Love is all there is!”
The wind picks up
shadows, mirrors, the fishermen’s faces,
all drip through the fog’s memory.
Rain in the noon of night
and a gray board over the gate:
The Cafe of the Lost at Sea.
— Translated by Ahmad Karimi Hakkak
THE GREEN BULL
A pretty green bull
is showing forth
out of the branches and leaves.
Pink butterflies loom up
on his henna-colored horns and short hair,
and the bull —
as he begins to eye a butterfly —
his whole form dissolves
into nonexistence.
(Ah, how very long must the sun and wind travel and twist
to remake the winged bull of green gold
from the form of the foliage.
Even then, clearly
it would not turn out as it was at first.)
After his short-lived formation, the bull
breathes briefly, his form constantly changing.
He is now grazing in the gardens of Eden.
As he contemplates the columns of the Achaemenids,2
he imagines them to be
his own likeness in some mirror.
Adorn, O wind,
the twisting twigs of this apple tree.
— Translated by Ahmad Karimi Hakkak
Footnotes
2 The Achaemenid dynasty (ca. 648 to 330 b.c.e.) was the first dynasty of the Persian Empire.
Yadollah Royai
Yadollah Royai was born in 1931. One of the most famous poets of the post-revolutionary period, he rose to prominence with the publication in 1967 of Sea Songs, a collection of terse, austere poems most notable for their formal features and rhetorical sophistication. Chief among a group of poets who steadfastly refused to accept the prevailing notion that poetry ought primarily to give expression to popular political discontent, Royai represents a contrarian tendency in modernist poetry. In the 1960s, he parted company with those poets who favored social commentary and launched what came to be known as “The New Wave” to privilege form over content and innovative use of language over preoccupation with contextual concerns. He believes that poetry tries to describe an ineffable realm of language and form.
In the early years of the Iranian revolution, Royai immigrated to France, where he has since published several new volumes of poetry, the latest of which is Seventy Tombstones. A literary critic, he is also a translator of French poetry into Persian.
MARTYR’S TOMBSTONE
A sketch of Zarathustra’s smile upon the stone. A thin tablet (the vertical inscription on the tombstone) to be carved in the shape of a wave, from a marble different from that of the tombstone. Grass has grown all around the grave — and in the grass, a hatchet, upon the staircase to the altar down which he rolled, as he said under his soldiers blow: that we should not be is another form of our being.
You who on the front line
put your life on the line in front,
may my world be foam, a blade of straw, on your heaving forth!
And may your beauty forever
be the size of our lives!
— Translated by Ahmad Karimi Hakkak
TOMB OF MANICHAEUS
Like a tree
my death
begins
with a beginning
under thoughts of leaving
when thoughts remain above
Manichaeus wrote, “The most dangerous things are man’s own thoughts.” His disciple said: “Then thought is a thing,” and asked that they place his book in his tomb. “Let them carve a small stream in the space of the following stone: with stone, filings below the water, and a fish that has the slightest contact with water. Decorative objects: A green vase with a yellow plant, a spinal column, a small bird, a few roots, and the fear of shears in Manichaeus, who said in his time of leaving: we turn on the perimeter of danger.”
— Translated by Haleh Hatami
LABIAL VERSE 67
As I flee the din of voices,
ropes stretched in the wind
leave me baffled between help and helplessness.
The throat of help and helplessness,
a passageway for the wind to flee
remains the path for remembering you
when stretched ropes move next door to the throat.
— Translated by Ahmad Karimi Hakkak
LABIAL VERSE 181
Here, having landed, forever sits an eye
and like an eye, I
have landed here.
When my landing pauses,
waiting,
it knows with my other eyes,
forever waiting for a landing,
that a rising line
will turn my pause
into a perpetual stasis,
like the gone-before-come,
like the come-before-gone,
like the landing of an eye,
like me sitting down.
