(1928-1999)
Bijan Jalali was born and educated in Tehran and received his BS in French literature.  Jalali's first volume of poetry, DaysOur Hearts and the World (1965), continues the poet's quest for simplicity and directness. The Color of Waters (1971) reflects Jalali's concern for more free forms.

In his unpretentious poems, he reflects moments of pain and boredom by brief words and passing images. His best poems portray vivid images in the mind. He is the most contemplative modern poet and reflects different philosophical thoughts with an intimate language, which never tires the reader. (1962), portrays the painful growth of an individual style. The poet takes pains to be simple and clear by resorting to concise prose to convey his message. His second volume,

I want to die

I want to die,
Not that my heart should fail,
And my body grow cold,
And be leveled with earth;
I want to die
Not that I should not hear any voice,
Or the sun will fail to shine on me,
Or I grow blind
To the moon and stars.
I seek a quite extraordinary death,
Like the water turning into vapor,
Like the blossoming of the seed,
Like the setting of the sun,
Like a sky which is clouded.
I want to be annihilated,
to be born again in another world,
A world which I have not yet named,
A world which I have not completely tried,
A world resembling the world of imagination
In which everything is ordinary,
Except the fear of annihilation,
Except wretchedness,
Except loneliness.

Words arrive

Words arrive
Greet each other 
And sit beside each other,
A poem emerges
And I sing it
And I write it.


I hear a fresh voice,
Somebody is calling me by name,
And I watch
The fresh face 
Of the day,
And the fresh face of the earth,
And the fresh face of the light
And the fresh face of the water.


Do not take away the earth from me,
For without Earth
I will be devoid of heaven,
And I can't
Hear the sound of my footsteps
Nor can I know to which house it walks
And where it will reach?


Earth
And earth again,
And stars bred by earth,
And the sky too 
Which will turn to dust one of these days.


You are asleep 
Between heaven and earth 
Somewhere in my memory,
And your sleep is long
And my sorrow is without end.
---

Your voice
Was colorful
Like the play of light,
At the evening precipice 
Or like farewell of flowers
With the spring.


I never understood,
O tall lady,
Where do you carry me
And in which road
You will leave me alone,
And when you will recall me again;
O fair lady!
O daytime!
O bright sky.

Translations to English by M. Alexandrian

(1929-2000)

Nader Naderpour was born in June 06, 1929 to educated parents, he traveled to Europe upon completion of his secondary education to study literature in Sorbonne University, Paris, France.

On his return to Iran, he took up a position in the Department of Arts and Culture. Meanwhile he became Editor-in-Chief of the monthly journal of "Honar va Mardom".

Naderpour published his first poems in 1940s and completed four collections by 1970s. In 1964, he went to Rome where he studied Italian language and literature.

When he returned to Iran in 1971, he took over as the director of "Goroohe Adabe Emrooz" (Contemporary Literature Department) in the Iranian National Radio and Television, where he directed many programs on the life and works of contemporary literary figures. His efforts contributed significantly to the understanding and identification of a great many of today's literature.

Naderpour left Iran in 1980 for France and resided there until 1987. Later, he was elected to France's Authors Association, and participated in several conferences and gatherings.

In 1987, he moved to California. During his residence in the United States, Naderpour gave several speeches and lectures at Harvard University, Georgetown University, UC Berkeley, and UCLA. He was an imagist, a musician and a wordsmith in one. A classic poet living in a modern world with a modern style. He was regarded as one of the leaders of the movement of "New Poetry" in Iran and among other Persian speakers in Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan.

Naderpour has published nine collections of poems, many of them translated into English, French, German, and Italian. Naderpour's poetry is rich in imagery and deeply imbedded in the texture of Persian language.

He died in Los Angeles on 18th February, 2000.

Homily of Perdition
(For Imam Ommat, Ayatollah Khomeini, "The People's Imam")

O, infernal nature! Although the oppression of the sky

gave you the heritage of my land,

under the mirthful sun of that land

your hand planted nothing but the seed of inhumanity.

It is time to inform you, you the newly planted.

Till the moment that your death message arrives

O, despicable man!

Till the moment that your wicked blood flows

on the cold cobblestone.

Let me compose an anthem to your annihilation.

In my eyes you are a black wind that suddenly

has stolen several thousand young leaves.

After the sun's death your dark spirit closed

several thousand thrilled eyes

to the morning and opened them to the night.

The starless nights that mothers' eyes

mourned tears running down their cheeks for their children.

In your cold eyes, O, you iniquitous man!

No one has seen compassion nor read repentance.

The white haired elderly that on the tombstone slab

have written the names of their loved ones

are crying blood in your days,

harvesting what they have never planted.

