the throne and declared himself king, Shah, founding the Pahlavi dynasty. In his vision of modernization, Reza Shah enforced the unveiling of women, kashfe-hejab, and in 1935, changed the country’s name on the roster of nations from “Persia” to “Iran,” the name of the country in the Persian language itself (endonym), and a variant of “Aryan,” a self-designation by the Indo-Iranian people, later distorted during World War II toward atrocities in the name of racial ideology.
Shamlou spent an unhappy childhood in various provincial towns witnessing much misery and suffering around him. He recalled scenes of this desolate childhood, his external realities, in Keyhan-e Sal magazine: In the city of Kash, he saw a starving Baluchi boy on a mattress that he had soiled the previous night, likely from the terror of impending death in a filthy boardinghouse. He remembered the agonizing sight of a sickly teacher and his stomach-churning lash marks in the city of Mashhad. There were villages without trees for respite from the searing sun, fields without water. The tears of his mother washing with her own hands the dead body of her son, Shamlou’s brother.
When Shamlou was a young boy, he overheard a young neighbor play the piano, maybe Chopin. He experienced “the first undefinable sensations of puberty: a blend of pleasure and pain, death and rebirth, and who knows what else.” He decided there and then what he wanted to do with his life. But he was given no music lessons, even taunted. Shamlou mused later that his poetry arose from his stifled longing for music in the same way that the dance-like designs of Persian carpets (and calligraphy) harbored in them the indigenous Persian desire for dance and song, long suppressed under Islam, which swept through Persia in the seventh century.
There was a silence to Shamlou’s childhood. With no one to talk to, no one to stoke his imagination, he turned inward, into the well of his own self.
The itinerant life of Shamlou’s family meant an interrupted education, transferring schools, and being held back. In high school, Shamlou left for Tehran, but ultimately abandoned school altogether. The image of Cain beating Abel was the door to another world for him. He diverted his attention to reading and literature, his interests spanning politics to poetry.
Around this time, Iran was in the throes of the 1941 Anglo-Russian invasion of Iran, which was to force the opening of a supply route for Russian forces. Shamlou became briefly involved with Iran’s communist party, the Hezbeh Tudeh, or the Tudeh Party of Iran, literally, the party of the masses. His early political activities led to a momentary mix-up in a nationalist tendency in Iran that temporarily fell on the side of the Axis powers and against the Allies. He was arrested in Tehran and transferred to a Russian Red Army prison in Rasht, where he spent twenty-one months, and finally released in the fall of 1944.
Soon after, in 1945, Shamlou’s father was transferred to the northwestern state of Azerbaijan in Iran, and their home was raided by the guerrilla forces of the democratic faction. Shamlou and his father were held blindfolded before a firing squad for two hours before a last-minute reprieve.
Shamlou’s domiciles were raided throughout his life, his manuscripts burned and stolen, confiscated works he tried to recreate from memory while plotting new ones. Sometimes he went into hiding. He began to realize that his voice could not be expressed by aligning with any political ideologies or parties or stealthily pasting protest posters in the middle of the night. Writing would be his only work, nothing would be as potent as his pen, nothing large enough to contain him. Shamlou transforms from an outward activist to introspective witness.
When Shamlou launched into his literary career in the fertile period after World War II, Persian poetry had been remolded and given a new dynamism. His coming of age and evolution as a free spirit in an increasingly unfree Iranian society posed a challenge, but he managed to reflect his social and humanistic ideals in his work. The reformist spirit of the time was reflected in the works of socially motivated poets preceding him. Poets such as Bahar, Iraj, Dehkhoda, Farrokhi, Eshghi, and Lahuti played key roles in this process of freeing Persian poetry from the state of decline and stagnation it had fallen into. The florid language of the nineteenth century had alienated the masses and led to the gradual isolation of the ruling classes from the realities of life. Classical imagery with its metaphors wrapped in candles and moths and taverns and lady wine-bearers no longer reflected the concerns of the citizens of a bold, new century.
In their wake came the poet Nima Yushij, born Ali Esfandiari in 1897 in Yush in the northern province of Mazandaran, and largely referred to as Nima. In his rustic simplicity, Nima cloistered himself at home for twenty years as he single-handedly challenged traditionalist tendencies in Iranian poetry, namely its subjects and metrical forms, and began to update the language of poetry in the language of his time, all against a barrage of criticism for upsetting tradition. His work was denounced for not even being written in the Persian language. Progress was slow—with each new publication he took one step forward and two steps back. In 1945, Nima was a renegade star, but in only five years he would turn into a sun around which rotated a galaxy. He would be a vanguard, cementing his She’re No, or New Poetry movement.
After abandoning high school, Shamlou began working in a bookstore. Soon after, his first volume of poetry, Forgotten Songs (1947), was published, what he later considered a workbook of his classically influenced poems. Reading one of Nima’s poems, “Knell”—on the first day of spring, no less—transformed Shamlou’s vision of the potential of poetry. Shamlou would track down Nima’s address and knock on his door, where appeared a man who resembled drawings Shamlou had seen of Nima. Shamlou introduces himself and expresses his intentions to apprentice under the poet. Nima found in the serious young poet an ally in his vision. In his zeal, Shamlou visited Nima almost every day, never taking into account that he might be imposing on Nima’s time.
Shamlou became Nima’s champion, publishing Nima’s seminal poem, “Afsaneh” (“Myth” ) in 1950. In the same year, Shamlou published his pivotal poem, “To the Red Blossom of a Shirt,” in which metric language was disregarded, the poem heralding the free verse revolution—known as She’re Sepid, meaning white verse—that Shamlou would engineer.
Shamlou later recalled, In the beginning, when we young poets were composing non-metrical, non-rhyming poetry, many of the elders, who were terrified of innovation, disinclined to accept these new forms, used our work against us, called us inexperienced, repudiated our work of not being poetry. But why? we would ask, and they would mock us: You are so uneducated and foolish that you don’t even realize what you’ve written is prose!
But Shamlou pressed on experimenting with language. He harnessed the healing powers of poetry as his weapon against tyranny, his tool for connecting with a larger public. Shamlou’s worldview matured. He educated himself on a robust regimen of international literatures, gaining independence of thought. He imagined himself in a lineage of writers he considered friends across time and language, a collective that created the blueprints for our humanity.
No one in my family remembers how we came to host Shamlou in our home. During the literary gatherings, which in my mind were wild artists’ salons, Shamlou was the centerpiece everyone deferred to, his mastery of language and history and culture so superseded everyone else’s that there was no questioning him. Only sitting at the feet of the titan. Other literary heavyweights joining us included Gholam-Hossein Saedi, in whose apartment I would later see a large poster of Beethoven above the entrance staircase, and who would disappear from time to time and when let out of prison, where he was beaten with electrical cables and his mouth pried open to take his torturer’s piss—which he told us about while howling and as casually as, Where is your bathroom—would resume spirited socializing as before. These people were not new to torture for literature, I thought, my mind already racing with fuzzy torture scenarios I had no business imagining at such a young age, gleaned from our guests and the books I was handed to read about the torture of political prisoners in South America. Torture of female body parts I could not comprehend. Having