— Translated by Ahmad Karimi Hakkak
Reza Baraheni
Reza Baraheni was born in 1935 in Tabriz, the capital of the Azeri Turkish speaking regions of Iran. The experience of being a member of a linguistic minority infuses his work, both as a poet and as a notable fiction writer. He obtained his doctorate in literature from the University of Istanbul and in 1963 was appointed professor of English at Tehran University. He has also taught in universities in the United States, Britain, and Canada. In the mid-1960s, Baraheni entered Iran’s literary scene through a series of extremely bold and highly controversial critiques of the Persian poets of the time. His early collections of poetry are seen as efforts to fit the discourse of Anglo-American modernists — poets like Eliot, Pound, Ginsberg, and Ferlinghetti — within the metric and imagistic patterns of Persian poetry. His collection God’s Shadow: Prison Poems is based on a period of 102 days he spent in prison at the end of 1973, during the reign of the Shah. The Crowned Cannibals, a collection of prose and poetry about repression during the time of the monarchy, was published in the United States in 1977. Baraheni also spent time in the prisons of the Islamic Republic. He is also the author of several short stories and novels, including Azadeh Khanum and Her Writer and The Hellish Life of Mr. Ayyaz.
Still active in trying to promote democratic liberties in his country, he was one of the drafters of, and a signatory to, a 1994 open letter to the government of Iran calling for artistic freedom and an end to censorship. Baraheni now teaches at the University of Toronto. He is a former president of PEN Canada.
Although the following poem was originally written in English, we have included it here because it expresses the anguished state of mind of exiled intellectuals particularly well. It was published by the Seneca Review (volume 34, no. 1, Spring 2004).
IN THE NEW PLACE, OR EXILE, A SIMPLE MATTER
In the new place you don’t speak of yourself
your feet facing the front
you tread backwards with needles in your throat
The etched plot was there before you suddenly stepped in
The old place walks ahead of you
someone claps his hands and then you have two husbands
one forgetting you, the other not remembering
The distance walks away with you
both in the new country, and the old country
You gather the leaves, stuffing them into your ears
and pull up the blindfold, fearing you will be raped in the
eyes
You buy a new set of false teeth
and write your brother at home to mail you a brand-new
false mouth
Instead, he sends you Discourses of Shams of Tabriz, Rumi’s
mentor,
Because time is ripe to write the Third Script:
The one neither the scribe nor the reader will understand
“Shines
in the m
ind of heaven God
who made it
more than the sun
in our eye.
Fifth element; mud; said Napoleon”
After the explosion into incomprehension
the unimpossible beauty you might call it
(two negations equaling not affirmation
but running the whole gamut of endless negation)
Pound dissolves words into meanings, and Shams says:
don’t, I say
But after the first four lines of Canto LI, Pound has already
missed the point
you hear him reading the rest of the poem
four sets of false teeth blocking breath’s rush to the
mouth,
giving reference and preference to history,
missing the point once again
You are after Walter Benjamin’s fasting man
but who is fasting here?
You want to tell someone or write somewhere
that you find affinities between Shams and Benjamin too
both of them are pre-Adamite hermaphrodites in sudden
languages
it hurts that no one knows
You buy a small bouquet of flowers
You’re going to see your new boss
Clinging to the precipice of his Imperial desk
And everyone is in search of something here
they call it competence, and you call it
the salad dressing of the new malady
They say you ought to have eye contact with everyone
you have it with the beasts
why not with humans?
And you are the new talk of centuries
both the old and the new
and you have hoisted both of them on your shoulders
All hurt minds of both dark hemis
pheres
broke down into exile
at home or abroad, etching with broken wrists
what Benjamin called “a charmed circle of fragments.”
And your small bouquet of flowers laughs at your hypocrisy
you toss it away and you watch
until it gets tossed back at you
Suddenly the word “obfuscation” comes between you and the boss
you see him sleeping while you are speaking,
eye contacting And the birds in the yard
chirp away in frenzy laughing at you
And you start telling your boss of the “fasting man
who tells his dream as if. . .”
You stop, the boss is sleeping and you are scared
scared that he will suddenly snore
And you won’t know what to do with the malady of both centuries,
The birds have stopped singing
He wakes up as soon as you stop
and says: “Don’t, don’t bother the snoring, if I snore,
I’m still listening.” And he closes his eyes, and you tell him about the word “obfuscation,”
To decipher the obliterated cipher of your being and his
And “the fasting man who tells his dream as if he were
He suddenly wakes up and says: “Be sure I’ll do something
about it,
but competence, don’t forget competence...”
And Walter Benjamin says: “a charmed circle of fragments.”
I was not asking for money.
It soils the hand that gives
and the hand that takes
but I don’t tell him, I need a job, a better job, for sure
And this is not the question. I’m trying to have the eye contact
going
And I gauge competence
For this you need a new sort of concentration
Like the one you had when you were being born
Passing through someone in blood and pus, deaf and blind
the concentration of a solid constipation
a towering, excruciating empire of constipation
And then somebody slapping you hard, screaming “obfuscation”
And you opening your eyes to the world, recognizing
that the boss has no snoring habits
He has the unfortunate habit of sleeping soundly only, yes
only. . .
