Читать книгу Self-Portrait in Bloom - Niloufar Talebi - Страница 13
ОглавлениеAHMAD SHAMLOU WAS BORN on December 12, 1925, by his own account on a bleak and cold snowy day in a spiritless house at 134 Safi Alishah road in Tehran, Iran. What is believed to have been his birth home seems to be standing abandoned in a country that barely allows gatherings of fans making a pilgrimage to his graveside on the anniversary of his passing on Sunday, July 23, 2000.
I was awaited in a bleak house
by the sacred mirrored fountain
near the mystic’s temple.
(Perhaps why
I found the shadow of Satan
staking me out
from the outset).
At age five
I was still despondent from the unthinkable blow of my own birth
and grew up rootless
on salty sand
to the grunting of a drunk camel and the ghostly presence
of poisonous reptiles in a dust-bowl more remote
than the dusty memory of the last row of date palms
on the fringes of the last dry river. 4
Shamlou’s father was an itinerant military officer whose assignments took his family to far-flung corners of Iran—then still called Persia—exposing the young Shamlou to the peoples, tribes, languages, folklore and customs, and the harsh realities of a nation teetering at the edge of modernity and ravaged by feudalist class warfare at the hands of weak monarchs. First, of the Qajar dynasty who ruled from 1789 to 1925, and later, the Pahlavi dynasty who ruled from 1925–1979, gradually diminishing Iran in size and power as they gave away land and assets to foreign states.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the increasing exchange between the Persian intelligentsia and the rapidly shifting European states had resulted in cultural and political shifts. Persia underwent a Consti-tutional Revolution between 1905 and 1911, which led to the establishment of a parliament, Majles.
Shamlou’s birth year, 1925, was the pivotal year when Reza Khan, a military man, seized the throne and declared himself king, Shah, founding the Pahlavi dynasty. In his vision of modernization, Reza Shah enforced the unveiling of women, kashfe-hejab, and in 1935, changed the country’s name on the roster of nations from “Persia” to “Iran,” the name of the country in the Persian language itself (endonym), and a variant of “Aryan,” a self-designation by the Indo-Iranian people, later distorted during World War II toward atrocities in the name of racial ideology.
Shamlou spent an unhappy childhood in various provincial towns witnessing much misery and suffering around him. He recalled scenes of this desolate childhood, his external realities, in Keyhan-e Sal magazine: In the city of Kash, he saw a starving Baluchi boy on a mattress that he had soiled the previous night, likely from the terror of impending death in a filthy boardinghouse. He remembered the agonizing sight of a sickly teacher and his stomach-churning lash marks in the city of Mashhad. There were villages without trees for respite from the searing sun, fields without water. The tears of his mother washing with her own hands the dead body of her son, Shamlou’s brother.
When Shamlou was a young boy, he overheard a young neighbor play the piano, maybe Chopin. He experienced “the first undefinable sensations of puberty: a blend of pleasure and pain, death and rebirth, and who knows what else.” He decided there and then what he wanted to do with his life. But he was given no music lessons, even taunted. Shamlou mused later that his poetry arose from his stifled longing for music in the same way that the dance-like designs of Persian carpets (and calligraphy) harbored in them the indigenous Persian desire for dance and song, long suppressed under Islam, which swept through Persia in the seventh century.
There was a silence to Shamlou’s childhood. With no one to talk to, no one to stoke his imagination, he turned inward, into the well of his own self.
The itinerant life of Shamlou’s family meant an interrupted education, transferring schools, and being held back. In high school, Shamlou left for Tehran, but ultimately abandoned school altogether. The image of Cain beating Abel was the door to another world for him. He diverted his attention to reading and literature, his interests spanning politics to poetry.
