Ahmad Shamlu

1925 - 2000

Leading Iranian exponent of the "new poetry"; editor and translator.

Ahmad Shamlu was born in Tehran in 1925, the son of a military officer. Although he never finished high school, he became one of Iran's foremost poets during the second half of the twentieth century. He also was the editor of several literary journals and translated some thirty-five works of poetry and prose into Persian. The late 1950s through the 1960s marked Shamlu's most productive years as a politically concerned, modernist poet. In his poetry, he comes close to rejecting the bases of Persian verse: rhythms and metrical patterns.

In 1977, exasperated with life under the regime of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shamlu left Iran for foreign exile. He returned to Tehran in early 1979, full of optimism about the new social order emerging in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution. He founded a weekly called Ketab-e Jom'eh, which the Islamic republic banned a year later. His collected poems were published in Germany during the mid-1980s.

In April 1990, at the University of California at Berkeley during an extended stay in the United States for health reasons, Shamlu delivered a controversial lecture in the field of Persian literature. He attacked Ferdowsi (940 - 1020), author of Iran's national epic, the Shahnameh (Book of kings, c. 1010), as a feudal writer perpetuating royalist myths. Hundreds of responses to Shamlu's speech subsequently appeared in Persian publications throughout the world.

Bibliography

Alishan, L. "Ahmad Shamlu: A Rebel Poet in Search of an Audience." Iranian Studies (1985).

Dabashi, Hamid, and Dahdel, Golriz. "Ahmad Shamlu and the Contingency of Our Future." In Intellectual Trends in Twentieth-Century Iran: A Critical Survey, edited by Negin Nabavi. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003.

— MICHAEL C. HILLMANN
UPDATED BY ERIC HOOGLUND