Ahmad Shamlou
Translated by Niloufar Talebi
World Poetry ($24)

by Patrick James Dunagan

The poetry of Ahmad Shamlou (1925–2000) towers over 20th-century Iranian literature, but has been too little appreciated outside the Middle East. Fortunately, Niloufar Talebi’s translations in Elegies of the Earth offer the most comprehensive selection of his poems yet to appear in English. Shamlou, who never earned a high school diploma and was imprisoned several times, found in poetry a venue for expressing the inexplicable. He eschewed traditional Persian poetic forms, writing free verse that blended the richness of Persian visual tropes and surrealist leaning metaphors with a stylized self-scrutiny. As Talebi describes in an introduction, Shamlou’s poems “synthesize East and West, the classical with the contemporary, the high and low to invent language that propelled Persian poetry into the pulse of a rapidly evolving Iran. . . . Without sacrificing its depth, he democratized his literary mode, giving voice to the ‘everyman’ in a range of registers.”

The clarity and immediacy of Shamlou’s work is indeed striking. What exactly a poem is “about” may not be entirely clear, but the imagery and associated feeling are always animated; as well, there’s an easy-going dreamlike fluidity to his descriptions of abstruse scenes, though they are nevertheless loaded with emotional heft. Take these lines from “I Can’t Help But Be Beautiful”:

 in my world
 blood
           is never the spirit laid bare
 and the fear of lead
                                doesn’t deter the partridge
from its strut

Talebi knew Shamlou personally, and she attests to his magnetism, saying, “he was the sun around which everyone at my parents’ secret literary salons in Tehran gathered. I recall him abruptly retreating from our bustling living room, where he was holding court, into a bedroom because a poem had seized him, demanding immediate transcription.” Even if enigmatic at times, his poems are deeply personal; in Shamlou’s own words, “My work is my complete autobiography. Poetry isn’t just an interpretation of life—it’s life itself.” He embeds weighted depth into mundane existence, as in “Still Life”:

An obscure book and
a burnt-to-ashes cigarette next to the forgotten cup of tea.

A forbidden thought
on the mind.

While Talebi’s selection of poems, drawn from the full range of Shamlou’s oeuvre, succeeds in delivering some sense of his poetic purview, one might wish for more commentary upon his life and the poems themselves. Talebi supplies footnotes for many of the poems, but they leave much unsaid. For instance, Shamlou has a number of poems scattered throughout volumes across the years with an overarching title of “Nocturnal,” which would seem to indicate some specific reference linking these poems together for him (a disrupted poem-series coming in fits and starts over an extended period of time)—yet Talebi supplies no information in this regard. As if in expectation of such grousing, she offers this short explanation: “I had prepared a lengthy introduction filled with biography and analysis, drawn from my previous writings about Shamlou. But let’s just get straight to the poems.”

Given ongoing current developments within Iran—where the people are in a perpetual state of peril under the brutality of the regime, thousands have been gunned down in the streets for daring to rise up and express discontent, and war with the United States continues—Shamlou’s poetry is a welcome demonstration of the vibrant cultural and imaginative resources of the Persian people and a dependable bulwark to lean against whatever the future holds. Let’s let him have the last word with these lines from “Nocturnal (Among the Eternal Suns)”:

Your gaze
    is the fall of tyranny—
a gaze that dressed
                               my bare soul
                                                     in love
so fully that now
                            the darkest night of never
feels like nothing but a comedy of ironies.

Your eyes told me
tomorrow
      is a new day—