Ahmad Shamlou, the Great Poet of Liberty (1925-2000)

A little ago was the ninth anniversary of the death of the great contemporary poet, Ahmad Shamlou. I dedicate this post to this great poet.

Ahmad Shamlou was a great Iranian poet. He wrote poetry about freedom. He pictured the worst moments of humanity but he never gave in to depression. To him poetry was a sword, and he used it well. He wrote many great poems. He had an international tone to his works, for example he used Christian imagery as well as Persian. He’s more than any other Iranian poet is translated and read in foreign words.

Iran is a country with many great poets. Ahmad Shamlou is certainly one of the greatest ones. He, alongside Nima Youshij, Mehdi Akhavan Sales, Forough Farrokhzad and Sohrab Sepehri is one of the five pillars of Persian poetry in 20th century. Many consider him the greatest contemporary poet. I don’t go as far as that and say along the four other poets I mentioned he belongs to the greatest level.

His style is very unique. His poems are famous to be “White poems” in Persian poetry. His poems usually have no rhyme, and their rhythm is not the traditional or even musical rhythm, more of a prose-like, natural rhythm. Like most other contemporary poets his language sometimes approaches every day speech. What gives his poems their great power is his choice of vocabulary, his unique, individual descriptions, and his fantastic imagery, as well as the power of his message and the strong emotion they convey.

About whatever subject he composes poetry, he sets a great message within it. Among his great poems some are about his wife Ayda, some sad poems, some hymns, and some deeply political poems, they all share an international imagination and a great message. They accompany a great emotion. All these have made Shamlou the most international Iranian poet.

Because of his great art, he definitely deserved The Nobel Prize in Literature.

He worked also as journalist, writer and researcher, but he was mediocre, to me, in these fields. He never really understood the great tradition of Persian poetry, and made crude remarks about Ferdowsi and some other poets. He was never a great theoretician, he was a great artist.

Below I quote one of his great poems so you can grasp a little of his art.

Written by:
Sohrab Jamshidi

…

Poetry
is liberty and liberation,

Poetry is a suspicion
that at last
congregates with conviction,

And a bullet
shot at the midst of the targeted end.

It is a content sigh,
It is the relief’s sign.

And it is the concrete verdict of seat
when it falls apart from underneath the feet
to allow the burden of body bursts
beneath its own mass
whenever the salvation of soul
is submitted to this last resort.

***

No bird had ever guided me
to the depth of this land:
I grew
by myself
from the dimness of this soil,
alike a wild flower
beside the moist of a trivial waterway
devoid of gardener.

And it is so that some are such regarding me:
“I live off their earnings,
and I exhale the malodorous air of my breathings
in the space of their territory.”

Except the truth is that
when they disembarked
in this land
the one who received them
with open arms
was me.

By Ahmad Shamlou
Translation: Maryam Dilmaghani
Translated from the poem “…” from the book The Dirgy of The Earth first published in 1969 Tehran.
Quoted from:

http://www.ahmadshamlou.com/