Ahmad Shamlu is a prolific Persian poet of post-Mosaddeq Iran; and the most successful Persian poet to synthesize classical engage Persian poetry with the modernist innovations of western poetry. Critics in general note Shamlu's poetry to run parallel to the stages of modernist Persian poetics from Nima Yushij. However, Reza Baraheni has described Shamlu's work as a sociological study, even a biography of Iranian society over the past four decades or so. Below are excerpts of several of Shamlu's early poems, taken from an essay written by the late Armenean poet Leonardo P. Alishan. Personally, while I sympathize with his suffering, I cannot agree with many of his beliefs, particularly of the archetypical man being lord of his own universe. Abandoning hope in heaven doesn't grant one heaven on earth.

The context of his work places him in the position of an almost quixotic rebel - also a realist and humanist - with utmost respect for the revolutionary. Most telling, perhaps, is "She'ri keh Zendegi-st" (A Poetry That Is Life)

'Today

poetry

is the people's weapon;

For the poets

are but a branch from the forest of the people,

not jasmines and hyacinths of someone's greenhouse.

...

He writes poetry --

meaning,

he touches the wounds of the old city;

meaning,

he tells a tale

at night

of pleasant morning.

Shamlu, who used the nom de plume "Alef Sobh" [A. Morning] up to 1953 and henceforth, "Alef Bamdad" [A. Dawn], has always utilized "night" as a symbol of evil and oppression. Thus, when he states,

He writes poetry

meaning,

he opens sleeping eyes

toward

the rising morning...

he is clearly indicating that the poet's function is to "awaken" the people and to assure them of the inevitable "morning," the dawn of revolution and light.

In Bagh-e Ayeneh [Garden of Mirrors] (1960), Shamlu remained the Promethean rebel, but the revolutionary's zeal had subsided considerably. He still declared, like Prometheus, "I have cursed all the gods/as the gods/have cursed me. " But the people's continued passive and resigned attitude was now driving him toward despair:

We wrote and wept

We laughed and rose to dance

We roared and forfeited our lives....

No one heeded us.

...

Far away

they hanged a man.

No one raised his head to see.

...

We sat and wept

and, with a cry,

we vacated our frames.

Now he witnessed the sufferings and executions which had followed in the post-Mosaddeq trials, and felt the loneliness:

My unknown companions

fell like burnt stars

in such numbers

to the dark earth

that you'd think

the earth

remained

forever

a starless night.

And finally, the poet finds himself in a prison where the crimes of many of the other prisoners have stemmed from their abject poverty. His sole "crime" is that he knows who the real criminal is.

Love, a new theme introduced into Shamlu's engage poetry with Garden of Mirrors, now became his primary preoccupation, replacing his ideal people and audience. In "Az Shahr-e Sard" [From the Cold City] of Garden of Mirrors, the poet had so addressed his beloved, Ayda:

Make me invulnerable with the armor of your caress.

I will not succumb to darkness.

I have summarized the world in your small bright dress

and will not return

toward them.

O my written and unwritten poems!

Let there be no doubt

as to your royal reign

if she alone

remains your reader!

For she is my independence from petty merchants

and people alike

also from those whose sole motive for reading my poems

is to criticize me for their own dull minds.

And addressing the people, he wrote:

I am twice condemned to torture:

to live so,

and to live so

amongst you

with you

whom I have loved for so long.

In November 1964, during the protests and demonstrations which followed in Tehran and other cities, Shamlu realized that his passive people could move, but only when moved by what he considered the worst possible motive - religion. The people appear at the beginning of "The Tablet" as a languid octopus, stretching into the streets, and waiting with "anticipation/ and silence." Shamlu expands on his persona of the poet-prophet, a blend of a lyrical Jesus and an epic Moses, holds up to them a clay tablet which "speaks of compassion, friendship, and honesty." But the people who lack "an ounce of guts," prefer to wait for their religious messiah.