Around this time, Iran was in the throes of the 1941 Anglo-Russian invasion of Iran, which was to force the opening of a supply route for Russian forces. Shamlou became briefly involved with Iran’s communist party, the Hezbeh Tudeh, or the Tudeh Party of Iran, literally, the party of the masses. His early political activities led to a momentary mix-up in a nationalist tendency in Iran that temporarily fell on the side of the Axis powers and against the Allies. He was arrested in Tehran and transferred to a Russian Red Army prison in Rasht, where he spent twenty-one months, and finally released in the fall of 1944.
Soon after, in 1945, Shamlou’s father was transferred to the northwestern state of Azerbaijan in Iran, and their home was raided by the guerrilla forces of the democratic faction. Shamlou and his father were held blindfolded before a firing squad for two hours before a last-minute reprieve.
Shamlou’s domiciles were raided throughout his life, his manuscripts burned and stolen, confiscated works he tried to recreate from memory while plotting new ones. Sometimes he went into hiding. He began to realize that his voice could not be expressed by aligning with any political ideologies or parties or stealthily pasting protest posters in the middle of the night. Writing would be his only work, nothing would be as potent as his pen, nothing large enough to contain him. Shamlou transforms from an outward activist to introspective witness.
When Shamlou launched into his literary career in the fertile period after World War II, Persian poetry had been remolded and given a new dynamism. His coming of age and evolution as a free spirit in an increasingly unfree Iranian society posed a challenge, but he managed to reflect his social and humanistic ideals in his work. The reformist spirit of the time was reflected in the works of socially motivated poets preceding him. Poets such as Bahar, Iraj, Dehkhoda, Farrokhi, Eshghi, and Lahuti played key roles in this process of freeing Persian poetry from the state of decline and stagnation it had fallen into. The florid language of the nineteenth century had alienated the masses and led to the gradual isolation of the ruling classes from the realities of life. Classical imagery with its metaphors wrapped in candles and moths and taverns and lady wine-bearers no longer reflected the concerns of the citizens of a bold, new century.
In their wake came the poet Nima Yushij, born Ali Esfandiari in 1897 in Yush in the northern province of Mazandaran, and largely referred to as Nima. In his rustic simplicity, Nima cloistered himself at home for twenty years as he single-handedly challenged traditionalist tendencies in Iranian poetry, namely its subjects and metrical forms, and began to update the language of poetry in the language of his time, all against a barrage of criticism for upsetting tradition. His work was denounced for not even being written in the Persian language. Progress was slow—with each new publication he took one step forward and two steps back. In 1945, Nima was a renegade star, but in only five years he would turn into a sun around which rotated a galaxy. He would be a vanguard, cementing his She’re No, or New Poetry movement.
After abandoning high school, Shamlou began working in a bookstore. Soon after, his first volume of poetry, Forgotten Songs (1947), was published, what he later considered a workbook of his classically influenced poems. Reading one of Nima’s poems, “Knell”—on the first day of spring, no less—transformed Shamlou’s vision of the potential of poetry. Shamlou would track down Nima’s address and knock on his door, where appeared a man who resembled drawings Shamlou had seen of Nima. Shamlou introduces himself and expresses his intentions to apprentice under the poet. Nima found in the serious young poet an ally in his vision. In his zeal, Shamlou visited Nima almost every day, never taking into account that he might be imposing on Nima’s time.
Shamlou became Nima’s champion, publishing Nima’s seminal poem, “Afsaneh” (“Myth” ) in 1950. In the same year, Shamlou published his pivotal poem, “To the Red Blossom of a Shirt,” in which metric language was disregarded, the poem heralding the free verse revolution—known as She’re Sepid, meaning white verse—that Shamlou would engineer.
Shamlou later recalled, In the beginning, when we young poets were composing non-metrical, non-rhyming poetry, many of the elders, who were terrified of innovation, disinclined to accept these new forms, used our work against us, called us inexperienced, repudiated our work of not being poetry. But why? we would ask, and they would mock us: You are so uneducated and foolish that you don’t even realize what you’ve written is prose!