Although you removed the lion's image and the face of the sun

from the three colored flag of champions,

their memories are still the source of our enthusiasm.

And although the name of that eloquent Shahnameh writer

was stolen from the books and tomes,

only his holy voice exists in our thoughts.

Wait till the groans of your prisoners

are too loud to fit in their chests,

let the people's tears flood and their blood run

till red roses of revenge grow from the earth.

Wait till the morning of the revenge

when you get up from your morning sleep

and young and old, small and big, scream

O, black-hearted devil!

Your death will be celebrated by all men and women,

Your name will be removed from the journey of time.

The Sound of the Footstep 

In the large desert I am going through

the heavy steps of someone, in the heart of night,

travel with me and my shadow.

When I look back timorously

nobody is there except the wind and the tree,

one drunk, the other out of touch.

Exasperated, I ask myself:

if the one who accompanies me is not Satan,

then who is it whom I cannot see?

No answer, the desert is empty,

the mountain behind the tree is all alone.

And what I hear is:

The sound of someone’s weighty footsteps

Who is closest to me.

My eye, once again

endeavoring to find its identity,

is looking toward what is behind:

The moon on the depths of the horizon

is like a mask which the sun has pulled over its face

till in the heart of the night it starts its banditry again.

I am telling myself:

This is the same thing that every night

travels toward the end of the world with me.

Ah, you, the fallen shadow on the earth!

If, during the shining of the dawn,

you still continue walking along with me:

The footsteps of thousands of nights

with footsteps of hundreds of days

you would see on earth.

This sight would tell you

that this body, the sounds of whose footstep frightened you,

is "death" in the form of another day.

Qom

Thousands of women  

Thousands of men  

The women in veils  

The men in cloaks  

A single gold dome

With old storks

A joyless garden

With a few scattered trees

Devoid of laughter 

Silent

A half-filled courtyard pool  

With greenish water

Some old crows  

On piles of rocks  

Crowds of beggars

Every step of the way  

White turbans

Black faces

Translations by Farhad Mafie

The Fortune-teller

The sun's honeycomb had fallen aside,
The bees of light had abandoned their flight,
From behind the trampled lawn of sky
The fresh red petals of twilight had newly spread.

The old fortune-teller of wind appeared from distance,
The yellow shawl of autumn wrapped around his neck;
That day he was the guest of the street trees,
To hear their secrets from his bright fortune.

Each step he advanced he was greeted by a tree,
Each branch stretched its palm towards him;
He brushed aside all these hands,
Like gypsies, he tuned a strange song.

He sang and sang so much that the evening magpies
Summoned the night from within the trees,
Alarmed of that sound the leaves fell to the ground,
as if a thousand swallows were shot in the air.

Night crossed like a stream over these leaves,
Each leaf was cut like a fist;
Although no image he read in these hands,
The fortune-teller of wind saw the fortune of each leaf.

Translated by M. Alexandrian

O Earth, O Tomb, O Mother!

An old man who was walking behind the autumn-stricken trees,
Resembled my soul of 40 years age,
A soul more disturbed than the shade of hundred leaves
And more scattered than the trembling of hundred waves,
A soul ready to die,
An old man whose pointed staff
Continually disturbed the peace of that laughing spring.
It was my soul that was walking behind the autumn-stricken trees.

Ah I know:
No more this soul can see the sky
From the bright windows of dream;
It cannot look at trees and the sun;
Its strange sensation
- at sunrise after rainfall -
Shall no more breathe the wet perfume of the lawn.
His heart cannot escape the terror of the nights of old age.
Because he is too old,
His old age is dark and gloomy;
His old age is a dark chamber that has no opening to the street
Nor a street leading to the plain.

O I know!
That love that dawned on that morning of merry youth,
And touched the window of his cottage,
Has hidden its face from the unhappy soul,
And cast its desirous eyes to more youthful rivals.
He is too old,
His old age is dark and gloomy,
His face beams as it used to beam.
If at evening the mirror betrayed a single white hair 
from his silky jet black curls,
Today in its withered silky white hairs
You can't trace a black string,
Here the sun won't shine but on a snowy night.

Ah I don't know,
Under this agitated and gloomy snow of old age,
Under this heavy grayness of forgetfulness
How many embers have survived from the light years?
How many embers from those nights
Which behind an orange curtain rain poured cats and dogs
And a woman washed a weeping child in the raining of his caressing hairs,
And sought the dumb gaze of the child in the father's eyes.

