Poetry by Ahmad Shamlou

Translated from the Persian by Zara Houshmand

First published in English in Words Without Borders' July/August 2003 issue, Literary Border-Crossings in Iran.

for Elegy
https://wwb-campus.org/literature/elegy-on-the-death-of-forugh-farrokhzad

Ahmad Shamlou

Photo by Hadi Shafaieh [Public domain]

Ahmad Shamlou (1925-2000) is recognized as one of Iran's greatest modern poets, writing in the new mode of expression pioneered by Nima Yushij. Born into a military family, he spent an itinerant youth being transferred from one remote town to another, with schooling left unfinished. During World War II, he was arrested by the occupying Allied forces and imprisoned for supporting the German war effort. On his release a year later, he was arrested again along with his father, and together they faced a firing squad and last-minute reprieve. In the 1950s he spent six months in hiding and another year in prison for his support of Mossadegh's nationalist movement. Eventually, in 1977, political oppression moved Shamlou to leave Iran, and he lived for two years in Princeton and in England. Like so many who at first believed that the revolution heralded new freedom and stability, Shamlou returned to Iran in 1979.

Throughout these vicissitudes he wrote continuously. In addition to twelve collections of his own poetry published between 1948 and 1978, he has also written several plays and a major analytical survey of Iranian folklore Ketab-i Kucheh [Book of the Street]. He is the editor of an important edition of Hafez as well as other volumes of classical Iranian poetry, and has translated many French authors into Persian. Shamlou's third marriage lasted from 1964 until his death, and his wife Ayda figures prominently as the muse of many of his later poems.

Zara Houshmand (translator)

Zara Houshmand is an Iranian-American writer who was raised in the Philippines and received her BA in English Literature from London University. Her most recent book is A Mirror Garden (A. A. Knopf, 2007), co-authored with Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian. Her poetry has been published in the anthologies Let Me Tell You Where I've Been (University of Arkansas Press, 2006) and A World Between (George Braziller, 1999) and in journals including Caesura, Persian Book Review, West Coast Line, Di-verse-city, and Texas Observer. Her play The Future Ain't What It Used to Be was produced at the Burbage Theatre in Los Angeles (1986). Her translations from the Persian received the first commissioning grant from the National Theatre Translation Fund, and have been published in numerous journals and anthologies including Literature from the Axis of Evil (New Press, 2006), Words Without Borders (Anchor, 2007) and Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature (Arcade, 2006). As editor for the Mind and Life Institute, she has been responsible for a series of books representing a longterm dialogue between Buddhism and Western science. She has also pioneered the development of virtual reality as an art form; her installation Beyond Manzanar (with Tamiko Thiel), now in the permanent collection of the San Jose Museum of Art, has been widely discussed in works on new media and critical theory.

Links available online only

Meet the Author

Find out why Shamlou never finished high school in his obituary, published in The Guardian newspaper. Scroll to the bottom for another Shamlou poem.

Meet the Translator

Find out what it was like for Zara Houshmand to grow up "as a third culture kid" in this interview with Interalia magazine.

Meet the Subject

"Forugh Farrokhzad was a poet who dared defy stupid attitudes towards women . . ." Watch translator Sholeh Wolpé and others discuss Farrozkhad's short, rebellious life, during which, "with each 'no' she encountered, she responded with an even more furious 'yes.'"

(Watch on YouTube.)

Or, read about the poet in "Forough Farrokhzad, Iranian Poet Who Broke Barriers of Sex and Society," one of a series of contemporary obituaries of "remarkable people whose deaths went unreported," currently being published in the New York Times.

Then, see photos of Farrokhzad's funeral, following her death in a car crash at age 32.

(Watch on YouTube.)

Farrokhzad's poem "Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season" seems to predict the poet's death:

Perhaps the truth was in those two young hands,
those two young hands
buried beneath the never-ending snow.

You can see more photographs of Farrokhzad on a website created for her poetry.

Hear the Names

Listen to pronunciations of the names of this poem's author and translator, and then of the subject of the elegy, all read aloud by Mandana Naviafar.

Words Without Borders · FF

A Scholar's Notes

Read what scholar Amir Arian writes about Shamlou, Farrokhzad, and their era in his introduction to Iranian literature:

The next period of opening up began in the 1960s and continued until the 1979 revolution. In this era, the Iranian economy boomed, and the middle class grew, wafting fresh air into the literary culture. This happened despite the heavy censorship of the time, which drove authors towards symbolism and allegory. . . . Ahmad Shamlou, one of the most important poets from the generation that published poetry after Neema, looked to the past for answers. He carefully studied the historiography of the eleventh-century historian Abu Al-Hassan Bayhaqi and the poetry of Hafiz, the fourteenth-century poet whose collection of ghazals has gained the status of a holy book in Iran . . .

[T]he poetry scene continued to be dominated by men, with the outstanding exception of Forugh Farrokhzad. In her short life, Farrokhzad published five collections and introduced the strongest female voice in Persian poetry in the twentieth century . . . she had a way of engaging all senses with words, creating an intense, sensuous experience that sometimes bypassed the mind and talked straight to her reader’s body. Her death in a car accident at thirty-two was traumatic for the literary community of Iran, and elicited a welter of eulogies and memorials. Ahmad Shamlou’s “Elegy on the Death of Forugh Farrokhzad,” translated in this collection, is one of them.

From Hafez to Shamlou

Visitors at the Tomb of Hafez, a famous destination in Shiraz, Iran. By Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Listen to a five-minute radio story about the fourteenth-century poet Hafez (also called "Hafiz" in English), one of Shamlou's major influences: "In Iran, a Poet's 700-Year-Old Verses Still Set Hearts Aflame."