Gone are the times you wept in mourning

for your crucified Christ; now

every woman is a Mary

and every Mary has a Jesus on a cross

though with no crown of thorns, no cross, no Golgatha,

no Pilate, no judges, no courts of justice;

Jesuses with similar fates,

Jesuses with similar souls,

uniformed Jesuses,

with boots and leggings of the same kind--

the same kind,

with equal shares of bread and gruel

(for Equality is the precious heritage of Mankind!)

And if there is no crown of thorns

there is a helmet to wear on your head;

And if there is no cross to bear on your shoulder,

there is a rifle

(the means of greatness

all at hand.)

And every supper

may well be The Last Supper

and every look

the look of a Judas.

....

And, alas, no more is the way of the cross

an ascent to Heaven

for it is a descent to Hell

and the eternal wanderings of the soul.

But the people do not seem to heed the poet-prophet's call for a secular struggle. They disagree with his view of religion as a "sin" in our times. And the speaker realizes the futility of his appeals:

I now knew that they waited

not for a clay tablet

but for a book

and for a sword

and for guards to assault them

with whips and maces

and drop them to their knees

before the steps of the one

who would descend the dark stairway

with a sword and a book.

Fully aware that his reader knows Islam is the religion of the sword and the book, Shamlu attacks it, an attack which gains significantly in its bitterness while adding to Shamlu's loneliness, bitterness, and need for Ayda's assuring love.

Shamlu eventually transformed his persona from a public poet-prophet to a sensitive, often helpless, and seldom silent observer who was not only a witness to the "crime" but was also a victim, an observer who refused to compromise his conscience. Ebrahim dar Atash [Abraham in the Fire] (1973) depicted a sick and static, a morbid and lifeless society. The first poem of this collection, "Shabaneh" [Nocturnal], was an appropriate prelude to the poems which followed:

There is no door

there is no road

there is no night

there is no moon

neither day

nor sun.

We

are standing outside

time

with a bitter dagger

stuck in our spine.

No one

talks

to anyone

for silence

is speaking

in a thousand

tongues.

We fix our looks

on our dead

with the sketch of a grimace

and wait our turns

deadly

serious!

For a time, he leaves on a self-imposed exile to America and Britain. Returning to Iran after the Shah had been deposed, he began writing articles and giving interviews wherein he attempted to make certain that the meaning of the line "to be deserving of freedom" was properly understood, only to find the ulama had hijacked the revolution; and it was doomed to repeat the history of the oppressed becoming the oppressor. Being an staunch, outspoken critic of the ulama as well as Iran's religious culture, it no doubt took great courage not to consider a second period of exile. In "Dar In Bonbast" [In This Dead-End] he gives a powerful and clear picture of post-revolutionary Iran:

(Translated by Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak)

They smell your mouth

lest you might have said: I love you,

they smell your heart:

Strange times, my dear.

They flog love by the road-block:

Let's hide love in the larder.

In this crooked blind alley, at the turn of the chill

they feed fires

with logs of song and poetry.

Hazard not a thought:

Strange times, my dear.

There, butchers

posted in passageways

with bloody chopping blocks and cleavers:

Strange times, my dear.

And they chop smiles off lips,

and songs off the mouth:

Let's hide love in the larder.

Canaries barbecued

on a fire of lilies and jasmines:

Strange times, my dear.

Satan, drunk with victory

squats at the feast of our undoing.

Let's hide God in the larder.

Yet, he refused to give up on hope. In "Khatabeh-ye Asan, dar Omid" [A Simple Sermon on Hope] (1980), the longest poem of this collection, he reaffirmed his humanistic belief and anthropocentric optimism:

To live

and offer prayers

to the exalted lordship of Man on earth;

to live

and to perform miracles

or else

what is your birth but the memory of a futile pain,

just as your death

just as the passing of your barren mule train

through the desert distance between your birth and death.

...

And for Shamlu, "the ultimate miracle" was "to be just." However, this collection also appropriately ended with a Shabaneh [Nocturnal] poem, at the end of which the tired poet asked, "Has it always been like this?/Is it always like this?".

