Ahmad Shamlou
احمد شاملوPoet, translator and editor who freed Persian verse from metre altogether.
- Known for
- Fresh Air (Hava-ye Taze), 1957
- Forms
- Free verse (she'r-e sepid)
- Collection
- Contemporary
Shamlou went further than Nima and gave up metre altogether, in what came to be called she'r-e sepid, white poetry. His collection Fresh Air (1957) made his name.
He was also a tireless translator and editor, and spent decades on the Ketab-e Kucheh (Book of the Alley), an encyclopaedia of Persian folk speech and custom.
Shamlou's poems are in copyright. We will publish translations only with permission from the rights holders; until then we write about the work.
Booksکتابها
The principal works of Ahmad Shamlou.
Fresh Air
هوای تازهThe collection that established Shamlou as a leading voice of the new poetry, mixing poems in Nima’s manner with his first free verse, written without metre. Its subjects are love, political defeat and a stubborn hope in the years after the coup of 1953, and it was widely read by a young generation.
The Garden of Mirrors
باغ آینهA collection in which Shamlou’s unmetred free verse, she‘r-e sepid, comes fully into its own: long, prose-like lines carried by rhythm, imagery and the cadences of classical Persian prose rather than by metre and rhyme. Many readers date the maturity of his style, and of Persian free verse, to this book.
Ayda in the Mirror
آیدا در آینهLove poems addressed to Ayda Sarkisian, who became Shamlou’s wife and companion for the rest of his life. Among the best-loved love poetry in modern Persian, the book joins private devotion with a stubborn hope in human beings, and marks a turn from public anger towards a quieter, more intimate voice.
Phoenix in the Rain
ققنوس در بارانA collection of the mid-1960s, its title answering Nima’s famous phoenix. The poems turn between love for Ayda, grief for lost companions and anger at injustice, in the grave, incantatory free verse that had by then become entirely Shamlou’s own, drawing on old prose and the language of the street alike.
Abraham in the Fire
ابراهیم در آتشOne of Shamlou’s most admired collections, its title poem a lament for a fighter who faced death unbowed. Mythic and political at once, the poems use the story of Abraham thrown into Nimrod’s fire as an image of defiance, and were read in the 1970s as a testimony to those who resisted.
The Book of the Street
کتاب کوچهShamlou’s vast encyclopaedia of Persian popular speech, proverbs, beliefs and customs, compiled with Ayda over decades and published volume by volume, still unfinished at his death in 2000. It is a monument to the spoken language of ordinary Iranians, the same living speech that also fed and shaped his poems.
Ahmad Shamlou in Iranian history
Iranian historyAfsharids, Zands and Qajarsافشاریان، زندیان و قاجاریان
A soldier-king who sacked Delhi, a regent who rebuilt Shiraz, and a dynasty that made Tehran the capital and lived through Iran's Constitutional Revolution.