Tag Archives: Iran

Norouz Pirouz! Eid Moborak! Happy Iranian New Year 2011 — An Auspicious Day to Announce My New Book, “The Teller of Tales: Stories from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh”

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I was, actu­ally, hop­ing to post this yes­ter­day, before the chang­ing of the year, which hap­pened some time between 6 and 7 PM, but I was very busy and didn’t get a chance to do it. So let me take this oppor­tu­nity to wish all the Ira­ni­ans I know, fam­ily and friends, and even those I don’t know, soleh noh mob­o­rak (Happy New Year!).

And just like the title says: It is, truly, an aus­pi­cious day offi­cially to announce my new book of trans­la­tions, The Teller of Tales: Sto­ries from Ferdowsi’s Shah­nameh, which has been pub­lished by Junc­tion Press. I will be launch­ing the book on Sat­ur­day, March 26th at Per­sian Arts Festival’s 5th Annual Arts Fes­ti­val. The book is not yet up on the publisher’s web­site or Ama­zon, but you can order it from Small Press Dis­tri­b­u­tion.

If you’d like to read a sam­ple from the book, Eklek­so­graphia pub­lished Zah­hak: We’d Need to Hear his Mother’s Story; you can read an early ver­sion of the story of Kayu­mars and Hushang in the Iran­ian lit­er­a­ture issue of Arte East Quar­terly that I edited a few years ago; and you can read the story of Jamshid, which includes the ori­gins of Norouz in the Norouz post I wrote last year.

We cel­e­brated last night at my wife’s aunt’s house, which was lovely, and I actu­ally thought I might be cel­e­brat­ing tonight at the United Nations. Last Fri­day, I actu­ally received a per­sonal invi­ta­tion from the Iran­ian mis­sion to the UN to attend an event that the woman to whom I spoke, Zahra, said would be tak­ing place this evening. In 2009, the UN declared Norouz part of humanity’s Intan­gi­ble Cul­tural Her­itage, and the event to which Zahra called to invite me, she said, would include rep­re­sen­ta­tives from all the coun­tries that cel­e­brate it. (The ones listed on the UN site are Azer­bai­jan, India, Iran, Kyr­gyzs­tan, Pak­istan, Turkey and Uzbek­istan, though there might be more.) The invi­ta­tion never arrived, and I have been won­der­ing all week if per­haps Zahra changed her mind and decided not to invite me, though it’s also pos­si­ble, since I can­not find the event on the UN’s cal­en­dar for today, that it was can­celed. I am dis­ap­pointed mostly for my son, for whom it would have been a very cool expe­ri­ence to cel­e­brate Norouz at the UN.

Persian Poetry Tuesday: The Prologue to the Story of Rostam and Sohrab in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh

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Writ­ten in the 10th cen­tury by Abolqasem Fer­dowsi (NPR did a fea­ture on him not too long ago), the Shah­nameh (Book of Kings) is the national epic of Iran, telling the nation’s story by recount­ing the tales of its kings, from the first, myth­i­cal king Kayu­mars to Yazdegerd III, who ruled Iran just before the Mus­lim Arab con­quest in the 7th cen­tury. One of the best loved sto­ries in the Shah­nameh was given the title The Tragedy of Sohrab and Ros­tam by Jerome W. Clin­ton when he pub­lished his trans­la­tion of it in 1987. Ros­tam is a Hercules-like char­ac­ter whose role through­out the epic is to defend Iran and its kings; Sohrab is Rostam’s son, con­ceived with Tah­mine, a princess from one of Iran’s vas­sal king­doms. When Sohrab reaches puberty and dis­cov­ers who his father is, he decides that Ros­tam, the great­est war­rior in the world, should be the ruler of Iran, not Kay Kavus, the king who right­fully sat on the throne at the time. Sohrab sets off with a dual mis­sion, to find his father and to depose Kay Kavus.