Despite the fact that for the past couple of years the Khomeini regime has not allowed the publication of any new poems by Shamlu, he continues to write. He writes because of an overwhelming "burning urge" which he compares to the powerful sexual urges of a young man. He writes because for him the poem has "an instantaneous life" which it demands from the poet as a fully developed fetus would from its mother. Shamlu writes because he is doomed to write and damned to remain "the conscience of mankind, even if mankind pays no attention." Finally, Shamlu writes because he "needs to shout or to whimper, and shouting or whimpering are manifestations of protest and signs of life."

October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or of shutting a book, did not end a tale.
Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: "It is simply a matter," he explained to April, "of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content."


In the beginning there was a boy.
He loved stories, and indulged a voracious appetite for books.
He was never a fast reader, but he learned to savour the nuances of each page.
The material feel of words – saturated, dense, layered; stark, isolated, provocative – where language becomes an insistent development in conjunction with the narrative plot.
The illustrations – sometimes beautiful in austerity, sometimes breathtaking in detail – evocative and inviting in unique ways.
But it is where the physical and abstract elements met, where the page-turn – a closure to antecedents and a precursor of the following – coincided with the imagination – the lingering afterimages borne of words and pictures, the anticipation of the next rushing ahead of the synapses – that truly caught his heart.
There, in that place between the lines, he read his own stories.
Hundreds of them.
No, thousands.
As the six honest serving men taught Kipling all he knew, so too did they serve the boy well.

It was little wonder that, as with many young boys, he grew to love the fantasies most – the fairy tales with their magic and familial endings; the fables with their lessons and talking creatures; myths which told of tales when the world was young; legends which romanticized the ideals and deeds of heroes.
In a world where the cold rationalities of a science-driven existence became ever more apparent, escape could be found in the worlds furthest removed from such rationalities.
The knight’s errand.
The hero’s quest.
The wretched boy who becomes a noble prince.
The fair princess who attains freedom.
True love conquers all.
These became realities in the fantasy world. A world of idyll and simplicity. A world of chivalry and honour. These ideals would be betrayed by the harsh world he inhabited - a world which could neither accept nor understand such ideals, like they could not understand him – thus he hid them in the shelter of his imagination.

In time, the boy learnt to appreciate the stories even more. He found stories in artwork; and, later on, music. Still, to speak of those would be a story for another time.
Graphic novels whetted his appetite for dramatic, visual interpretations, crucially retaining sufficient off-panel space to digest the stories. Animated feature films were amalgamations of all these elements he had come to enjoy, yet, they could not enchant the same way – there was scant space and time for the imagination to roam.

The holy grail took an innocuous form, the container surprised even him. It may have been a day of wind and rain, but the sun-drenched revelation took him a world – no, worlds – away.
The graphical adventure game.
Scorned and derided by parents – it was no wonder, he came to realize, because therein lay the same fantasy worlds which his own could not, would not accept – they beckoned and invited him into a captivating story-telling journey each time.
The stories were quests, rendered in colour, chronicled in animation, given emotion by music, brought to life by words. And the greatest pleasure, the boy found, was in being a part of the story. He did not write the story, but he could still shape it. He could direct the hero’s actions, explore new vistas with him, and meet unknown creatures together. In the lull between fruitless searches and failed plans, the boy would once again consult the six servant men. And in the periods where he left for the vagaries of his own colourless, static world, his mind would wander.
It was a dream. A paradise. How ironic, that it was the computer – technology borne from the highest order of rational minds – that proved the gateway to Avalon. It should have served as a foreshadow of cruel despair.

It was a dream. The stories… They always ended. All is but a distant Utopia. Was parting sweet sorrow? The climax of a story – the culmination of time and emotion invested – where one stands at the zenith and surveys the victorious conclusion ahead, is always tempered by a lingering certainty of finality – the hero’s purpose gone, the story’s justification finished.

So the boy decided, he would continue the dream.

I am the spine of my book.

God had granted him a gift, in accord with his interest and personality. A voice. A style of writing which expressed those ideals he had sheltered, the poetic sensibilities he had nurtured.

Knowledge is my body, imagination is my blood.

Perhaps nostalgia is a chain, like that which bound Prometheus to an immortal life of suffering, holding one to memories of stories eclipsed. But still, the boy pondered the enchantment of bedtime stories of days gone by.

