Nima Yushij’s poem Hey, People (Ay Adamha) has been much anthologized in the years following its 1941 publication, often in support of leftist ideologies. The poem was written during the productive period when Nima (the name commonly used) worked for… Read More ›
Iranian Literature
Analysis of Reza Baraheni’s God’s Shadow
God’s Shadow: Prison Poems is Reza Baraheni’s powerful narrative, 99 pages long, of the excruciating physical and mental torture he suffered in 1973 at the hands of SAVAK, the Iranian secret police. The account is told through a vivid prose… Read More ›
Analysis of Forugh Farrokhzad’s Conquest of the Garden
Conquest of the Garden (Fath-e Bagh) appeared in Farrokhzad’s fourth collection, Another Birth. An early translator and proponent of Farrokhzad’s poetry, Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, argued that this publication was “perhaps the most significant single document of contemporary Persian letters” (An Anthology… Read More ›
Analysis of Simin Daneshvar’s Savushun
The thoughtful, provoking, and sensitive novel Savushun is considered the masterpiece of Persian author Simin Daneshvar (1921–2012). The novel has sold more than any other work in Iran since its publication (the English translation was in 1991). The work depicts… Read More ›
Analysis of Shahriar Mandanipour’s The Courage of Love
This important work by the Iranian author Shahriar Mandanipour (1956– ) is a two-volume novel about love, war, earthquake, and pre- and postrevolution Iran. It opens with a prologue entitled “The Four Mothers of Separation.” Four angels—Gabriel, Michael, Seraphim (the… Read More ›
Analysis of Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl
Sadeq Hedayat (1903–51) was for many decades the best-known modern prose writer in Persian, the language of a country whose purified literary lexicon and restrictive linguistic formalism he sought to violate by introducing crude idioms and colloquial phrases. He has… Read More ›
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