THOUSANDS OF IRANIANS BID FAREWELL TO AHMAD SHAMLOU

TEHRAN 27^TH July (IPS) 

“He was not a flower to fall in autumn. He was not a bird to break his wing. He was not a tree to be cut by the wind. He was the Dawn. Announcing the rise of the sun”.

©Photo: Reza Germany/21 Oct. 1988 click here to see bigger photo

Thus read as a requiem a moving Ms. Simin Behbahani, one of the lasting Iranian national poets from her own poet made few hours earlier for Ahmad Shamlou, Iran’s and the Persian language world’s most acclaimed poet, writer, researcher and art critic.

Thousands of Iranians of all walks of life – some eyewitness estimated the crowd at around 100.000 --, as well as hundreds of writers, artists, intellectuals and relatives flocked to Karaj, 40 kilometres West of the Capital where he was living as a self-imposed exile with Aida Sarkisian, his companion for the last 35 years, to bid farewell to the great poet, art critic, translator, playwright, writer and publisher of fine literary revues.

Mr. Shamlou died early Monday morning in a Tehran hospital following months of suffering from an acute diabetes.

He was buried in a small cemetery where other Iranian poets and intellectuals, including Mohammad Ja’far Pouyandeh and Mohammad Mokhtari, both assassinated savagely two years ago by high-ranking officers of the Intelligence Ministry on orders of unidentified senior clerics also rest in peace.                                        

Born in 1925 in Tehran, Shamlou started by publishing his poets at the age of 17 under the pen name of A. Bamdad (Dawn) and stormed quickly the rigid world of Iranian poetry by popularising the concept of “free verses” initiated before him by Nima Yushij, a great poet Shamlou condidered him as his master and guru.

Self educated, learning Russian and French by himself, Shamlou quicly became the leader of young Iranian poets like Ms Forouq Farokhzad, Nader Naderpour, Sohrab Sepehri, Mehdi Akhavan Sales, Ms. Simin Behbahani and many others, all but few have disappeared.

A leftist “engaged poet” taking cue from Paul Eluard, Maiakovsky or Federico Garcia Lorca, of whom he translated and adapted the “Blood Wedding”, Shamlou published some political poems that sent him to jail under the former Monarchy but soon divorced from politics to dedicate himself to writing, translating, poetry and publishing.

Followed a series of romantic, passionate and legendary poems that includes “Mirror Garden”; “Aida In Mirror”; “To Open In The Haze” or “Phoenix In The Rain”, with some of them becoming as popular as verses of great poets like Hafez or Khayyam.

“When we asked him if it would not have been a deserved acknowledgement both for himself and for Iranian poetry as well as an encouragement for the Iranian civil society to receive the Nobel Prize for literature, Shamlou would observe with his acute sense of humour” No, for they would then have a pretext to kill me”. “They meaning the religious fanatics whom he fought bravely as he did with the Shah’s policemen”, wrote Mr. Alain Lance in the obituary published in the influential French daily “Le Monde”.

          An indefatigable and enthusiast, he would work on several projects at the same time, translating, editing revues and magazines, collecting idioms, proverbs, slang and popular expressions from all over Iran for his epic “Book Of the Alley”. SHAMLOU FUNERAL 27700