— this I won’t tell you — but here it is anyway;
only, when a writer in exile speaks
You don’t know the new country for sure
and now you hardly know the old one either
And you start again, with your only strength in the argument:
“The fasting man who tells his dream as if he were talking And the boss wakes up: “Don’t stop, I’m listening!”
“But Sir, you’re interrupting, I haven’t stopped yet!”
I’m passing through mud and pus, deaf and blind
He sleeps now like a baby in a cradle
on the grass on top of a cliff by the coast
and the waves rolling with the white foam of their whales down there
“As I was saying ...” I begin
And I stop in Benjamin’s “charmed circle of fragments.” “I am not from this country, you know. I am just talking about ‘the fasting man who tells his dream as if he were talking in his sleep.’
"Comprenez? This is a country with two official languages!”
But there is some kind of innocence in this man’s guilt as there is some kind of guilt in my innocence.
Now, I am all ready for action.
I put my left hand in my pocket
slowly,
sexually
surreptitiously
Remember Benjamin: “Your strength lies in improvisation.
All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.”
I open the blade of my knife in my pocket as he sleeps
take out the knife the baby, oh,
the baby, in a cradle on the grass
on top of a cliff by the coast, and the whales down there in the waves
I need a test: is he awake when he is awake?
Is he asleep when he is asleep?
Is he awake when he is asleep
Is he asleep when he is awake?
Is he he?
So language tells you things that reality doesn’t tell you
I decide: I’ll wake him up by telling him a funny story:
The woman says you cannot do that here, it’s impossible. She cannot help laughing. The old man is holding something between his two hands. Kids passing by don’t notice it. It’s only the shrewd eyes of the old woman that notice the vein-stricken hands of the man holding it between them. Then she says he shouldn’t be ashamed of himself. He is genuine. Artistic. Look at the young generation: they don’t even know how to hold it between their hands! She gets going, but after a minute she turns back to tell him he can hold it like that for as long as he wants to. But he has turned his back to her. And she doesn’t find the hairy back interesting at all. And then suddenly she sees the front and back of the man at the same time, and her own face with all the wrinkles reflected in the mirror, facing both of them.
Is this the “charmed circle of fragments, Benjamin?” I scream
And when the boss wakes up to sneeze “obfuscation!”
— dear reader or listener!
“Hypocrite lecteur! — mon semblable — mon frère!”—
If you want to take a leak, please feel free to get up
and go and do so
This is not a practice in suspense poetry
I thrust the knife, with the same left hand
drive it to the hilt into the heart
And fall supine before him, when he is rising
not to call an ambulance,
but to answer the telephone that started ringing
a minute before I was dead.
Mohammad Mokhtari
Born in Mashad in 1942, Mohammad Mokhtari has published fourteen collections of poetry and numerous collections of essays on criticism. He was secretary of the Iranian Writers Association and pl
ayed a major role in trying to revive it after the crackdown on civil liberties in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution, when its office in Tehran was closed by security forces.
Imprisoned under both the Shahs and the Islamist regimes, he established himself as a freelance poet and literary critic. Mokhtari also wrote about ancient Iranian mythology, which was his area of expertise. His last work, Social Tolerance, signals his undying interest in human rights, freedom of expression, and the establishment of the rule of law. Mokhtari was one of the authors of the 1994 declaration signed by 134 Iranian writers pleading for the right of free expression.
In October 1998, Mokhtari and his colleague Mohammad Jafar Puyandeh were summoned, together with four other prominent writers, to the revolutionary court and charged with attempting to establish an independent writers association. Mokhtari was last seen alive on December 3 going into a local shop. His body was found in a Tehran city morgue on December 9, 1998. Marks on his head and neck made it appear that he had been murdered, possibly by strangulation. Puyandeh’s body was found a few days later. They were among the group of writers, journalists, and intellectuals murdered by the secret arm of the Iranian security service during the 1990s.
FROM THE OTHER HALF
Here I open my eyes to snow that has been falling
horizontally all morning.
There it must be midnight sharp, she is closing her eyes in salt,
a dream on the other side of the earth is pulling my train on this side,
as confusion fills my head.
When will it arrive?
How will it end —
this line drawn between two margins?
Strange Times, My Dear Page 48