Some embers have survived from those days
When on the other side of the room a small wall mirror
Showed the constant motion of the cradle and the forehead of the mother,
And in that corner of the chimney piece the clock
Moved its long pointers 
To and from
And the peasant women with henna dyed hands
Milked from swollen breasts of her cows at morning,
And the father was drinking in the leaf of iris.
The light of the brass cup boiled with loud echo,
And sprayed on the sun,
And the boiling Samovars
And the pale cups with golden edges ....
Cooled the tea with the cold morning breath.

Some embers have survived from those nights
When in the veranda the heart of an ancient torch burnt
And in the brazier, the dream of spring died,
And the sad ice flower.. carried the sad perfume of sunset 
To the colorful border of dawn,
And the dawn gazed at the darkness of that young soul.
How many embers have survived from those nights
When his heart trembled with the blowing of perfume
And his body was inflated with a heartbeat,
And his lip 
Repeatedly translated his language 
With the help of kisses.

Some embers have survived from those times
In which a heart burning wrath breathed in his breast,
His breath was sincere;
His cry echoed at all horizons
And the awe of his wrath 
Broke and shattered 
The chandeliers in God's mansion, 
And his pointed golden revolving finger tips,
Dropped in the heart of the most fresh turquoise light of morning 
And truth were released from chains and fetters.

Ah it is long since that in his ruined and agitated recollections
From all these things nothing by recollection -
Dumb and dead and frying and disturbed - can't be found,
In the nocturnal chamber of his sorrow you can't find a ray of joy,
At times it sees the way to forgetfulness,
And says with regret:
"Ah old age, o the age of prudence!,
O forgetfulness!, O the cause of silence and joy!,
Removed all these disturbing recollections from my mind.
O earth, O tomb!, O mother!,
When shall I lie in your bosom?
Don't give my turn to another one.
Don't give my turn to another one.

Source: http://www.iranchamber.com/literature/nnaderpour/nader_naderpour.php

http://www.naderpour.com/Poems-in-English/The-Sound-of-the-Footstep.html

Diyara - Nader Naderpour in Persian

Sholeh Wolpé is a poet, visual artist and playwright. She is the author of Sin—Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad (University of Arkansas Press), The Scar Saloon (Red Hen Press), Rooftops of Tehran (Red Hen Press, Jan. 2008), Shame (a play in three acts) and has a Poetry CD featuring poems read by the author to traditional Persian music (Refuge Studios). She is the associate editor of The Norton Anthology of Modern Literature from the Muslim World (Norton, 2010), the editor of The Atlanta Review-- Iran Issue (2010), and her poems, translations, essays and reviews have appeared in scores of literary journals, periodicals and anthologies worldwide, and have been translated into several languages. Sholeh was born in Iran but spent most of her teen years in the Caribbean and Europe, ending up in the U.S. where she pursued Masters degrees in Radio-TV-Film (Northwestern University ) and Public Health (Johns Hopkins University ).  She lives in Los Angeles.

I Am Neda

Leave the Basiji bullet in my heart,
fall to prayer in my blood,
and hush, father
--I am not dead.

More light than mass,
I flood through you,
breathe with your eyes,
stand in your shoes, on the rooftops,
in the streets, march with you
in the cities and villages of our country
shouting through you, with you.
I am Neda—thunder on your tongue.

On June 20th, 2009, Neda Agha-Soltan, a 26 year old Iranian woman and a student of philosophy who was attending a demonstration in Tehran protesting the vote-count fraud in the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was aimed at and shot in the heart by a Basiji hiding on the rooftop of a civilian house. In the jittery cell phone video of a bystander who captured her murder, we hear her father wailing her name, begging her to stay, not to leave, as blood gushes from her chest and streams out of her mouth.  The name Neda in Persian means “The call.”

Azza – The ceremony of grief

Women in black rock
their bodies, beat their chests,
girl-children serve in glass
tumblers steaming auburn tea,
baklava on plastic trays.

Here, tears flow like streams,
wet the ornate Persian rugs
and in the courtyard
where she poured kerosene on her head, struck a match,
silver fish roam the small pond, oblivious.

On the other side of the yard, men sit
with hookah pipes, crack salted pistachios.

The butcher who was to take the girl as bride
sits on an embroidered cushion, strokes his twisting gray mustache.

Jerusalem, August 10, 2001

Rabbis rush out into blood-
splashed streets in white gloves
picking up pieces
from the sidewalks
dusty hoods of dented cars.

A hand, a toe, a nose.

For to rest in peace
one must be buried whole.

A child, her tears thinning
the blood on her cheeks,
stumbles over bodies, calling out
to her mother and when she finds her
she cannot fathom why her mother will not rise,
take her hand and lead her away.