Despite his youth, Sohrab is, like his father, a peer­less war­rior and when the Per­sians real­ize that none among them will be able to defeat him, they sum­mon Ros­tam. Ros­tam does not know he has a son and, in what is the most puz­zling aspect of the story, refuses to iden­tify him­self each of the sev­eral times that Sohrab asks who he is. The two war­riors fight three times and, in the end, Ros­tam is vic­to­ri­ous. As Sohrab lies dying, the true iden­ti­ties of the fight­ers are revealed and the story ends on a note of bit­ter sadness.

Matthew Arnold was so moved by this story, that he wrote his own ver­sion, “Sohrab and Rus­tum,” that is rec­og­nized by schol­ars to be an impor­tant turn­ing point in his career as a poet. There are sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences between Arnold’s ver­sion and the orig­i­nal, though, due largely to the fact that Arnold’s source was most like an inac­cu­rate sum­mary of the tale than an actual translation.

The pro­logue with which Fer­dowsi frames the story of Sohrab and Ros­tam is a med­i­ta­tion on fate. The idea of the just nature of death comes from a form of Zoroas­tri­an­ism which saw death as part of a realm that exists out­side this world, that peo­ple do not have access to, and that con­tains all events that are inher­ent in time and can­not be avoided. Thus, since death comes to every­one, it always comes at the proper time and is, by def­i­n­i­tion, fair and just. This ver­sion of the pro­logue is from Clinton’s trans­la­tion, which I men­tioned above:

What if a wind springs up quite sud­denly,
And casts a green unripened fruit to earth.
Shall we call this a tyrant’s act, or just?
Shall we con­sider it as right, or wrong?
If death is just, how can this not be so?
Why then lament and wail at what is just?
Your soul knows noth­ing of this mys­tery;
You can­not see what lies beyond this veil.
Though all descend to face that greedy door,
For none has it revealed its secrets twice.
Per­haps he’ll like the place he goes to bet­ter,
And in that other house he may find peace.
Death’s breath is like a fiercely rag­ing fire
That has no fear of either young or old.
Here in this place of pass­ing, not delay,
Should death cinch tight the sad­dle on its steed,
Know this, that it is just, and not unjust.
There’s no dis­put­ing jus­tice when it comes.
Destruc­tion knows both youth and age as one,
For noth­ing that exists will long endure.
If you can fill your heart with faith’s pure light,
Silence befits you best, since you’re His slave.
You do not under­stand God’s mys­ter­ies,
Unless your soul is part­ners with some div.
Strive here within the world as you pass through,
And in the end bear virtue in your heart.
Now I’ll relate the story of Sohrab,
And how he came to bat­tle with his father.

In his speeches, [Khameini] has often cited Lenin’s phrase that if an ideology is not supported by art it will die

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From an arti­cle called “The Secrets of Khameini’s Life,” writ­ten by Iran­ian film­maker Mohsen Makhmal­baf. Khameini, Iran’s Supreme Ruler, cares deeply about poetry and what I find inter­est­ing in this brief pro­file is the account of how poetry and pol­i­tics mix at the high­est ech­e­lons of Iran’s author­i­tar­ian, theo­cratic régime. Makhmal­baf, who has been liv­ing in exile in France, has become the Iran­ian opposition’s main spokesman abroad since the dis­puted pres­i­den­tial elec­tion in 2009. He posted the arti­cle to his web­site on Mon­day, Decem­ber 28, 2009. The Eng­lish trans­la­tion from which I have taken this excerpt about Khameini’s inter­est in poetry is from Homylafayette’s blog:

Khamenei’s inter­est in poetry began at a young age and has been main­tained till today. He spent long hours at the poetry asso­ci­a­tion of Mash­had. He has writ­ten some poems. He is delighted when poets write poetry about him and expresses his sat­is­fac­tion through gifts to the poets. Sabze­vari and Ali Moallem, who are among the fawn­ing Mus­lim poets, are con­stantly cor­re­spond­ing with him. It is through them that he is informed of the prob­lems of artists affil­i­ated with the régime. At the start of his Lead­er­ship, he received the poet Mir Shakak, who was a manic depres­sive, sev­eral times. Khamenei became very proud of him­self when Mir Shakak upon say­ing good­bye would say, ‘Seyed zat ziad’ (Mean­ing ‘the honor is great’, which is a col­lo­quial prayer). Khamenei invites poets to his House­hold sev­eral times a year so that they may recite poems in his presence.

