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Overview

Chasm. Mist. Dark Song. Hour of Execution. Behind the Wall. These are just some of the poetic titles of Ahmad Shamlu (1925-2000) that together form the cipher to one of the most powerful figures in modern world literature. Brought together here in translation for the first time, these selected works provide a gateway to the paradoxical imagination of an author who traverses immense distances of oblivion and light. On the one hand, Shamlu is known as a poet of night-raids and prison cells, dead-ends and burial orations, one for whom endlessly doomed horizons always keep him close to themes of martyrdom, fatality, rage, atrocity, and struggle. And yet, he is also the writer immortalized under the pen-name "Daybreak," a figure of illumination and ecstatic intensity who once declared himself the "vanguard of the sun" and who threatened to "hang the devil's lantern from the porch of every hidden torture chamber of this oppressive paradise." In a space caught between honor-codes and devastation, futility and apotheosis, one finds the poetic verses of Shamlu as among the first in a bloodline unbound-by-world.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781940625164
Publisher: Contra Mundum Press
Publication date: 12/12/2015
Pages: 172
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.37(d)

About the Author

Ahmad Shamlou (1925-2000) is recognized as one of Iran's greatest modern poets, writing in the new mode of expression pioneered by Nima Yushij. In addition to twelve collections of his own poetry published between 1948 and 1978, he has also written several plays and a major analytical survey of Iranian folklore Ketab-i Kucheh [Book of the Street], is the editor of an important edition of Hafez as well as other volumes of classical Iranian poetry, and has translated many French authors into Persian. Shamlou's third marriage lasted from 1964 until his death, and his wife Ayda figures prominently as the muse of many of his later poems.

Known for his voice of resilient defiance and political dissent, Shamlu is one of the most prominent literary figures of 20th-century Iran - as evidenced by his nomination for a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1984.
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