Simin Behbahani
سیمین بهبهانیShe renewed the ghazal with new metres and the subjects of modern life, and was called the lioness of Iran.
- Known for
- Renewing the ghazal
- Forms
- Ghazal
- Places
- Tehranتهران
- Collection
- Contemporary
Behbahani wrote in the oldest lyric form in Persian, the ghazal, but invented new metres for it and filled it with the streets, wars and injustices of her own time.
She was a leading voice of Iranian literature for more than half a century, and died in Tehran in 2014.
Behbahani'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 Simin Behbahani.
The Broken Lute
سهتار شکستهSimin Behbahani’s first collection, published when she was in her early twenties and written in classical forms. Its poems already turn to the lives of the poor and of women on the margins of society, subjects she would go on to carry into the ghazal for the rest of her long life.
Footprint
جای پاAn early collection in which Behbahani writes of social injustice and of the city’s outcasts, the poor, the sick and women forced into prostitution, in classical metres but with a new directness. It confirmed the social conscience that would remain at the centre of her poetry for six decades.
The Chandelier
چلچراغA collection of the late 1950s, made up mostly of ghazals, that confirmed her as a modern voice working within the classical forms. Its poems of love and social life show her gradually shaping the ghazal, a form many of her contemporaries thought exhausted, into an instrument for her own time.
Marble
مرمرA collection made up largely of ghazals, in which Behbahani turns more fully to the ghazal as her chosen form and begins to give it a modern, personal voice. Its love poems are frank and searching, and look forward to the more daring experiments in metre that she made in later books.
Resurrection
رستاخیزA collection of the early 1970s in which her renewal of the ghazal begins to take shape. Behbahani brings fresh subjects drawn from everyday modern life into the old form, and starts to stretch its traditional metres, preparing the way for the new ghazal of her later work.
A Line of Speed and Fire
خطی ز سرعت و از آتشThe collection in which her new ghazal, sometimes called the ‘Nimaic ghazal’, is fully realised: ghazals in fresh metres taken from speech and music, telling stories with characters and dialogue. Written in the shadow of revolution and war, it is among the landmarks of her career.
Simin Behbahani in Iranian history
Iranian historyThe Pahlavi century and afterدوران پهلوی و پس از آن
Two Pahlavi shahs built railways, universities and a centralised state, while poets, novelists and film-makers created a new Persian culture. The era ended with the revolution of 1979.