At the begin­ning of his pres­i­dency, he asked Akha­van Saless, whom he knew very well, to write a flat­ter­ing poem for the rev­o­lu­tion. Akha­van Saless (NB Mehdi Akha­van Saless, also known as M. Omid) responded, ‘We artists are above the gov­ern­ment, not with it.’ Khamenei was so incensed by this answer that he ordered that he stop being paid. (NB Akha­van Saless worked at the Acad­emy of Artists and Writ­ers). Akha­van Saless became unem­ployed after that. Gheysar Amin­pour has referred to this event in his arti­cle on Akhavan.

Khamenei intensely dis­liked Sham­lou (NB Ahmad Sham­lou, one of the most promi­nent Iran­ian poets of the last cen­tury) and referred to him with hatred. But he never dared arrest and pun­ish him, because he feared taint­ing his own name in his­tory. He has read much about kings who mis­treated poets. In his speeches, he has often cited Lenin’s phrase that if an ide­ol­ogy is not sup­ported by art it will die. He loves poetry so much that if he had not become active in reli­gion and pol­i­tics, he would prob­a­bly have turned to poetry and lit­er­a­ture. How­ever, because of his busy sched­ule, he some­times makes glar­ing mis­takes [in this regard]. Despite claim­ing to be knowl­edge­able about verse, when a young poet recited a poem in his pres­ence, he asked him, ‘Is this poem by you?’ To which the poet responded, ‘No, it is by Sohrab Sepehri.’ (Any school­child knows Sepehri’s work).

The People of Iran…

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…took to the streets again, and the irony is not lost on me that while they were doing so I was proof­read­ing the man­u­script of The Teller of Tales, my trans­la­tion of the first five sto­ries in their national epic, the Shah­nameh. Noth­ing about lit­er­ary trans­la­tion, at least as I am prac­tic­ing it here, in the com­fort and safety of my home in the United States, even remotely approaches the courage and deter­mi­na­tion and com­mit­ment shown by the peo­ple who pre­sented their bod­ies in Tehran, Shi­raz, Isfa­han and else­where in protest of a régime that sees those bod­ies as not much more than dust that can be swept away if nec­es­sary; and yet it’s hard not also to be aware that the text I was cor­rect­ing is inex­tri­ca­bly con­nected to the aspi­ra­tions of the Iran­ian pro­test­ers, not in the sense of cause-and-effect inspi­ra­tion, but because the Shah­nameh, as Dick Davis put it in Epic & Sedi­tion, has been for cen­turies “one of the chief means by which both Per­sian rulers and the [Iran­ian] peo­ple have sought to define their iden­tity to them­selves and to the world at large.”

When Abolqasem Fer­dowsi wrote the Shah­nameh in the 10th cen­tury, Iran had been under Mus­lim Arab rule for around 300 years. Ara­bic, not Per­sian, was the lan­guage of the court, of lit­er­a­ture, of phi­los­o­phy; and the Mus­lim belief that every­thing before the com­ing of Islam was his­tor­i­cally, cul­tur­ally, polit­i­cally and of course the­o­log­i­cally irrel­e­vant had resulted over time in a grow­ing accep­tance among Mus­lim Ira­ni­ans that it might be pos­si­ble to rede­fine Iran’s his­tory and cul­ture in Islamic terms. A man named Tabari wrote a revi­sion­ist his­tory along these lines, iden­ti­fy­ing spe­cific char­ac­ters in Iran’s cul­ture with char­ac­ters who inhabit the world of the Quran. Jamshid, for exam­ple, the fourth king in the Shah­nameh, who is respon­si­ble for the emer­gence of what we would rec­og­nize as civ­i­lized soci­ety, is equated in Tabari’s book with King Solomon, while Kayu­mars, the Shahnameh’s first monarch, is said to be the same as Adam.

