BELONGING

Excerpt of "Introduction" to BELONGING, edited by Niloufar Talebi: Recent political developments, including the shadow of a new war, have obscured the fact that Iran has a long and splendid artistic tradition ranging from the visual arts to literature. Western readers may have some awareness of the Iranian novel thanks to a few breakout successes like Reading Lolita in Tehran and My Uncle Napoleon, but the country's strong poetic tradition remains little known. This anthology remedies that situation with a rich selection of recent poetry by Iranians living all around the world, including Amir-Hossein Afrasiabi: “Although the path / tracks my footsteps, / I don’t travel it / for the path travels me.” Varying dramatically in style, tone, and theme, these expertly translated works include erotic divertissements by Ziba Karbassi, rigorously formal poetry by Yadollah Royaii, experimental poems by Naanaam, powerful polemics by Maryam Huleh, and the personal-epic work of Shahrouz Rashid. Eclectic and accessible, these vibrant poems deepen the often limited awareness of Iranian identity today by not only introducing readers to contemporary Iranian poetry, but also expanding the canon of significant writing in the Persian language. Belonging offers a glimpse at a complex culture through some of its finest literary talents. Also see thetranslationproject.org

Excerwpt from Introduction
In my eighth year as a child growing up in Iran, I spontaneously composed a stanza, a poem, observing the falling of snow, when something took over and I knew it was poetry I was jotting down in a nylon-covered notebook. That notebook remained in the piles of things left behind. This was the country in which I recited over and over again “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep” for our fifth-grade English class. In the fourth grade, the entire class would stand up from our wooden benches and recite an homage poem to mothers. At home, it was Sohrab Sepehri, “Wherever I am, let me be / The sky is mine / … Our work is perhaps / To run after the song of truth/in the distance between the lotus and the century.”

This was also the country in which I had the great fortune, as a teenager, during the four violent years I lived in Iran after the 1979 revolution, to sneak out of bed, way past bedtime, to eavesdrop on a poet in our living room. During these years of unrest, in order to usurp all the power, Ayatollah Khomeini was eradicating all other factions that had played a role in ousting the Shah. The old Iran was combusting into the Islamic Republic of Iran, and all homes were prey to sudden raids by the Islamic police. And though this was a poet so undeniably consequential that despite his outright opposition to Khomeini it would have been impossible to imprison him along with the thousands of other dissidents, we could never be too discreet about his visits to our home.

When he was visiting, it meant we were hosting a “literary salon.” It meant there were simultaneous discussions on art, literature, music, and world affairs. It meant Rachmaninov or Beethoven was blaring while a heated debate was under way in the kitchen, while another group in the living room provided endless commentaries on the nightly televised charades of the Iran-Iraq war, or the staged confessions by soon-to-be-released-or-executed enemy party leaders. Presiding over these salons, cigarette smoke rings dissipating over his full head of white hair, this poet would connect Nima, Lorca, Neruda, Hafez, Akhmatova, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Langston Hughes, Baudelaire, Hedayat, and Farrokhzad, among many others. He handed me many books over that time—carefully chosen, no doubt—each time asserting why this book was perfect for me at that time. In my thirteenth year, I got One Hundred Years of Solitude. Years later when I met him at UCLA where he was giving a lecture, he suggested Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita...

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Selected Poet
Shahrouz Rashid was born in the northeastern part of Iran, in Fars-Abad of Dashte Moghan near the Caspian sea in 1960 to a tribal family. He believes living a nomadic life, with its spirit of transience and innate lyricism, has profoundly affected his poetry. He left for Germany in 1984. He is the author of more than ten books of poetry, prose, and translations, including poetry booksBerlin Elegies, Circles and Never, and The Book of Never. He is the editor of an online literary magazine, Ketabe Siavash. His work has been translated into German and Swedish. A CD of his poetry set to music is called Landing.

Though his work is not political, it has a social conscience. His profound awareness of his exile does not narrow his poetic potential, but it endows him with a historical context. Rashid is of the generation whose youth was spent on the revolution—without the desired results—but the tumultuous events of his early adulthood do not limit the scope of his work; instead they leave traces for the reader, echoes of historic events in the scenes he creates. Iran’s rich poetic history, both its classical and modern poetry, is a significant tradition for a poet to emerge from. Rashid not only gives us poetic elements such as attention to language, imagery, and symbol, but beyond creating beauty in lyric form, he gives us ideas.

Rashid came of age after he left his country, equipped with references of both his Eastern and Western lives. He claims the Western literary and historical tradition as his own and at his disposal as they shape his work. In his poems, he addresses Dante in a journey to hell, as Dante conjured Virgil as his companion. He writes of Hamlet, Shakespeare and borrows from Hafez, Rimbaud, Marx, Shamlou, the Bible, the Koran, the myth of Sisyphus, the myth of Icarus.

His is a personal-epic poem, a blend of what Eastern-Islamic and Western-Greek cultural imaginations present him to deliver us what speaks to our blended imagination.

“Seasonless Years,” “Downfall on the Horizon,” and “Icarus” are excerpts from three long poems, narratives about falling, both vertically and horizontally.

Seasonless Years
(excerpt)

We have landed from the heights of our flight
And there is no seed by the trap

Neglect and vanity have cultivated our lives
Even our sleep doesn’t benefit from our fatigue

Our mending ways rot under the audacious sun
Charting our separation is an age-old habit.

Sterile wounds, we will not be avenged.

Yesterday
Yesterday

Yesterday
Yesterday has us memorized.

Do you remember
When we blindfolded night

With my purple scarf?
And in our dreams ran toward a sea

Without a shore?
It dawned because of our mischief

five hours early,
Do you remember?

I am not the restraint of forty dervishes
Nor is the earth a meager sheath.

The stars and the senate do not obey us,
For we are not Caesars.

We are the red rose in the wine tavern
On nights of avarice, in hellish cities.

Who made you into such a locust
That you chew yourself, chew,

Chew and spit
Yourself onto passersby

In the stammering day?
In square rooms

Infinitely reflected,
A poet is on fire.