A man bleeds from a gap
between his legs as he begs
for help from a soldier
who’s really just a boy in uniform.

The boy throws down his gun
vomits not just the breakfast
his mother made him that morning.

Will the rabbis see this and rush over,
pick up with their white gloves
the tenderness of this boy splashed
on the sidewalk and put it back
inside him so he can be whole again?

It's a Man's World To the End of the End

I am a woman. Simply.

To look at me is a sin —
I must be veiled.

To hear my voice is a temptation
that must be hushed.

For me to think is a crime
so I must not be schooled.

I am to bear it all
and die quietly, without complaint.

Only then can I be admitted to the court of God
where I must repose naked on a marble cloud
feed virtuous men succulent grapes
pour them wine from golden vats
and murmur songs of love…

Source: http://www.sholehwolpe.com/

I Belong Nowhere

I belong nowhere. Every language I speak, I speak with an accent. I eat Persian food in the British style – with a knife and a fork instead of a spoon and a fork. I kiss Americans Persian style – a kiss on each cheek. I entertain Persians American style – I cook one main course rather than the customary Persian three or four courses when entertaining guests. I know the body language of the Trinidadians, what it means to roll one’s eyes a particular way, or the meaning of sucking air between the teeth and the tongue. But these are mere gestures. Cultural habits. The foreignness I speak of manifests itself in what the eye can see and what the ears can hear and what the senses can feel --- still, it goes deeper. It exists at the level of the heart.

Being a foreigner everywhere, not belonging anywhere, can be disquieting but once you’re over that, it is liberating. Suddenly you find yourself part of something greater, something indefinable and exhilaratingly new. You are granted access to places the existence of which is not on most people’s radars. Places that clear a path to a strange kind of knowledge, something that is learned instinctively and without instruction. Once there, empathy comes easily. You melt into other people’s skins, look through their eyes at the world, without judgment or even agreement – your only desire being: to understand.

I do not write to create art. To me, life itself is art and it is creating me. Word by word, gesture by gesture, sight by sight, note by note. It is hard to feel hatred in such a world. Pity, yes, empathy, yes, but never hatred. Hatred is a fire that consumes and leaves behind ashes good for nothing but to rub on one's face and mourn the loss of beauty. Perhaps I write to express only this.

Source: http://www.poemeleon.org/sholeh-wolpe/

(1935-1967)

A pivotal female figure, Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad, also stretched the bounds of her nation’s literature. Born in 1935 to a middle-class family in Tehran, she married a distant cousin fifteen years her senior at the age of sixteen in order to escape the suffocating confines of her strict home. Soon after, she began publishing her poems in magazines, and making frequent trips to Tehran to meet with various editors.  However, within three years, during which time she gave birth to a son, her marriage failed and Farrokhzad was forced to relinquish her child to her husband and his family. She was given few visiting rights, and the child was brought up with the impression that his mother was a disgraceful woman who had abandoned him for the pursuit of her sexual pleasures. Distraught and burdened by family and societal pressures, she had a nervous breakdown for which she was hospitalized and subjected to electromagnetic shock therapy. Upon her recovery she faced a new world in the capital city-- a world of men in tight literary circles, unaccustomed to a woman amongst them. In a society where historically, women, their beauty, breasts, hair, etc., had freely been made the subjects of poems, Forugh made men her poetic subjects, her objects of love and reverie, of passion and sexual desire. Her poems were autobiographical and from a clearly feminine perspective. Further, they were “modern” as opposed to “traditional,” a form rejected by the academic community and not considered poetry at all. These factors subjected her to further disapproval and gossip.

Still, Farrokhzad lived her life uncompromisingly, and after a number of short-lived relationships fell in love and maintained a passionate relationship with a film director and producer, Ebrahim Golestan. She soon began work as an assistant and later became an editor at the Golestan Film Studios, where she subsequently make her first documentary film, The House is Black, about a leper colony near Tabriz. The artistic merit and success of the film cast Farrokhzad in a different light and she is finally recognized as a serious artist. A year later, the film was awarded the prestigious best documentary award in the 1963 Oberhausen Film Festival in Germany.  

In the spring of 1964, Forugh’s fourth collection of poems, Reborn, appeared. It was immediately hailed as a major work rivaling the best in the short history of Persian modernist poetry. In a society where women were considered best suited for keeping their lips tightly shut and smiling, saying as little as possible, Farrokhzad was, in her sister’s words, an “active and curious woman who blew a new life into Iran’s world of modern poetry. She drafted a new pattern from today’s language. With incredible brevity, she unlocked the lips of (Iranian) women artists and writers.”[i]

Farrokhzad continued to write and publish until her untimely death, at the age of 32, in a car crash. Her poems have lived on, influencing generations of Iranians—and recently readers worldwide.