Not every­one accepted this assim­i­la­tion­ist approach, espe­cially Iran’s landed gen­try, the dehqan, who saw them­selves as respon­si­ble for pre­serv­ing Iran’s his­tory and cul­ture. Fer­dowsi was a dehqan and it was pre­cisely to pre­serve Iran’s pre-Islamic his­tory and cul­ture that he wrote the Shah­nameh. Yet Ferdowsi’s goal was nei­ther rev­o­lu­tion­ary nor hereti­cal. He was a devout Mus­lim who accepted com­pletely the monar­chy under which he lived. Rather, his goal was, as San­dra Mackey puts it in The Ira­ni­ans, to express “the sep­a­rate iden­tity within Islam that Ira­ni­ans [have always] felt.” For many, includ­ing some of his fel­low poets, this goal was hereti­cal. The poet Far­rokhi, for exam­ple, a con­tem­po­rary of Ferdowi’s, declared the Shah­nameh “untruth from the begin­ning to the end.” Abd-al-Jalil Qazvini accused Fer­dowsi of “recit­ing myths on the brav­ery and mag­nif­i­cance of Ros­tam and Kavus [two char­ac­ters from the Shah­nameh] in order [sin­fully] to counter the hero­ism and splen­dour of [Imam] Ali.” Still another poet, Mo’ezzi, sug­gested that Fer­dowsi would be pun­ished in the next world because of the untruths he told in the Shah­nameh. (These quotes are taken from A. Sha­pur Shahbazi’s Fer­dowsi: A Crit­i­cal Biography.)

The Islamic Repub­lic of Iran was, from its very begin­ning, also threat­ened by the Shah­nameh and its cel­e­bra­tion of pre-Islamic Iran­ian his­tory and cul­ture. Accord­ing to San­dra Mackey, for exam­ple, Aya­tol­lah Khome­ini “tried to erad­i­cate ves­tiges of Iran’s pre-Islamic cul­ture [by attack­ing] Fer­dowsi, discourag[ing] the use of Per­sian first names, and hint[ing] at an end to the obser­vance of No Ruz [the Per­sian New Year] by express­ing the hope that in the future the only hol­i­day cel­e­brated would be the Prophet’s birth­day.” Even as recently as 2009, the Islamic Republic’s behav­ior towards Fer­dowsi would seem to indi­cate that it still feels this threat very keenly. Accord­ing to an arti­cle posted on the web­site of the Cir­cle of Ancient Iran­ian Stud­ies (CAIS), all pro­grams in Iran planned by the Fer­dowsi Foun­da­tion to cel­e­brate Ferdowsi’s mil­le­nium in 2009 had to be can­celed because of a lack of coöper­a­tion from the rel­e­vant agen­cies of the Islamic Repub­lic. The same arti­cle reports that on June 14, 2009 – which is Ferdowsi’s com­mem­o­ra­tion day in Iran – the gov­ern­ment of the Islamic Repub­lic demol­ished, with­out pro­vid­ing any rea­son, the Foundation’s unfin­ished build­ing in Iran. Also in 2009, the blog­ger Pedes­trian reported that the Iran­ian jour­nal­ist Bah­man Ahmadi was sen­tenced to eight years in prison for pub­lish­ing part of the Shah­nameh dur­ing the protests against the con­tested elec­tions that kept Mah­moud Ahmanide­jad in power.

I don’t want to give the wrong impres­sion, though. It’s not that the Shah­nameh is banned in Iran, or that peo­ple can only talk about Fer­dowsi or quote from his epic in whis­pers because the gov­ern­ment would oth­er­wise throw them in jail. The Shah­nameh, how­ever, clearly seems to res­onate with the peo­ple of Iran in a way that their gov­ern­ment finds threat­en­ing and so bring­ing into Amer­i­can Eng­lish poetry the parts of the Shah­nameh that I have trans­lated res­onates within me as a small dec­la­ra­tion of sol­i­dar­ity, as I hope it will res­onate with the peo­ple who read my trans­la­tion when it comes out next month – or with those who read any of the trans­la­tions that are avail­able, from Dick Davis’ prose trans­la­tion of the entire epic to Jerome Clinton’s verse trans­la­tions of two of Rostam’s sto­ries.

