If war is a defeat for poetry, what is diplomacy? Like poetry, diplomacy involves craft and discretion, finesse and poise, skill and subtlety. It requires canniness, deliberation, presence of mind, and shrewdness, as well as providence and wisdom.
I’ve been thinking about what poetry might tell us about the landmark deal the United States and five other world powers made this week with Iran to curb its nuclear program in an effort to prevent Tehran from building nuclear bombs. I know, I know, it’s the kind of consideration W. H. Auden warns us against.
Still, something: Like a poem, the nuclear agreement is a first step toward clarity and transformation. Like a poem, it began as a secret negotiation and ended existing in a civic space. Like a poem, it has jolted those who are content not to change their world view.
That’s about where this analogy ought to be put to rest. I know the difference between a historic nuclear agreement and a villanelle. But I don’t underestimate poetry’s powers of transformation either.
All this led me to wonder about contemporary Iranian poetry. What I know about Iranian poetry I learned from the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics and Wikipedia. In a nutshell the literature of Persia “spans two-and-a-half millennia.” Two-and-a-half millennia?! That’s a lot of poetry! During the Islamic Republic, contemporary poets in Iran have lived under the same oppressive conditions as most Iranians: oppositions candidates are prohibited from elections or been placed under house arrest, social activists have been mistreated or tortured, especially writers, journalists, lawyers, and students. Iran executes more people than any other nation, especially for drug-related offenses, and ethnic and religious minorities face frequent persecution. The new poetry that might emerge from an Iranian glasnost, if that’s what this agreement brings, and indications are it might given the political pressures on the Rouhani government to improve Iran’s economy, then it’s fair to hope that poets may get the opportunity to write under more open conditions. Hope, I mean, not assume.
Social media is also banned in Iran for all but a few elites in government (including the Grand Ayatollah!). So learning about Iranian poetry requires poking around the Web generally, using a clunky Google Translate with Farsi websites, and buying up some books, such as Niloufar Talebi’s Belonging: New Poetry by Iranians Around the World, a diaspora-themed anthology that mixes the traditional with the experimental and explores Iranian identity.
Here are some interesting websites for the Iranian poetry curious among you:
Poetry International Rotterdam features articles and links to Iranian literary magazines, publishing houses, and writers, including the Iranian PEN Centre in Exile, which is a limited resource.
The Translation Project brings Iranian-inspired projects to the world in literary translation.
The Poetry Translation Centre in London includes translation of about two dozen Iranian poems that includes “The Boat That Brought Me” by Azita Ghahreman:
Behind these eyes that look like mine
old names are fading away, the past lies crumpled in my clenched fist –
a coppery bird in coppery wind,
this vast place has covered me from head to toe.
I am not stripped of word and thought
but sometimes what I want to say gets lost
like a moon smudged with cloud, or when I splutter on a drink.
My tongue trips up when I speak of that journey
though the blood in my veins felt the truth of death.
As I traced my footsteps through the tracery of my old language
Summer whispered to me
and my frozen fingers began to put out shoots
even as I began to love the cold ebb and flow of tides.
Sometimes I miss
the boat that brought me here,
now that I am witness to the icy eyes of a Swedish winter,
under these tired old clouds,
while that suitcase still holds a patch of the sky-blue me.
(The literal translation of this poem was made by Elhum Shakerifar. The final translated version of the poem is by Maura Dooley.)
I admire the way this poem, as a depiction of exile experience, moves through time and space, the way “sometimes” becomes a conduit to understand the “journey” of self and language, home and exile, and the way time is calibrated through the seasons. All of this exists in a spatial zone as well, in a clenched fist and in words and thoughts, through the blood and through the veins, across the tides and inside a boat, and finally inside a suitcase.
The poem bears with it, too, a burden of hope as the “patch of the sky-blue me” looks outward for territory that is familiar and warm.
This inhabited realm, too, is an example of how poetry and diplomacy intersect via trust and verification. We may not go into the reading of a poem with trust that the poet will carry us into a new understanding beyond the cliche ideal, but the poem is an evidentiary trial that enables us to verify that a truth has been discovered.
Should the nuclear agreement reached this week lead to a genuine thaw in relations between Iran and the US, and between Iran and the west, than poets like Ghahreman will be able to return to Iran (say, as Czeslaw Milosz returned to Poland) and open the gates wider between Iranian poetry (with its millennias-long tradition) and the various poetries of the west.
Let’s hope so. Let’s hope. Because then we will be able to learn more about the fate, lives, and trials of our fellow poets under Iran’s dictatorship. And we will be able to find common ground, as Partow Nooriala does in the conclusion of her poem, “Many Happy Returns”:
And when night falls
Hidden from the moon
I unstitch the old threads
And send my keen eye
Clad in a gilded gown
Off to tomorrow.
And here in this passage from “The Sound of the Footstep” by the late Nader Naderpour who sees the world as an expression of private and political chaos:
When I look back timorously
nobody is there except the wind and the tree,
one drunk, the other out of touch.
4 responses
David,
Thank you for writing this very important piece….looking at the news through a poet’s eyes, and honoring solidarity with our fellow poets in Iran. Your essay reminds me of the words of Mary Szybist on winning the National Book Award last month: “I think often of the words of Paul Connolly, who said, ‘I believe it is not arguing well but speaking differently that changes a culture.’ Poetry is the place where speaking differently is the most prevalent.” In Iran, and in this country, it will be the work of poets to “speak differently,” and change the culture.
Kim Stafford
Dear David,
Rumi or Mavlana Djalal ad-Din Rumi, probably one of the best-known of all poets to American readers, wrote in Farsi/Persian, in the 12th century.
R. A. Nicholson, A. J. Arberry, Annemarie Schimmel, William Chittick, and Franklin Lewis all did translations much more accurate than Coleman Barks’ – and they know Farsi.
The British translator Dick Davis is one of the best contemporary translators of Farsi — his version of Farid ad-Din Attar”s “The Conference of the Birds” is brilliant.
Among contemporaries, worth reading the work of Forough Farrokhzad — sort of the Iranian Sylvia Plath.
Hi David,
Also check out Sholeh Wolpe http://sholehwolpe.com/, whose work includes three books of her own poems in English, a translation of Forough Farrokhzad’s selected poems (titled Sin, U of Arkansas Press), an anthology of contemporary Iranian poetry and an anthology of American poets talking to the world about human rights issues, titled Breaking the Jaws of Silence. She’s done other books, as well, all terrific, and is in the process of translating Whitman’s Song of Myself into Farsi.
Enjoy,
Tony
Hi David: Thanks for your article and invitation to comment. I’m attaching here a short piece I wrote last fall that talks about poetry and Iran. Cheers, Gary Geddes
The Moving Finger
It took a week in Hamilton to remind me, yet again, that diplomacy trumps silence, violence and military action. I’ll call it my Iranian week.
On Sunday I watched Argo, the new Ben Affleck movie that tells part of the story of the Iran hostage crisis, when the Canadian ambassador gave refuge to six U.S. personnel who fled their besieged embassy in 1979. Despite the ending being well-known, it was still a gripping action film. However, the timing of the film—in the midst of Israeli threats, international sanctions and Canada severing diplomatic relations with Iran—made me wonder if it was intended to prepare Americans and Canadians for an attack on Iran.
The mass hysteria and violence depicted in Argo might be seen as a reminder that this fundamentalist regime is out of control and a potential rogue state in the Middle East, were it not for three important facts: first, there was no demonizing of individual Iranians in the film (hostile confrontation yes, but also many civilized portraits); second, U.S. meddling in the internal politics of Iran that led to the overthrow of a popular government and the installation of the Shah is clearly stated at the outset; third, and even more significant, is the reminder at the end of the film that not one of the 444 Americans taken hostage by the students was killed. All were released the following year. I had to conclude that the timing of Argo had more to do with the eventual release of Top Secret CIA documents.
I’d been thinking of these things for several days, wondering why Prime Minister Harper closed our embassy in Iran and sent Iranian diplomats in Canada packing, when I found myself a few days later standing in front of an audience of Iranian poetry lovers in the old Town Hall in Dundas, Ontario, reading a couple of my poems that had been translated into Farsi and listening to individuals, all of them Canadian citizens or landed immigrants from Iran, stand up to sing or recite poems.
In the midst of their jokes and passionate renditions of original or classical poems, I thought of the great tradition of Persian culture, especially of Rumi, the 13th-century poet, mystic and jurist who said: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.†Hafez, too, who is claimed to have said to the conquering Tamerlaine: “I’d exchange my kingdom for the black mole of the Turk who extended a hand in love or friendship.†And, of course, Persia’s great Omar Khayyam, mathematician, astrologer and love poet, many of whose lines are part of our education: “The moving finger writes; and having writ / Moves on.†The same poem delivers the unforgettable quatrain:
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
 
