Iraj Mirza

Iraj Mirza was a great-grandson of Fath-Ali Shah, the second Qajar king, born in Tabriz and educated there at the court of the crown prince. He worked for years as a court poet and later as a civil servant, a career that took him to Khorasan, before he died in Tehran in 1926.

What set him apart was his language. He wrote the classical forms, above all the masnavi (long poem in rhyming couplets) and the qet'a (a short occasional piece), in something close to the Persian people actually spoke, and he used it for satire, for tenderness and for argument. His poems on the lives of women, and against compulsory veiling, were sharply contested in his day and are still cited.

His best-known long poem, Aref-nameh, is a satire aimed at his fellow poet Aref Qazvini, famous and notorious for its frankness. He also began an unfinished Persian version of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, Zohreh va Manuchehr. Later modernists admired how far he had already moved poetry towards ordinary speech.

His poems are out of copyright in most countries with a life-plus-70 term, but modern English translations usually are not. We publish only translations we have commissioned or have permission to use.