
He threw me a glance far from grateful.
Lost in thought, I wondered what
the unknown beggar was telling me with his eyes.
All of a sudden a spring cloud wept:
The earth soaked by God’s pure tears.
I fixed my stare on that filthy old man,
he laughed at me with flashing teeth.
In the mirror of his eyes, my reflection
was wearing a sackcloth just like him.
Ahead or behind, I did not see
another soul but him and me.
He and I, two men lost and homeless:
One drunk, the other lucid,
our clothes dripping, weeping on our bodies,
as the spring sunset smiled.
As evening appeared from behind a cloud
instead of the old man, there lingered a thought.
Astounding! Instead of the sounds of the busy raucous street
there lingered the sad gurgle of a drainpipe.
I said to myself: Well, man without country!
Not even a shadow follows you.
Don’t despair from this eternal exile,
as your future is not better than the present.
If you see no good in the past,
what can you expect from the future?
The evening was half alive, night was at hand:
With a bitter tear, the world laughed.
— Translated by William L Hanaway
M. R. Shafi’i Kadkani
Mohammad Reza Shafi’i Kadkani was born in 1939 in Kadkan, in the province of Khorassan. He received his early schooling in Mashhad and later graduated from Mashhad University with a degree in literature. During his university years he became active in various cultural and literary societies, and his writings began to appear in various local publications. In 1953, together with a group of young writers, he founded a literary society dedicated to the promotion of modern poetry and short stories. He later moved to Tehran, earned a doctorate in Persian language and literature from Tehran University, and became a professor of Persian literature there. His dissertation, Imagery in Persian Poetry, marked a new epoch, both in introducing new literary discourses to the field of Persian literary studies in Iran and in broadening the scope of the academic study of Persian poetry. He has also been a visiting professor and researcher at Oxford, Princeton, and Harvard.
Shafi’i Kadkani is considered primarily an outstanding scholar of the classical tradition in Persian poetry. Numerous scholarly monographs and essays of his have been published in Iran and abroad. In 1998, his collected works were published again in two beautifully produced books, A Mirror for Voices and The Second Millennium of the Mountain Deer. In his compositions, he combines a taste for the experimental with an awareness of the old traditions, and employs simple lyrical language to express complex thoughts.
Shafi’i Kadkani has published over ten volumes of poetry as well as numerous other books on poetry and criticism.
POETRY—I
Splashing spring downpour
over the slumber of plain and desert
all giving, granting all over,
filled for an instant
with the wholeness
of itself, blossoming out,
containing the self,
folded in on itself,
flowing on the tongue of the vetch
sedge, soil,
full,
fresh,
fast.
Poetry
arrives
thus.
POETRY — II
Where then is poetry
if it is not
where life resides?
Where then is poetry
if it is not
where a handful of living words with a soul
meet a human being
who needs them in life?
In vain we question this one and that
on its whereabouts,
people will point
in so many erroneous directions
from the alley of the imagination’s language
to the crossroads of ambiguities
to the circle of style, or texture.
Still, in the din of words
nobody will ever find
where poetry resides.
And what is poetry — what, if not
that moment of cleaning dust
from the mirror in certainty’s chamber,
that moment of seeing
in the blossoming of a rose
the liberation of the entire earth?
— Translated by Dick Davis and Ahmad Karimi Hakkak
PRAYER OF SUDDEN DREAD
Lo the Antichrist is coming, open the way for Christ,
Lo the day of resurrection is coming, sound the trumpets!
— Rumi
A dying voice between the East and the West,
once in a while it speaks:
I fear the comet that will loom on the eastern horizon.
Smoke-colored, it appears in mirrors.
It has cracked the arcades in the mosques
and in the synagogue of simple tuberoses,
it has left us respite
neither for joy nor for prayer.
Sunrise on the day of the Antichrists coming!
The one who will prevent water from reaching the rose and the tulip,
Who locks up light
in felt boxes.
A hoopoe is praying
on the branch of the old walnut tree:
a prayer of sudden dread.
What is it?
In the dawn sky, the dust and smoke of machine guns:
a full eclipse.
You too are accompanying the Antichrist,
beware!
Think of the river
that flows, carrying the sky in its heart,
you are pure in spirit, yet
the city’s air is unwholesome.
If one of the tulip’s martyrs
— killed by the bullets —
should rise up from the earth,
he would tell the clouds,
would tell the wind
how filthy the air is, how low the sky.
And how, drop by drop,
Poison has emptied
the roses’ veins of their flowing life-giving sap.
Standing by our windowsill,
you and I have by degrees
grown accustomed to the featureless dark.
Who knows
What is passing outside
in the wind?
All windows are shut.
Caught in this dust,<
br />
you and I did not know
where the night is, and where the day —
or what the true colors of the sun, water and the flowers are.
They graft the trees one to another
so deftly
that you would see apples on the almond tree branches,
and indigo tulips
on the chamomile plant.
What generosity —
bestow it on water
and it will turn into a bubble!
You and I never found out
where they buried
the stout tree of light
or where they may have taken it.
The clean clear crystal of words has grown so opaque
that the divine mission of the rose
has opened a way
to thornbushes, bugloss.
A dying voice between the East and the West;
once in a while it speaks:
I fear the comet,
The divine wrath it heralds.
Let us pray the prayer of pure dread.
The prayer of pure dread.
