Ahmad Shamlou
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Ahmad Shamlou (احمد شاملو in Persian; December 12, 1925 — July 24, 2000) was an Iranian poet, writer, and journalist.
Shamlou was born to the family of an army officer in Tehran. Like many children who grow up in families with militiary parents, he received his early education in various different towns, including Khash and Zahedan in the southeast of Iran, and Mashhad in the northeast. By 1941, his high school education still incomplete, he left Birjand for Tehran. He intended to attend the Tehran Technicum and learn the German language. In 1945, he made a final attempt at completing his high school degree in Urumieh, but he failed.
His poetry was initially very much influenced by and was in the tradition of Nima Youshij. Shamlou's poetry is complex. Yet his imagery, which contributes significantly to the intensity of his poems, is simple. As the base, he uses the traditional imagery familiar to his Iranian audience through the works of Persian masters like Hafez and Omar Khayyam. For infrastructure and impact, he uses a kind of everyday imagery in which personified oxymoronic elements are spiked with an unreal combination of the abstract and the concrete thus far unprecedented in Persian poetry, which distressed some of the admirers of more traditional poetry.
He married three times. His first marriage in 1947 gave him four sons but did not last long. Neither did his second marriage in 1957 that ended in divorce in 1963. But his third marriage in 1964 to Ayda Shamlou lasted. His wife became a very instrumental figure in Shamlou's life and remained with him until his death in 1999. Her first name, Ayda, appears in many of his later poems.
Due to political unrest and oppression in Iran, Shamlou and his wife left Iran temporarily in 1977. After living in Princeton, New Jersey for a while, they left for England and lived there until 1979. After the Revolution of Iran, Shamlou returned to Iran as the editor of Ketab-e Jom'e.
Shamlou has translated extensively from German and French to Persian and his own works are also translated into a number of languages. He has also written a number of plays, edited the works of major classical Persian poets, especially Hafez. His six-volume Ketab-e Koucheh (The Book of the Alley) is a major contribution in understanding the Iranian folklore beliefs and language.
Shamlou was one of the founding members of the Iranian Writers Association, and in the thirty intervening years before his death, he never ceased supporting its ideals. Once in an interview he said "The Iranian Writers Association is alive because its ideas are alive in each and every one of us. That means every one of us cultural workers who remains true to its shining ideals, is individually an association."
Aside from his first passion which was poetry, he had a number of other activities which indlude writing stories and film scenarios, contribution to children’s literature, and journalism.
He died in a Tehran hospital in July 2000 at the age of 74 after a long battle with severe diabetes.
Books
- Forgotten Melodies (1948)
- Steel and Emotion (1954)
- Fresh Air (1958)
- Garden of Mirrors (1961)
- Ayda in the Mirror (1965)
- Ayda, Tree, Dagger, and Memories (1966)
- Phoenix in the Rain (1967)
- Dust Elegies (1970)
- Blossoming in the Fog (1971)
- Abraham in the Fire (1973)
- Dagger in the Dish (1977)
- Tale of Mother Sea's Daughters (1978)
Large parts of this article are copyright of Professor Iraj Bashiri, who has kindly agreed that his text may be used for Wikipedia
External links
- Web site dedicated to his life and poetry (http://www.shamlou.org)
- Another very good webcite for him (http://www.shamlu.com/index.swf)