I have created over a thousand dreams.

Sleep was the breath of Once upon a Times. Even as he grew aware of the pages turning in his own life’s chapters, he could not forget the magic of those stories. They were the hope that tomorrow may yet allow him to live out the best of yesterday, one more time.

Unaware of loss.

Words. What use were his dreams if they could not be crystallized in language? Time would pluck them loose, like the Artful Dodger, until his future was left with naught but the curse of nostalgia.

Nor aware of gain.

Words give form and structure to stories. They imbue them with emotion, impart kinetic energy to actions, leave invitations to memory.

Withstood pain to create stories, waiting for one’s arrival.

The boy projected his imaginations in words.

I have no regrets.

It did not matter, that no one else would ever read these stories. From the start, he had only ever written for his pleasure.

This is the only path.

No, perhaps they could not even be called stories. For they were always written without endings. The boy imagined many tales. He dreamt of epics. He wrote of adventures and quests, one after another. But he would never finish any. He honed his gift through labour and inspiration, but always the truth that he feared to bring closure to any of his stories cut as sharp as a blade. Still, he wrote, clinging on to the dream.

My whole life was “unlimited dream words”.

It was a dream. Whether the dream betrayed him, or whether he betrayed it, it was an unrealistic ideal. The boy grew disillusioned as the pages turned. Even as he received accolades for his writings, he knew these were never the things he wanted to write.
Conformity. That word scares him.
Eventually, the boy realized there was no place in this world for that dream. He would hide it, along with his stories, in his imagination, as he used to do. He continued to write as demanded by authority, and continued to receive praise. He disliked it. Yes…from the start, he had only ever wanted to write for his pleasure. Eventually, he stopped writing stories altogether.

The years would pass by swiftly, cold as a winter pole, but the days were long, hollow and dreary. The wheel is never in the present. It turns forwards and round again. Time leaves but a track behind. As the boy matured, he would turn the pages with joy and satisfaction, content with a life of redemption and salvation. He made peace with the world and its unavoidably logical, scientific ways. Yet, this world – one which forced out his ideals and silly dreams – still seemed void and empty.

A girl changed everything.

Symmetry is a concept entrenched as deeply in science as it is in art. Perhaps it should have been little surprise that he was harkened back to the feelings pouring forth that overcast morning when he booted up his first adventure game.

I am the spine of my book.

He did not write this story. No, only one Author could have. But the greatest pleasure, as it was then, is being part of the story. No, it is even better now, because the boy can speak to the Author. Where previously he strove to capture his dreams in words, he has now found freedom in simply living the dream.

The bread I have eaten, from the cup I have drunk.

Unhindered by his imperfect aesthetics. Unimpeded by his limited language. No human use of words could ever capture this grand adventure. But there is no need for such words. He can simply talk to the Author. Whereas in the past he let his imagination run in the inherent intermissions in stories, he now gains a better understanding of the story's direction during these idylls.

I have created over a thousand dreams.

A continuation of the dream. Yes, the boy, who was now a man, never had to hide those ideals. For he was never alone.

Redeemed from death.

He would serve his king.
Slay giants.
Grow to be a worthy prince.
Discover his princess.
Experience true love.

Redeemed for life.

His life is a story. The Author’s mark is on each page, yet no doubt he can still express his ideals. After all, it is a gift he had received many, many years ago – but now, he has someone to share the story with. Even in the poor chapters, the embarrassing dialogue, the failed quests, he dearly wishes for her to experience it with him.

Have withstood pain to create many stories.

A story that does not end. No, rather, the end is merely a beginning.

Yet, without You these hands will never hold anything.

A story that shall be rewritten – one where this world he inhabits is recreated, and will finally accept and understand him – by the Author, and the distant Utopia brought into reality – a dream revealed in the light of day – by His word.

So, as I pray -

And for the girl and him, the Author will wipe away all tears from their eyes, and give them peace and rest in eternal paradise.

“Unlimited dream words”.

talk.

silence from you is like the death of a tune

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