But Shamlou pressed on experimenting with language. He harnessed the healing powers of poetry as his weapon against tyranny, his tool for connecting with a larger public. Shamlou’s worldview matured. He educated himself on a robust regimen of international literatures, gaining independence of thought. He imagined himself in a lineage of writers he considered friends across time and language, a collective that created the blueprints for our humanity.
No one in my family remembers how we came to host Shamlou in our home. During the literary gatherings, which in my mind were wild artists’ salons, Shamlou was the centerpiece everyone deferred to, his mastery of language and history and culture so superseded everyone else’s that there was no questioning him. Only sitting at the feet of the titan. Other literary heavyweights joining us included Gholam-Hossein Saedi, in whose apartment I would later see a large poster of Beethoven above the entrance staircase, and who would disappear from time to time and when let out of prison, where he was beaten with electrical cables and his mouth pried open to take his torturer’s piss—which he told us about while howling and as casually as, Where is your bathroom—would resume spirited socializing as before. These people were not new to torture for literature, I thought, my mind already racing with fuzzy torture scenarios I had no business imagining at such a young age, gleaned from our guests and the books I was handed to read about the torture of political prisoners in South America. Torture of female body parts I could not comprehend. Having to witness unspeakable torture of my parents was a nightmare that haunts me still.
We were not allowed to tell anyone about our visitors. The threat of surveillance loomed in those uncertain years. Every one of our loud and musical salons was susceptible to a sudden raid, a knocking down of the door and barging in of half a dozen armed brothers to loot, arrest. But so far as I know, Shamlou turned out to be too big to touch, even if he was critical of the new regime, which he considered to be nothing short of a handoff of despotic power from one group to another. In the summer of 1979, he wrote in the weekly journal, Tehran in Images:
The regular programming, sunrise, has been canceled without further notice. Ravens are approaching to occupy this entire realm. Terrible news is impending, but the ravens will not bear good tidings.
Shamlou was one of the most visible and written-about artist-activists of his time, rising to the charge of his time. Some have argued that had Shamlou not been possessed by charisma, he might not otherwise have achieved his icon-like status with a cult-like following. He was a storyteller with the skills of an orator, enlisting his cutting wit, charm, masterful turns of phrase, and a vast syntax that went from low to high as he held court wherever he was. While he valued conversations at the highest levels, he viewed himself as an element from and for the people, and preferred the company of the working man.
Fortunately, the other guests who gathered around Shamlou at our house, all politically minded, came from all walks of life, some of which I had not socialized with. I remember Mansour, a railroad worker, a true proletariat activist fighting for the cause. I remember him handsome, charming, kind, compassionate, committed. He had one of the most beautiful smiles I have ever seen. But did any of these qualities render him immune to his wife being thrown from the window in front of their teenage daughter when the brothers of the Revolutionary Guard went looking for him? We later found him and his daughter living in Canada, where I first met his daughter when we were in our twenties. She was sad and sweet. There was always something unsaid between us. How do you say, I’m so sorry about…your…MOTHER. To pretend to understand the horror.
In the mornings, dressed in school uniform, which had only just begun to include a headscarf, even at our new, gender-segregated schools, I tiptoed past bodies collapsed in our living room. This might have occurred once, or something I heard our guests did at other people’s homes, yet that is how those late nights have been mythologized in the history of my coming of age. The soirées may have been tame, restrained even, but they were clandestine and spirited times colliding with my own internal efflorescence. My body, too, was growing and I was wearing my father’s old funky shirts that belonged to a man in his exuberant youth, perhaps before children, or perhaps when we were still children and their whole lives lay ahead.
All the while entertaining as a social centerpiece, a heavy drinker and smoker, Shamlou worked diligently, often late nights to dawn, to author more than seventy books, including seventeen books of poetry, dozens of translations, children’s books, essays, the Book of the Alley, a living encyclopedia of folklore, and his edition of the classical tome, the Divan of Hafez, a daring act that was met with much criticism upon publication—skeptics wondered how dare Shamlou edit the work of the great bard, a prophet of sorts in Iranian society, but Shamlou brought Hafez to the twentieth century by editing punctuation to allow for more possibilities in meaning.