The story I am up to in my proof­read­ing is the story of Tah­mures, the third king of the Shah­nameh, also known as “Demon Binder” because he bound Ahri­man, the devil fig­ure” and rode him around the earth like a horse. When the Black Demon led a force of demons and sor­cer­ers against Tah­mures for this insult to their leader, Tah­mures so thor­oughly defeated them that they only way he would agree to spare their lives was if they promised to teach him knowl­edge no one else pos­sessed. What they taught him was how to write:

They taught Tah­mures to shape each let­ter
and pro­nounce the sound it stood for,
and this new and prof­itable knowl­edge
lit a light in him like the sun.

Writ­ing so often plays such an impor­tant role in the top­pling of tyrants that I will leave you, sim­ply, with the irony that, in the Shah­nameh at least, it was the tyrants them­selves who taught human­ity how to do it.

Protests Have Begun in Iran

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Unfor­tu­nately, I don’t have time to do more than note that the protests in Iran are hap­pen­ing, that peo­ple are com­ing out into the streets and that the gov­ern­ment is try­ing very hard to make sure the protests do not grow into some­thing like what we saw in Egypt and Tunisia or even what we saw in Iran after the 2009 elec­tions. There are some YouTube videos up on Tehran Bureau’s live blog of the protests, and it’s nice to see that The Wall Street Jour­nal and Reuters have filed reports about what’s going on. Al-Jazeera put this up on YouTube:


Persian Poetry Tuesday: Poetry and Moral Authority, “If The King Sleeps Well,” from Saadi’s Bustan

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One of the things that con­sis­tently moved me when I was work­ing on my trans­la­tions of Saadi was the way in which he felt autho­rized as a poet to speak in a voice of moral instruc­tion to those in power. Saadi lived at a time, in other words, when poets and poetry had real moral author­ity and as a poet writ­ing and pub­lish­ing today that bog­gles my mind. It’s not that I think the rulers who were Saadi’s patrons nec­es­sar­ily changed their ways because of some­thing the poet wrote – though it is also true that it took courage to write poems that were crit­i­cal of such patrons – but rather that I find myself envi­ous of a time when there was an offi­cial cul­tural space for the pro­duc­tion of poems as polit­i­cal and overtly didac­tic as the one to which I have given the title “If The King Sleeps Well” and, more, that the rul­ing class was wil­ing to pay to have these poems writ­ten. A poet who wrote a poem like this today might think that her or his local polit­i­cal lead­ers ought to read it, might think that they would learn some­thing from read­ing it, might even send the poem to those local lead­ers with a note attached; but – just to think in terms of my city, NY – the idea that Mayor Michael Bloomberg might approach me and ask me to write a book of poems for him, part of the pur­pose of which would be to offer him guid­ance on how to be a good mayor is so ridicu­lous that it leaves me almost speech­less. One might argue that cer­tain kids of TV pro­gram­ming serves that pur­pose now – though the com­par­i­son would have to be unpacked a good deal more than I am going to do here to be really use­ful – but I still think there are things that good poetry can do that TV can’t. Any­way, here is “If The King Sleeps Well.”

A man whom other men of wis­dom fol­low
tells the story of Ibn ‘Abd al-‘Aziz,
who owned a ring in which was set a stone
no jew­eler could prop­erly assess.
At night, you’d swear it was a ris­ing sun.
By day, it shone with a sin­gle pearl’s lus­ter.
One year, by God’s decree, Aziz’s rule
was plagued by drought. He watched his people’s faces
wane from full moons to nar­row cres­cents
and knew the royal com­fort he enjoyed,
unshared, would undo his man­hood in their eyes.
(When peo­ple are pour­ing poi­son down their throats,
who would dare drink sweet-water in their sight?)
He sold the stone for sil­ver, giv­ing it all
in just one week to orphans, strangers, the poor
and any­body else he saw in need.
The court gos­sips pounced, “You’ll never find
a pre­cious stone like that again!” I’ve heard
that when he answered tears poured down his cheeks
like can­dle wax. “A prince who wears such jew­els
in time of drought betrays his people’s trust.
This empty ring looks fine on me. Hunger’s
empti­ness enhances no one’s looks.”
Hap­pi­ness is in pro­vid­ing com­fort
to those who need it, not in own­ing gems
to dec­o­rate your hands. Those who cher­ish
virtue don’t buy joy with oth­ers’ sorrow.