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou,

Beside me singing in the Wilderness,
 
And oh, Wilderness is Paradise enow.
One of the Iranian-Canadian poets, a man with a shining, bald pate, was sitting ahead of me in the audience. As he listened to the other poets read, he had the habit of tapping the fingers of one hand on this glistening dome, marking the beat of each Farsi poem. When we talked later, Sam Assadi gave me his card, which indicated that he was a realtor working in Burlington. I had been talking about poetry as a primary process language, a substitute umbilicus that we construct as infants to reconnect ourselves to our mother and to the adult world. He liked this image, he said, but confessed with a smile:
“Our poets in Iran had highly developed imaginations. They often needed them over the centuries and wars to survive. Now that I’m living in Canada, where I can relax and enjoy my life, I don’t need to write as much. I live the good life, instead of just imagining it.â€
During my week of living vicariously in Iran, amidst a people whose desire for an ordinary life of bread, wine, love—and, yes, poetry— is often obscured by the rhetoric of fundamentalists and confrontational media, I’ve thought long and hard about the roles of poetry and diplomacy, how poems can bring nations and cultures together and how diplomacy itself is a sign of imagination triumphing over the baser impulses of fear and violence and revenge that keep people apart, or at one another’s throats. Canada has a long and celebrated history of diplomacy: a Nobel Peace Prize for our negotiations in Suez; open relations with Cuba that kept it from total isolation in North America; and we even sent the poet R.A.D. Ford to Moscow as our ambassador during the Cold War.
This tradition of enlightened diplomacy has enabled us to win friends, defuse international tensions, and reach out to nations in difficult times. Perhaps the moving finger that signed the order to cease diplomatic relations can also erase or re-write it. Closing doors is definitely not the answer.
Gary Geddes is this year’s writer-in-residence at McMaster University. His most recent book is Drink the Bitter Root: A writer’s search for justice and redemption in Africa.
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