Shamlou was also editor-in-chief of dozens of literary magazines, both inside and outside of Iran, including Sokhan-e No, Ashna, Khoosheh, Iranshahr, Ketab-e Hafte. After the revolution, he began editing the famous Ketab-e Jom’e. Some joked that one of Shamlou’s gifts was that he could resurrect a closed-down journal, and close down a circulating one. Shamlou was also one of the leading members of the Iranian Writers’ Association, a member of PEN International.
Writing was a kind of salve for Shamlou. Terrifying as it was to be a lone vanguard in the face of prejudice, he buried himself in seventy-two-hour writing sessions. Shamlou’s favorite poems by other poets meant so much to him. He connected to them so closely that it seemed to him he had recited them. When he recited poetry, he believed he was merely transcribing what had already been composed in his mind, his poems apparitions that came to him fully formed. He felt he was in a trance, not on the planet, as if someone else were speaking on his behalf. When he woke up in the morning, he said, he did not remember awaking in the middle of the night to scribe a poem. When there were silences, pauses in his poetic output, he believed poetry had abandoned him.
Shamlou said in a 1979 interview with Bamdad newspaper: A poem is an incident crafted in time and space, but it is composed in language, so all of the capabilities and possibilities of language could and should be utilized to create a poem.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1947 essays on engagement, or commitment, spawned a global movement in the literary discourse of ensuring that literature would serve the struggle for liberation. Sartre believed that words were actions, and that a writer could influence history through writing. Sartre dismissed autonomous writing—“art for art’s sake”—as an invention of nineteenth century bourgeois authors. Engagement was writing in the service of liberation.
Similarly, Shamlou developed his own call to arms, a brand of socially engaged commitment, ta’ahhod in Persian, which peaked in the decades before the Iranian revolution. Shamlou’s poetics called upon the collective of human beings to strive for a meaningful and utopian kind of liberation. The idea that the world could be changed by the power of literature was exciting in the 1950s. Shamlou was a Humanist in the sense that he took humanity as the center of a universe, and modern poetry as the grounds for expressing the ideal that people should be free and construct their own destinies. So crucial was freedom to Shamlou that he never stopped advocating for it:
Searching for success, prosperity, and happiness is futile unless people are absolutely free. But people are not even relatively free, so they cannot be happy. A person who is in the bondage of laws, rules, duties, attachments, dependencies, and their own conscience, struggling to satisfy other people’s greed and lust, will inevitably lose all of his or her creativity and will mistake the advancements of technology as his or her own when in fact that person is nothing more than a cog in the wheel of those machines. So, of what use is freedom to this person?
Humanity and human culture will only ever blossom in the context of freedom. But as long as prejudice reigns, society will suffocate. Humans rise through freedom from superstitions. Superstitious people defend their own ignorance and bondage, enslaving others in the process. Freedom is not an illusion, a rumor. Believe in freedom as the higher goal for which we fight.
Defending freedom in an oppressed and classed society that has conflicting interests is not easy. In such a society each person champions what they imagine freedom to be, but few are those who seek the mysteries of freedom from the position of freedom.
13 points on Shamlou’s ideas about art and society:
1. It is important to distinguish between political literature and socially engaged literature. Social Realism was the aesthetic doctrine of the Communist Party, but neither Shamlou nor other writers worldwide, such as Mario Vargas Llosa, could get behind political literature, which espoused literature as propaganda, a vehicle for disseminating political ideas to the proletariat. For example, though many of Shamlou’s socially themed poems were written while he was imprisoned, he did not consider any of them political poems, per se. To Shamlou, politics was such a dirty game that the mere hint of it soiled the very hem of the skirt of poetry.
