Homeland
میهنFive ways of carrying a country with you: in stone, in song, in a garden plan, on the longest night, and in a new kind of art.
From the editors
Every diaspora inherits two questions: what did we bring, and what will we make of it? Our first issue answers neither neatly. Instead it walks through a palace, a poem, a garden, a winter night and a studio, and asks what a homeland looks like when you build it out of form rather than nostalgia.
Essaysجستارها
Toward a Persian Modernism
In the 1960s, a group of Iranian artists turned the folk objects of street shrines and talismans into modern art. Their question is still ours: how does a tradition become contemporary without becoming a costume?
The Longest Night, Kept Awake
On Yalda, Iranians everywhere stay up through the darkest night of the year with pomegranates, watermelon and a book of Hafez. A dispatch on what ritual becomes when it travels.
The Garden Is an Argument
The fourfold Persian garden gave the world its word for paradise. It also gave it a theory of order, built from walls, water and shade.
Hearken to the Reed
Rumi opens his great poem with a flute cut from its reed bed. For anyone who has left a homeland, it reads less like mysticism than like a description of daily life.
Persepolis and the Bauhaus
An ancient ceremonial city and a twentieth-century German art school have nothing in common but everything that matters: the grid, the column, the workshop and the dream of a total work.
Poemsشعرها
الا یا ایها الساقی ادر کأسا و ناولها
که عشق آسان نمود اول ولی افتاد مشکل‌ها
Ah, O saqi, pass the cup around and hand it to me,
for love seemed easy at first, but then came the troubles.
Love Seemed Easy at First
بنی آدم اعضای یک پیکرند
که در آفرینش ز یک گوهرند
The children of Adam are limbs of one body,
for in creation they are of one essence.
The Children of Adam
بشنو این نی چون شکایت می‌کند
از جدایی‌ها حکایت می‌کند
Listen to this reed, how it complains,
telling the tale of separations:
The Song of the Reed
این قافله عمر عجب می‌گذرد
دریاب دمی که با طرب می‌گذرد
This caravan of life passes strangely by;
seize the breath that passes in delight.
This Caravan of Life
توانا بود هر که دانا بود
ز دانش دل پیر برنا بود
Whoever has knowledge has power;
through knowledge an old heart grows young.
