Description

The poets in this collection reached their peak in the heyday of modern Persian poetry. At that time, the artistic will of the Iranians concentrated on poetry in a way that we can hardly imagine, and in a pre-modern society that meant verse. These poets enjoyed incredible prestige and success. They determined the intellectual climate of the time.
This period began in a period of only a few years without strict censorship in 1941 after the accession of the last Shah. When the censorship became stricter again in 1953, it was possible to circumvent it through clever choice of words and ambiguous expressions; the audience knew how to read between the lines. The poets found a form for their work whose unsurpassed beauty deeply impresses and whose encoded language makes reading doubly attractive.
Here the reader can approach a new world: a world of strangeness and fascination, a dynamic between sadness and resistance, between melancholy and passion, he can follow the rhythm of the poems, the flow of the images - up to the refuge of the word. He finds it in a rousing flood of images, in the ambiguous, in poems about love and forbidden love words, about silent houses full of fear, about snow and the comfort of rain, about the narrow streets of violence and the dream of the bird in the cage.
The brilliant, sensitive translation by Kurt Scharf gives German readers a convincing impression of the sound of the original and lets them directly participate in the art of language and images, dreams and hopes of a poetic world not so far away.

Reviews and press:

Fixpoetry:

And while some socialist-agitative verse seems very outdated today, some nationalistic praise seems anachronistic, there is also much that is highly topical, even timeless - starting with Sepehri, Shamlu and Farrochsad, of course, which are not missing in any well-assorted canon of world literature allowed to. Neither does this anthology, which in a way is still doing pioneering work to make Persian poetry accessible to German readers. more

The newly released anthology perfectly illustrates [this ability of poets to position themselves as “bridge builders” between different worlds]. Like no other, Kurt Scharf stands for the communication of Persian poetry in Germany. As early as 1977 he was involved in organizing poetry readings at the Goethe Institute in Tehran. In the memory of many Iranians, the ten evenings of poetry at that time are a great event, especially at a time when censorship and surveillance meant that Iranian poets hardly had the opportunity to engage in direct dialogue with their audience. At the time, no one suspected that about 14 months later the Shah's regime would be overthrown by a revolutionary mass. more

– Hamid Hosravi, De Gruyter