///

If the shah sleeps well upon his throne,
I doubt the poor sleep eas­ily, but if
the shah lights up the night with watch­ful eyes,
those he rules will dream deeply, wak­ing
soothed. Praise God! The Atabeg,
Abu Bakr ibn Sa’d, is such a ruler.
The only signs of trou­ble plagu­ing Pars
are the women whose lunar beauty turns our heads.

A verse from our last party caught my ear:
“I held my moon-faced lover while she slept
and wanted noth­ing more from life than that,
but the sight of her so fully lost in sleep
moved me. ‘Your slen­der grace shames the cypress.
Wash this sweet slum­ber from your nar­cis­sus–
eyes, let the rose of your smile bloom
and free the nightin­gale song of your voice!
Your beauty sub­verts us all. Wake your­self
and bring the ruby wine you poured last night!’
She opened one indig­nant eye, ‘You say
I am sub­ver­sive, and still you choose to rouse me?’”
Under the rule of our enlight­ened king,
no other sub­ver­sion dares to stir.

Videos I’ve Been Watching: On The Holocaust, On “New Data on the Rise of Women”

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Some videos I think are worth watching.

First, The Daily Show on at least one Fox Net­work host’s insis­tence that no one on that net­work ever com­pares peo­ple on the left to the Nazis for rhetor­i­cal effect:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon — Thurs 11p / 10c
24 Hour Nazi Party People
www​.thedai​lyshow​.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Polit­i­cal Humor & Satire Blog</a> The Daily Show on Facebook

Sec­ond, a link to Yad Vashem’s Per­sian chan­nel–I could not find the embed data – which hope­fully will serve as a coun­ter­weight to the kind of infor­ma­tion cir­cu­lat­ing in Iran about the Holo­caust as shown in this video from the open­ing of a Holo­caust Car­toons Expo in August 2006:

And third, this TED video of a talk by Hanna Rosin, author “The End of Men,” pub­lished in The Atlantic Monthly, “which asserts that the era of male dom­i­nance has come to an end as women gain power in the postin­dus­trial economy.”


An Iranian Version of The Daily Show

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These guys do an online show called Parazit that does to Iran­ian pol­i­tics what The Daily Show does to the pol­i­tics of this coun­try. Unfor­tu­nately, the shows are in Per­sian and I haven’t been able to find ver­sions with Eng­lish sub­ti­tles, but the brief clip they show on this Daily Show inter­view gives a taste of what the show is like. (Edited to embed the extended interview.)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon — Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclu­sive — Kam­biz Hos­seini & Saman Arbabi Extended Interview<a>
www​.thedai​lyshow​.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Polit­i­cal Humor & Satire Blog</a> The Daily Show on Facebook

Persian Poetry Tuesday: Ghazal 10 from “The Green Sea of Heaven,” Translations of Hafez

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Khwaja Shams ud-Din Muham­mad Hafez-i Shi­raza, the acknowl­edged mas­ter of the ghazal form in the Per­sian canon, was born some­time between 1317 and 1325. He died in 1389. His poems are among the most pop­u­lar in the Persian-speaking world, where one is likely to hear verses of his recited or sung in the bazaar, on the radio, and at spir­i­tual gath­er­ings. His tomb, in the city of Shi­raz, is a site of pil­grim­age, and peo­ple gather there to read his work, to have their for­tunes told in a tra­di­tion known as “fale hafez,“1 and even to pray. Indeed, when I vis­ited Hafez’ tomb in the sum­mer of 2008, a man knelt there and prayed, first alone and then lead­ing a group of oth­ers, dur­ing the entire time I was there. This ghazal was trans­lated by Eliz­a­beth T. Gray, Jr. and was pub­lished in her book, The Green Sea of Heaven.