2. Shamlou believed that the masses could not directly connect with the work of an innovator, whose primary job it was to incite innovation. An intermediary was needed to make the connection. Yet these works, which would not pander to the masses, were not to be confused with “bourgeois art.” Therefore, there was no “people’s art” in the literal sense of the word.
3. Shamlou’s critics attacked some of his work for being personal and not socially minded, and others for being deeply rooted in the events of his time, incapable of passing the test of time. But rather than succumb to the division of his works into eras, or react to such assessments, or try to please the critics, Shamlou remained unfazed. His intention was never to use poetry as a means with which to fit himself into society. He was not running a poetry factory, he said, to conduct market research on what kind of poetry people wanted so as to produce that marketable product.
4. Shamlou traced the seeds of the criticism that his work was not socially engaged to the 1950s and 1960s when junior members of the Communist Party, believing themselves proficient in cultural theory, yet whose knowledge, he said, did not equip them to distinguish between a mule and an ass, spouted off the idea that art should be for and understandable by the masses. Their ideas were directly lifted from the Zhdanov Doctrine, formulated by Stalin and his cultural agent, Zhdanov, and revered as scripture. The doctrine reduced all of culture to a sort of chart, wherein a given symbol corresponded to a simple moral value.
5. The masses were stratified, not monolithic. There were the illiterate, the semi-literate, the absolutely uninspired, the somewhat inspired, the inspired illiterate, the uninspired semi-literate and so on. Which “mass art” was to appeal to which of these substrata? What of high art, in the works of, for example, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and Glinka, upholders of the Russian musical heritage? (Shamlou cleverly mentioned Russian composers so that “friends” in the Communist Party could not dismiss his point for citing artists who had “betrayed” the proletariat.) Those composers channeled Russian national and folk themes in their compositions, themes that the masses, such as the semi-literate lumberjack in remote forests of Siberia, hummed and connected with as the very raw material of his soul. Shamlou questioned whether those composers’ innovative works were mass or high art in the eyes of Communist ideologues.
6. Shamlou said that literature is produced by singular literary workers from their own experiences. No clear path could be drawn for literature. Necessity is the mother of invention—what arrives at a point of urgency is a done deal. It can neither be rushed nor impeded.
7. This is a reminder of T.S. Eliot’s essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in which Eliot points out that scoffing at the notion of “tradition” is a failure to recognize that what is known and disparaged as “tradition” at any given time was a leap of innovation in its time, once a transgression that was likely resisted, mocked, and written off. So to dismiss it as passé or old-fashioned is paradoxical in some way, in that it subsumes innovation, the future.
8. Shamlou said that his poetry stemmed from his own pain. How honest would his poetry be if it pretended to be cried out from other people’s pain? Yet, he said, If my pain were common, then I have at once cried our common pain. Hence the lines, I am common pain/cry me out! (from Shamlou’s poem, “Collective Love”).
9. The irony is in that “commercial art,” popular amongst the masses, and devoid of any meaning, is in fact the enemy of a people’s culture, further distancing them from their freedom, enslaving them instead. In contrast, there is art that is not popular, but whose content is deeply pro-proletariat. Art that contains slogans for the masses should really count as “political activity,” not “cultural activity,” and the basis of its measure should be “historical value” not “cultural value.”
10. For the innovations of a lasting work of art to reach all strata of society, other artists with access to both the innovators’ visions and the masses were needed to act as intermediaries, to transmute the art for them. An example of such an intermediary was the Iranian poet, journalist, and leftist activist Khosrow Golesorkhi, executed by the Shah’s regime and the dedicatee of Shamlou’s poem, “Rupture.” 5
11. Shamlou considered the colloquial language he had been exposed to in his early years to be much richer and more expressive than the official language. He began to fuse high and low language together to create a new, multidimensional one. To him, the writer who embodied his or her time must make these two poles speak with each other. He struck a fine balance in his straddling of both high and low cultures. The Iranian poet and critic Mohammad Reza Shafiei Kadkani believed that even if Shamlou’s language spanned the vernacular registers of the street to the higher, more erudite ones, Shamlou managed to never write a common poem in his long career.
