By: Muhammad Ali Mojaradi*
If the tradition of court poetry had declined in the Qajar era, it died an unceremonious death under Reza Shah, who was a village boy with little taste for elite culture. The new monarch was more concerned with re-shaping Iran as a modern nation.
Inspired by Mustafa Kemal Pasha’s (known later as Atatürk) fleeting Turkish Republic, Reza Shah plunged Iran headfirst into modernity by destroying, severely restricting or replacing the institutions that were once cornerstones in Iranian society.
For the first time, Iranian intellectuals began to travel and study in Europe in large numbers. Taking note from the free-verse poetry that had been prevalent in the West for nearly half a century, they began to experiment with a similar style in Persian. New poems were written without traditional stanzas and rhyme schemes, and the court imagery of balls, banquets and battles was mostly abandoned in favor of newer, more relevant themes like women’s rights, national identity, political representation, freedom and more.
After World War II, the British dethroned Reza Shah Pahlavi in favor of his son Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, who would prove a less successful monarch. Early in his reign, the populist and nationalist prime minister Muhammad Mossadeq nationalized Iran’s oil, which led to the now infamous 1953 coup d’état. The young Muhammad Reza ultimately failed to hold his grip on the country, seeing many periods of instability that forced him to flee the country, earning him the title “Suitcase King” abroad. After just a few decades, the 2500-year-old monarchy was overthrown in a revolution and replaced with a new Islamic Republic in 1979.
Just as poets a half-century earlier had brought Iranian poetry into modernity, Iran’s political thinkers began to imagine a way to do the same with Iranian governance. Imam Khomeini famously said, “Neither Western (secular, capitalist democracy) nor Eastern (communism) but an Islamic Republic.” As the newly formed republic attempted to forge a new, traditionalist Iran, it paid little attention to modernist, free-verse poetry. The government began to patronize traditionalist poets like Shahriar (Seyyed Muhammad Hussein Behjat Tabrizi), who revived Iran’s poetry with hundreds of newly composed odes written according to the conventions of traditional poetry. His language is unmistakably modern, but his poems are traditional in their spirit and form.
Shahriar helped revive Iran’s traditional poetry with hundreds of newly composed odes written according to classical conventions: “O needy beggar, go and knock on Ali’s door / for he’ll kindly give gems of kingship to the poor.” (boro ay gedāy-e meskīn, dar-e khāneh-yeh‘alī zan / keh negīn-e padeshāhī dehad az keram gedā rā). Though Shahriar’s language is unmistakably modern, his poems are traditional in their spirit and form.
Although no traditionalist poet on the scale of Shahriar has emerged since his death in 1988, the Iranian government continues to sponsor neotraditionalist letters. In the aforementioned poetry nights, poems recited to Ayatollah Khamenei are written according to traditional conventions, including the religious themes and symbolism of premodern poems with adaptations for our modern context. References to the wars in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen are common: “Peace be upon the legendary Irani / the living martyr Haj Qassem Soleimani … God is our witness, we’ve not run away to hide / we are still standing with Nasrallah by our side.”
And though the characters and sentiments may change – Persian poetry continues to live and breathe as it has for a millennium. Concluded
* Muhammad Ali Mojaradi is a University of Michigan graduate, translator and founder of persianpoetics.com.
Courtesy: New Lines Magazine
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