Ghazal 10

Curls disheveled, sweat­ing, laugh­ing, and drunk,
shirt torn, singing ghaz­als, flask in hand,

his eyes see­ing a quar­rel, his lips say­ing, “Alas!”,
last night at mid­night he came can sat by my pillow.

He bent his head to my ear and said, sadly,
“O my ancient lover, are you sleeping?”

The seeker to whom they give such a cup at dawn
is an infi­del to love if he will not wor­ship wine.

O ascetic, go, and don’t quib­ble with those who drink the dregs,
for on the eve of Cre­ation this was all they gave us.

What he poured in our cup we drank,
whether the mead of heaven or the wine of drunkenness.

The wine cup’s smile and his knot­ted curl
have bro­ken many vows of repen­tance, like that of Hafez.

  1. The tra­di­tion is sim­i­lar to what some peo­ple do with the Bible; they open the book to any page, pick a verse at ran­dom and then see what that verse has to say about their lives. [↩]

Persian Poetry Tuesday: Partow Nuriala’s “I Am Human”

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Shortly after the Islamic Rev­o­lu­tion in Iran, Par­tow Nuri­ala was forced by the gov­ern­ment to stop teach­ing phi­los­o­phy at Tehran Uni­ver­sity, where she also worked as a social worker. She sub­se­quently founded Dama­vand Pub­li­ca­tions, one of the first inde­pen­dent woman-run presses in Iran. Three years later, the gov­ern­ment shut the press down, an ironic devel­op­ment since it was dur­ing the rev­o­lu­tion in Iran that the ban on her first book of poetry, A Share of the Years, which had been imposed by the Pahlavi régime in 1972 was lifted. In 1986, Par­tow came to the United States with her two young chil­dren. Since 1988, she has worked in the Los Ange­les County Supe­rior Court as a deputy jury com­mis­sioner, though she still has an active lit­er­ary career. Her pub­li­ca­tions include four books of poems, lit­er­ary and movie reviews, a col­lec­tion of short sto­ries and a play. “I Am Human” was pub­lished in the anthol­ogy Strange Times, My Dear and was trans­lated by Zara Hush­mand.1

I Am Human

Bow your form
in sight of the earth.
Hide your face
from the light
of the sun and moon,
for you are a woman.

Bury your body’s blos­som­ing
in the pit of time.
Con­sign the rene­gade strands of your hair
to the ashes in the wood stove,
and the fiery power of your hands
to scrub­bing and sweep­ing the home
for you are a woman.

Kill your word’s wit:
ruin it
with silence.
Feel shame for your desires
and grant your enchanted soul
to the patience of the wind
for you are a woman.

Deny your­self,
that your lord
may ride in you
at his plea­sure,
for you are a woman.

I cry
I cry
in a land where igno­rant kind­ness
cuts deeper
than the cru­elty of knowl­edge.
I weep for my birth
as a woman.

I fight
I fight
in a land where
the zeal of man­li­ness
bel­lows in the field
between home and grave.
I fight my birth
as a woman.

I keep my eyes wide open
so as not to sink
under the weight
of this dream that oth­ers
have dreamed for me,
and I rip apart
this shirt of fear
they have sewn to cover
my naked thought,
for I am a woman.

I make love to the god of war
to bury
the ancient sword of his anger.
I make war on the dark god
that the light of my name
may shine,
for I am a woman.

With love in one hand,
labor in the other,
I fash­ion the world
on the ground of my glo­ri­ous bril­liance,
and into a bed
of clouds I tuck
the scent of my smile,
that the sweet smelling rain
may bring to blos­som
all the loves of the world,
for I am a woman.

My chil­dren I bring
to the feast of light,
my men
to the feast of aware­ness,
for I am a woman.

I am the earth’s steady purity,
the endur­ing glory of time,
for I am human.

  1. Apolo­gies to the poet and the trans­la­tor for the inac­cu­rate line breaks. I don’t know how to make Word­Press show them as they are sup­posed to appear. [↩]