12. In Moslem Mansouri’s documentary, The Final Word—a different cut of which is presented as Master Poet of Liberty, an apt title for the poet of the people’s heart—Shamlou said that commitment was not implicit in the nature of art itself. It is the artist who has to be committed, bear witness to history. If artists do not understand the pain of humanity, they cannot be considered intellectuals—they are merely thieves with a torch.
13. Shamlou thought that many conflated the notion of social commitment to make art for the people with an imaginary debt that the artist owed to society.
As a translator, Shamlou brought dozens of international works into Persian. In this way, he had at his disposal several literary traditions, and aesthetic and poetic movements, a broad sampling of world literatures to draw from in concocting a unique recipe that fomented his cultural revolution. What made Shamlou the avant-garde poet of his time, beyond his unparalleled mastery of the Persian language and literary history, was his power of synthesizing through the filter of his own imagination and creativity all of the literatures from which he drew.
Even if he himself did not have direct access to most of the languages from which he translated, collaborating from trots—literal translations of foreign texts—provided by language intermediaries, the practice of translating not only informed Shamlou’s own work, but it put him in direct conversation with a global knowledge base. Translation, a tool with which he bridged the world to his own work, bled into his own poems, a grafting of aesthetic innovations of other literatures to imagery from classical Persian literature to new subjects and languages, creating a third language.
Translating gave Shamlou the opportunity to deploy and experiment with the vernacular: street language in Langston Hughes’ work and in Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don, and everyday language in the works of Lorca and Margot Bickel, to name a few.
Some of Shamlou’s translations were twice removed from their original sources. Shamlou’s knowledge of the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s work, for example, which informed his poem, “The Final Word,” came from French translations of the Russian originals. He translated ideas, images, prosody, music, language, tone, techniques, patterns. His creative renderings—and occasional errors—all played an integral part in the fresh air that he breathed into Persian poetics, shaping the disruptions he made. In many ways, Shamlou’s importing of inter-national literatures and ideas into his native one was equally, if not more, disruptive as Ezra Pound’s, whose translations and introductions of Chinese and Japanese poetry into English changed the course of American poetics, still reverberating in the poetic practice one century later.
In importing and remixing ideas, Shamlou also drew from a wide swath of sources beyond the page: the protest music of the executed Chilean artist, activist, and songwriter Victor Jara, the Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis’ rendering of Neruda’s homage to his continent, Canto General, classical music, and films are a few of the works I remember being introduced to personally.
Shamlou not only wrote and adapted a number of seminal works for children, including the iconic works, Pariyah (The Fairies) and Dokhtaraye Naneh Darya (The Daughters of Mother Sea), in that familiar yet new language that he created at the crossroads of the high and low, he also translated Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. For some time, he was considering my little brother, whose voice had not yet turned, as the little prince for the dramatic recording of the work he was preparing.
In a 1972 article in Keyhan-e Sal magazine, Shamlou expressed his dissatisfaction with existing Persian translations of the novels Virgin Soil Upturned and Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don, the latter of which Shamlou later translated, satisfying the poet’s love for the novel and the epic. Shamlou posed the question as to whether social commitment alone sufficed for literary workers, and whether that commitment could override a broader commitment to literature and language. He questioned whether a subpar translation—be it through sheer neglect, the absence of knowledge, or linguistic weakness—was excusable if the literary worker creating it was socially committed.
On July 30, 2010, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the poet’s passing, Faraj Sarkoohi writes in a BBC Persian online article that Shamlou rejected the approach of word by word, phrase by phrase, and in the case of poetry, verse by verse translation, arguing that the translation of poetry, as opposed to prose, hinged on the strength of the internal music and language of the rendition. The only option was the re-recitation of a poem in the target language. Poetry was to be translated in the obliteration and re-creation anew in language.