We must be judged and feel that we have made a difference, made a connection, and that we are responsible. But how can one look fondly at, or even expect an answer from a society that is shapeless, without an ideal, refusing any sort of responsibility, its only movement being from a season of mating to a season of grazing? In this field, an artist’s work is private and individualistic. How long can he or she survive this isolation, conversing only with the door and the four walls? This is a question, the answer to which lies in the capacity and forbearance of each individual artist. Those who grow silent, or have nothing more to say, had better keep their peace, otherwise their ability to cope with this frightful sewage becomes impossible and they find themselves abandoned and useless.  The only way to survive is that one should reach such a state of detachment and maturity that he or she can become both a builder of and a mouthpiece for her world, both an observer and a judge.   --Forugh Farrokhzad

Biographical sketch and translated poems contributed by writer and poet, Sholeh Wolpé                                                              

The Gift

I speak from the deep end of night.

Of end of darkness I speak.

I speak of deep night ending.

O kind friend, if you visit my house,

bring me a lamp, cut me a window,

so I can gaze at the swarming alley of the fortunate.

From Sin—Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad  translated by Sholeh Wolpé (University of Arkansas Press, 2007)

Window

A window for seeing.

A window for hearing.

A window like a well

that plunges to the heart of the earth

and opens to the vast unceasing love in blue.

A window lavishing the tiny hands of loneliness

with the night’s perfume from gentle stars.

A window through which one could invite 

the sun for a visit to abandoned geraniums.

One window is enough for me.

I come from the land of dolls, from under 

the shade of paper trees in a storybook grove;

from arid seasons of barren friendships and love

in the unpaved alleys of innocence;

from years when the pallid letters of the alphabet

grew up behind desks of tubercular schools;

from the precise moment children could write

“stone” on the board and the startled starlings took wing

from the ancient tree.

I come from among the roots of carnivorous plants,

and my head still swirls with the sound

of a butterfly’s terror— crucified with a pin to a book.

When my trust hung from the feeble rope of justice

and the whole city tore my lamps’ hearts to shreds,

when love’s innocent eyes were bound

with the dark kerchief of law, and blood gushed

from my dreams’ unglued temples,

when my life was no longer anything,

nothing at all except the tick tick of a clock on the wall,

I understood that I must, must, must

deliriously love.

One window is enough for me.

A window to a moment of comprehension, perception, silence.

The walnut sapling has grown tall enough

to tell its leaves the meaning of the wall.

Ask of the mirror the name of your liberator.

Is not the trembling earth beneath your feet

lonelier than you?

The prophets brought the epistles

of ruin to our age.

These explosions without end, 

these poisonous clouds,

are they not the peal of holy scriptures?

O friend, O comrade, O blood brother,

when you reach the moon,

mark the day of the flowers’ massacre.

Dreams always fall

from the heights of their own naiveté,

and perish.

It’s a four-leaf clover I’m smelling, 

sprouted upon the grave of an archaic creed.

Was the woman buried in the shroud of longing

and chastity, my youth?

Will I ever again climb the stairs of wonder

to greet the good God who paces my roof?

I sense that time has passed,

I sense my share of “moments” is now a leaf of history;

I sense this desk is just an illusory mass between

my hair and this forlorn stranger’s hands.

Speak to me.

What does one who offers you a living body’s love

want in return but a nod to her sense of existence?

Speak to me.

From the sanctuary of my window

I am intimate with the sun.

From Sin—Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad  translated by Sholeh Wolpé (University of Arkansas Press, 2007)

Sin  

I have sinned a rapturous sin

in a warm enflamed embrace,

sinned in a pair of vindictive arms,

arms violent and ablaze.

In that quiet vacant dark

I looked into his mystic eyes,

found such longing that my heart

fluttered impatient in my breast.

In that quiet vacant dark

I sat beside him punch-drunk,

his lips released desire on mine,

grief unclenched my crazy heart.

I poured in his ears lyrics of love:

O my life, my lover it’s you I want.

Life-giving arms, it’s you I crave.

Crazed lover, for you I thirst.

Lust enflamed his eyes,

red wine trembled in the cup,

my body, naked and drunk,

quivered softly on his breast.

I have sinned a rapturous sin

beside a body quivering and spent.

I do not know what I did O God,

in that quiet vacant dark.

From Sin—Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad  translated by Sholeh Wolpé (University of Arkansas Press, 2007)

 
Someone who is like no one                                           The wind will take us