— Translated by Dick Davis and Ahmad Karimi Hakkak
Manuchehr Atashi
Manuchehr Atashi was born in 1931 in the southern city of Bushehr, where he received his primary schooling. He attended Shiraz University, and in 1954 returned to Bushehr to teach in high schools both in the city and surrounding villages. Later he attended Tehran University and in 1964 earned a degree in English language and literature. Following his career as a teacher, he joined the publishing arm of the National Radio and Television organization in Tehran as an editor. His poetry was first published in literary journals in 1951 and the first collection of his work, Another Tune, was published in 1959. Atashi’s early poems were welcomed as a new authentic voice from the southern coast of Iran. The sun-soaked atmosphere of his native city, the austere yet untamed lifestyles of the southern nomads, and the overriding sense of belonging to the land depicted in his poems are among the formative elements in his compositions. In his later work, the active, angst-ridden atmosphere of the earlier compositions seems to give way to a brooding, contemplative mood. To date, Atashi has seventeen books to his credit. He has also worked on compilations of works by other prominent Persian poets, most notably Poets of Peace, which is to be translated in various languages under the auspices of UNESCO.
Atashi retired in 1980 and returned to Bushehr, where he dedicates his time to his poetry and other writings.
A WOMAN OUT OF MEMORY
A woman rises out of memory,
moves from behind the trees into the lagoon,
water rising up to her shoulders.
She moves the moon to ecstasy.
Behind the trees
a woman and the moon come together in the waters.
Loose and wet, a lock of hair
floats forward on the waters.
A little red star twists in the fish’s mouth,
a shepherd song rings in the valley,
and the river, whole, sinks back into memory.
— Translated by Ahmad Karimi Hakkak
VISITATIONS
What a beautiful day!
How thin the shadow next to the boulder!
I long for the droplets of your fingertips,
I long for your black eyes —
How shy their flowing waters!
I long for the privacy of my fancies —
what an exhausting peak!
Hiking up from zero to six thousand,
sitting here, at the top,
wading two tired blistered feet in the waters of the stream.
What lovely deer!
They arrive by the water, pause.
One, two, three — and where’s the fourth,
soul mate of that young stupefied stag,
standing so sullen over there,
taking no fancy to the water?
I long for a smoke-filled chest, my own.
What ruthless days!
How crushed the silhouette under the boulder!
I long for your absent fingertips
for the distant memory of your black eyes.
How woeful their flowing waters!
— Translated by Ahmad Karimi Hakkak
Mohammad All Sepanlu
Mohammad Ali Sepanlu was born in Tehran in 1940 and began to publish his poems in the capital city’s literary journals when he was twenty years old. During the 1960s, he published collections focusing on the darker corners of Iranian history. His fourth collection, Sidewalks (1968), snapshots of life as lived in Tehran’s older quarters, marked him as a keen observer of everyday life and immediately captured the imagination of his audiences. It received much critical acclaim and went through several printings.
Before he graduated from Tehran University’s Faculty of Law in 1963, Sepanlu had already begun a second career as a translator. His translations of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre helped make their work immensely popular in Iran in the 1960s. He has also written several film scripts and acted in a number of films.
Still, poetry remains central to his career. Over the decades, his poems have retained certain characteristics that are recognized as his trademark. In his use of language, he connects twenty-first-century readers of Persian to the parlance of their great-grandparents, which in itself is remarkable in view of the rapid changes in the Persian language in the twentieth century. However, the past infuses this seemingly peculiar idiom with considerable poetic significance, thus investing his compositions with an Old World beauty that casts its shadow over all modernist efforts. In mood, he broods over meaningful episodes that shed light on contemporary life by depicting scenes, images, or vignettes from the often forgotten corners of Iran’s eventful history, both recent and ancient. Turquoise in the Dust, an anthology of Sepanlu’s poetry published in 1998, best summarizes the poet’s lifelong achievement in poetry.
MINIATURE
1
A bird without a season
is singing songs
through the women’s foreheads.
A certificate of burial
is still
the reward for love,
and the invisible order
that has dragged down the city
and made the choice
mandatory for us all
awards a prize to love
and grants the soul a city.
The citizens, one and all, always
carry tiny iceboxes in their hearts.
In it, in one corner,
there’s a cage with a silent canary inside,
in store for the spring (it might come!).
On the margins of
every schoolchild’s notebook
there’s a song scribbled in a script she cannot read
(she might learn it!),
and under her scarf every woman
hides a mourning dove in her hair.
2
Resurrection is in the nature of rain,
it’s no surprise, in this land, for the rain
to pour after a delay of half a year,
We have yet to join those who have withered.
Like the seasonless bird
we are the youth of yesteryears.
Our ghosts, still young, still ride their bikes
back and forth before the coroner’s office;
the windows are shut, of course,
but the purgatorial administration
still keeps its sojourners awake,
while suddenly from the loudspeakers
noontime salutes issue forth . . .
What consequences
flow from the firmament
of female foreheads
as they hit the alien air:
lightning sparks, sparks flash,
and the song of the mourning dove reverberates
amid the sparks and the wailing sirens.
The skies are rainy,
rain brings plenitude . . .
— Tra
nslated by Ahmad Karimi Hakkak
THE TERRACE OF DEAD FISHERMEN
Fog comes,
covers the heart of the world over,
and even after it passes
it lingers in my eyes.
There’s a wedding on the other side of the dividing drape.
On this side, I gaze through an opaque mist,
give ear to whispers from the lost. . .
A narrow cobblestone pavement,
a tavern gate,
a door opening on to the sea,
and some fishermen on the terrace,
their golden pipes
lighting up the heart of the fog.
The smell of kerosene from the nearby lantern
comes studded with red dots.
I push aside the thin fog and ask:
“No fishing in the fog, ha?”
One answers back:
“We are after adventure;
you see strange things,
especially in the dark in the fog
there are treasures here,
I swear by this cup.”
“Why not celebrate then, my friend . . .
Strange Times, My Dear Page 47