While Shamlou was inventive and literary in his translation output, he was neither always accurate—looking up terms in reference books and sometimes translating word by word—nor was he, by his own admission, always faithful, believing instead that the translator had to edit in the interest of the final work and its audience, lest the work be suspended in some linguistic and cultural limbo. In the documentary The Final Word, Shamlou mentioned his intervening in the translation of a short story by Kafka, whose language he found complex and in need of some kneading into Persian. Essentially, in his practice, Shamlou broadened the notion of “faithful” in translation, prioritizing artfulness and accessibility in the new language over a strict adherence to words in the original.
But Shamlou also thought that translation could at most transmit meaning, images, ideas, imaginary figments, that language and the internal music of a poem was lost in translation. In other words, what was lost in the translation of poetry was poetry. Did he think this applied to himself as a poet or as a translator, or both? These comments coming from a writer who translated a vast body of international literature reveal Shamlou’s quite complex relationship with translation.
Shamlou was arrested and held as a political prisoner just after the 1953 coup d’état orchestrated by the United Kingdom under the name “Operation Boot” and the United States under the name “Operation Ajax.” Political prisons were packed with people from all strata of society in close quarters. University professors, farmers, merchants, and laborers were eating together, commiserating, exchanging ideas. Away from home, desperate to forget their surroundings, they came together, told stories, recited poetry, hummed songs together. Early among these songs was a lullaby Shamlou composed, “Laalaa’i,” a folkloric song gathered and edited by him, a practice he would continue to masterful levels for the rest of his life. This poem of resistance circulated, filled prisoners up with hope and the zeal to fight.
Laa laai laai lai laai lai, little rosebud
your daddy’s gone, my heart is blood
Laa laai laai, your daddy’s not coming home tonight
maybe they’ve taken your daddy, laa laai laai
Laa laai laai lai laai lai, little iron bud
the enemy killed your daddy
Laa laai laai, this is the enemy’s mark
hands soaked with blood, laa laai laai
sleep peacefully in your cradle tonight, laa laai laai
like fire in ashes, laa laai laai
tomorrow you’ll ignite
avenging daddy’s blood, laa laai laai…
In his estimation of his own work, Shamlou’s first serious volume of poetry was Fresh Air (1956), the publication of which was an event in Iranian poetics, largely inspired by Paul Éluard’s poem, “Air Vif,” from his 1951 volume, Le Phénix, which Shamlou translated and published under the title “Fresh Air” in 1955:
I looked before me
I saw you in the crowd
I saw you among the wheat
I saw you under a tree
At the end of my journeys
In the depths of my torment
At the corner of every smile
Emerging from water and fire
I saw you summer and winter
I saw you throughout my house
I saw you in my arms
I saw you in my dreams
I will never leave you.
Shamlou’s poem, “Collective Love,” from his volume, Fresh Air, is especially reminiscent of Éluard’s “Air Vif.”
In 1954, when Shamlou was making his young mark on poetry and struggling to break with tradition, he composed one of his most well-known poems, “Poetry That is Life,” while imprisoned, witnessing poets and activists tortured and executed. The long poem is considered his version of Archibald MacLeish’s poem, “Ars Poetica,” a poem about what a poem should be, which ends with, “A poem should not mean/But be.”
Shamlou echoes this sentiment in “Poetry That is Life.” In the poem, a poet breaks out into the streets declaring to “everyman” that his poetry is for and about them, not the irrelevant subjects of the past.
The subject matter of poetry
from past poets was not life.
...
The subject of poetry
today
is a different matter…
Today
poetry
is the weapon of the masses
because poets are themselves
one branch from the forest of the masses,
not jasmines and hyacinths from so-and-so’s greenhouse.
Shamlou’s call to arms served as a manifesto of the new emancipatory poetics in which, following the prescription of his mentor, Nima, a poet must embody the essence of his or her time through an expression that is stripped of pretenses and decorative language. And this would be the measure of the best poets across time. Because life came first.
