My interest, in this paper, is primarily speculative, i.e., to explore the poetological intent behind Ahmad Sh?ml?’s encounter with the general problem of translatio—defined by Rebecca Comay as “the circulation of things, ideas, and power within the global continuum of space and time;” and secondarily political, i.e., to articulate the critical dimension of Shamlou’s radical shift toward the translation of non-Persian modernist poetry. I will argue how by foregrounding the practice of translation as philology’s true essence, Shamlou expressed a subversive disenchantment with the then popular domain of nationalist Iranian philology, represented by the literary establishment of his time, which by drumming into people’s minds a sense of cultural continuity and national pride advanced the imperial and nationalistic fantasies that underlined the Pahlavi’s cultural and linguistic reform programs. Indeed, these cultural reform programs were specifically designed to subjugate the diffuse cultural identities and class conflicts comprising Iranian society at the time into a unified administrative whole by fostering an essentializing view of the Iranian nation as a body of people united by a language (Persian) and a common essence, that is, their poeticalness. I will argue that as the official culture was appropriating classical Persian poetry and language as a means toward its own political ends, the dynamic and heterogeneous material of Shamlou’s translations, whose identity is no longer fixed or rooted in a single linguistic origin, emptied out the ontologically privileged position reserved for the Iranian national self. Finally, I will discuss the dialectical link between Shamlou’s loyal attachment to the then popular idea of proletarian internationalism—both as an ideal abstract utopia and a concrete sociological concept—and his practice of translation. Through a close social reading of his translations of Federico García Lorca, I will argue that these translations should be read as a critical-lyrical response to the construction of a regressive autocratic nationalism, and above all, to the total organization of society by an authoritative state, whose aim was to subsume the poetical phenomena under national categories and categories of authority. As ironic as it may sound, through a detailed textual analysis, I will show how the politically reinvigorated modernism of these translations should be seen as a revolt against the hyper-politicization of poetry.

Shamlou’s translations of Lorca’s poetry suggested new possibilities for the creation of a new style of Persian lyric poetry called Shi‘r-‘i Sifid, which is Shamlou’s greatest contribution to the transformation of Persian lyric poetry into a modernist and politicized genre. In this paper, I will rethink the poetic potentials and relevance of Shamlou’s practice of translation for contemporary artistic practices such as music composition. Through the analysis of my DMA dissertation piece, a 45-minute song cycle, for soprano, violin, flute, clarinet, and percussion, based on a selection of poems by Lorca, I will discuss: how the formal and material problems and the objective aesthetic possibilities of Shamlou’s translations of Lorca has informed the composition process of my piece? While composing my piece, I frequently returned to Shamlou’s approach to the translation of Lorca's lyric poetry into Persian as a model for my approach to the incorporation of Lorca’s lyric in my music. Similar to Shamlou’s translation, I sought to captures the general poetical and political aspects of the poems, such as the repetitive structures of Lorca’s poetry, the pastiche character or the delicate musicality of the text, and translate them into the musical construction. In my presentation, after playing the fourth movement of my song cycle, based on Lorca’s “Arquoros,” which metaphorically illustrates the people’s suffering under Fascism, I will delve into a detailed musical analysis of this movement. In my analysis, I discuss how Shamlou’s translation of “Arquoros,” which poetically diverges from Lorca’s poem in order to incorporate its political essence into Persian, has informed the composition of this movement.

Studies of Shamlou’s politics of writing have largely read his poetry as allegories of the semi-colonial case of Iran. Through such representational readings, scholars have often imposed on Shamlou’s poetry formulations of the political that have their roots in colonial modernity. This paper examines alternative forms of political relationality through the close reading of a selection of poems from Shamlou’s post-1953-coup poetry. In the early 1950s, the poet-filmmaker Férydoun Rahnéma introduced Paul Éluard’s notion of poésie engagée to a circle of Iranian poets at the center of which was Ahmad Shamlou. Such a poetics promulgated the ideas of the self-identity of a class, the universally translatable discourse of resistance, and a notion of progress toward “an absolute humanism.” The catastrophic 1953 Coup in Iran, however, soon ruptured these ideals of internationalism. Shamlou publicly distanced himself from the organized communist activism, while his poetry remained haunted by a Marxist, internationalist specter. With the traumatic experience of losing several of his friends during this time, I argue, a notion of history emerges in Shamlou’s poetry that is often marked by a problematization of the notion of “aghaz” (origin)—in Greek “arche”—and the eternal recurrence of bearing witness to the moment of trauma. This notion of history resists any reduction to the dominant political fiction of the unified national history propagated by the Pahlavi Dynasty—a fiction predicated upon an ethno-racial nationalism and the idea of Persian as a “pure” national language. It simultaneously resists the very idea of the political as that which defines the relation of self-identical sovereign subjects. This paper concludes by reflecting on a new form of melancholic relationality in a selection of Shamlou’s later poetry that attends to what was erased by the very form of national politics—the non-identity.

Contemporization of Myths in Ahmad Shamlu’s Existentialism Ahmad Shamlu contemporizes such myths as the crucifixion of Jesus and the myth of Fereydun. In this paper, I will attempt to demonstrate the ideological and philosophical foundations based on which Shamlu contemporizes the myths. Additionally, I will attempt to show how the contemporization of myths simultaneously deviates from and contributes to Shamlu’s Marxian ideology. To specify my objectives, I have analyzed the contemporizing themes in Shamlu’s interpretation of the Fereydun Myth and his understanding of the role of Judas Iscariot in one of Shamlu’s last poems, Death of the Nazareth. I have tried to show that despite his devotion to Marxism, an ideology for which historical thinking is quintessential, Shamlu regarded Marxism as a system of perpetual values, which enabled him to evaluate the historical figures by isolating them from their specific historical context. Decontexualizing the myth of Fereydun, Shamlou applies the Marxian soteriological agendum on the myth of Fereydun, to show the extent of the distance between Ferdowsi’s values and perpetual Marxian values. I will attempt to show that although problematic, Shamlu’s Marxian critique of Ferdowsi is the first-ever encounter with Ferdowsi to de-deify the great Persian poet, enabling Ferdowsi to be read based on a modern value-system. Besides perpetual values, Shamlu deploys another tool to decontextualize the historical figures. In Death of the Nazareth, Shamlu takes a theological-existential approach to render a novel interpretation of the role of Judas. According to this novel reading, Judas’s predestined mission was to be a means to Jesus’s entrance to the realm of perpetuity. Doing so, Shamlu empties the Jesus myth from its specific context and turns it into a transhistorical existential project. This transhistoricity turns into the personal will of the poet in On the Threshold, which is entirely removed from the Marxian agendum, producing a personal understanding of death and the afterlife.