Then, read the Hafez poem "For years my heart inquired of me." (You can also find more work from Hafez on Poets.org.)

Iran

New to learning about Iran? Take a look at the country profile on encyclopedia.com and click on the topics that interest you.

Alleyway in Hamoomchaal, by Kamyar Adl. License: CC BY 2.0.

Links available online only

More from the Author

Read Shamlou's "The Fish," a poem of love and longing, also translated by Zara Houshmand and published on this site. For others, visit the translator Sholeh Wolpé's website.

Shamlou's obituary in The Guardian newspaper noted the poet's "beautiful voice." If you're a Persian speaker, or want to hear how Shamlou sounded, you can browse a playlist of videos compiled by the Persian Circle of Friends of Metro DC.

More from the Translator

Read Zara Houshmand's essays and other translations in the magazine Words Without Borders.

Then, take a look at the virtual reality project she co-created, about being "caught in the middle" between a homeland and an adopted country. The project helps tell the story of the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. To learn more about Japanese culture, visit the collection of literature on WWB Campus.

More from the Subject

You can find several other poems by Forugh Farrokhzad on WWB Campus. The first is "I Pity the Garden." Below, watch a 6-minute video in which translator Sholeh Wolpé introduces us to Farrokhzad and reads "I Pity the Garden" in English.

Then, read Forugh Farrokhzad's love poem "Connection," also translated by Sholeh Wolpé.

For more poetry, explore Wolpé's website farrokhzadpoems.com, or read a collection of Wolpé's translations of Farrokhzad, entitled Sin.

More about the Subject

Forugh Farrokhzad, 1960s. Public domain.

Read other writers' perspectives on Farrokhzad's life and work on farrokhzadpoems.com.

For a deep dive into her writing, take a look at scholar Farzaneh Milani's article in the Encyclopedia Iranica, or watch Milani's lecture at the Library of Congress.

Or, look through photographs of Farrokhzad on a website created for her poetry.

Shamlou and Farrokhzad . . . and Yushij

Sholeh Wolpé commented in an interview that a rebellious poet named Nima Yushij "attracted the attention of a group of brilliant young poets, among them Forugh Farrokhzad and Ahmad Shamlou." Nima Yushij went on to found modern Iranian poetry; learn about him in Wolpé's interview, then read translations by Kaveh Bassiri in The Sink Review and Two Lines Journal.

In his introduction to this unit, scholar Amir Arian writes of Yushij:

If one is to mark a symbolic turning point, a year that launched the modern era in Iran, 1921 is a compelling choice. This is the year Nima Yushij published his long poem Afsaneh, in which he opened Persian poetry to the contemporary world and bravely brought "unpoetic" language into his art.

Shamlou's Global Influences

Langston Hughes by Carl Van Vechten 1936. (No known copyright; available from the Library of Congress.)

According to his obituary in The Guardian, Shamlou was fascinated by a variety of poets from around the world: "the French Paul Eluard and Louis Aragon, the Russian Vladimir Mayakovsky, the American Langston Hughes and, above all, the Spaniard Federico García Lorca." Follow the links to find out more about these poets.

More Elegies*

On Words Without Borders:

I Pity the Garden, a poem about a more subtle kind of loss by Forugh Farrokhzad (the poet Shamlou mourns in "Elegy")
Poems for Parting, an ancient Chinese poem mourning the end of a romance
Riverwilt, a Japanese poem that mourns a lost childhood connection to the natural world, and asks whether it is possible to restore it.

Elsewhere:

"oh antic God," by Lucille Clifton, about the poet's mother
"O Captain! My Captain!" Walt Whitman's elegy for Abraham Lincoln
"Spring and Fall" by Gerald Manley Hopkins, about the meaning of the change of seasons
Shakespeare's Hamlet's remembrance of a dead court jester ("Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio"), also available in the context of the larger play and as performed by actor David Tennant.

(Watch the video on YouTube.)

*For Teaching Idea 1

More Imagery of Loss*

On Words Without Borders:

"An Uncoincidence, A Noncoincidence," by Russian poet Larissa Miller
"The Poem" by Mohsen Emadi and “23” by Shams Langeroody, two contemporary poems about loss from Iranian-born poets: the first is about the poet's departure from Iran, the second, about the return of bodies from the Iran-Iraq War. Both poems have a very different approach to imagery from Shamlou's.

Elsewhere:

"After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes," by Emily Dickinson
"One Art," by Elizabeth Bishop

For Teaching Idea 2

Reading Grade Level(s): 7, 8, 9 and up

Key Points
1. A Poem That Grieves
2. Shamlou's Imagery of Loss

To access these Teaching Ideas, please register or login to WWB-Campus.

Elegy

On the death of the poet Forugh Farrokhzad

Searching for you
on foothills of mountains,
on thresholds of oceans and meadows,
I cry.

Searching for you
in windy passes
I cry at the crossroads of seasons
in the weathered wood
of a broken window frame
that contains a cloud-stained sky.

Looking for your portrait
in this empty book—
how long
how long
will pages keep turning?

To embrace the flow of wind,
and love
who is sister to death—

eternity
has shared with you
this secret.

And so you have taken the shape of a treasure:
earned and enviable
another kind of treasure
which, claiming the earth, these lands
in this way
has made the heart embrace them.

Your name is a white dawn that passes over the sky's brow
blessed be your name!—
And so we repeat the round
of night and day
in this way
even
now . . .

Related Reading

The Fish - Poetry

I Pity the Garden - Poetry

Riverwilt - Poetry

An Uncoincidence, A Noncoincidence - Poetry