Simin Behbahani

Simin Behbahani - Simin Behbahani (born July 20 , 1927, Tehran, Iran) is one of the most prominent
figures of the modern Persian literature and one of the most outstanding amongst the contemporary
Persian poets. She is Iran's national poet and an icon of the Iranian intelligentsia and literati who
affectionately refer to her as the lioness of Iran. She has been nominated twice for the Nobel Prize in
literature, and has "received many literary accolades around the world." She was named Iran’s Lady
of Ghazal.
Simin Behbahani, whose real name is Simin Khalili, is the daughter of Abbas Khalili, poet, writer and
Editor of the Eghdam (Action) newspaper, and Fakhr-e Ozma Arghun, poet and teacher of the French
language. Simin Behbahani started writing poetry at twelve and published her first poem at the age of
fourteen. She used the "Char Pareh" style of Nima Yooshij and subsequently turned to ghazal.
Behbahani contributed to a historic development by adding theatrical subjects and daily events and
conversations to poetry using the ghazal style of poetry. She has expanded the range of the traditional
Persian verse forms and has produced some of the most significant works of the Persian literature in
20th century. When the One Million Signature campaign, a women’s rights initiative to raise public
awareness of legal, social, and political discrimination against women in Iran, began in 2006, Behbahani
was one of the first individuals to join. In 2009, the campaign nominated Behbahani, as a distinguished
affiliate, to receive on behalf of Iranian women’s activists the Simone De Beauvoir prize that was
awarded to the campaign. She is President of The Iranian Writers' Association and was nominated for
the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999 and 2002.In early March 2010 she refused permission to leave the
country. As she was about to board a plane to Paris, police detained her and interrogated her "all night
long". She was released but without her passport.
Behbahani's poetry in the 1950s and 60s, influenced by her leftwing politics and reflecting social issues,
included Seh-tar-e Shekasteh (The Broken Lute, 1951), Ja-ye Pa (Footprint, 1954), Chelcheragh
(Chandelier, 1955), Marmar (Marble, 1961) and Rastakhiz (Resurrection, 1971). Her feminism and hatred
of war engendered poetry extremely critical of the Islamic regime after 1979, but her popularity both
inside Iran and among the Iranian diaspora in the west made her virtually untouchable. One poem is
about a prostitute who uses rouge to mask her face "withered from sorrow", one about a woman
stoned to death for alleged adultery, one about a child who steals the pistachios his family is too poor to
buy, and one about a mother tying together the laces of the boots of her son killed in the Iran-Iraq war
and wearing them as a necklace. She published Khatti ze Sor'at va Atash (Line of Speed and Fire, 1980),
Dasht-e Arzhan (Arzhan Plain, 1983), Kaghazin Jameh (Paper Dress, 1992), Yek Daricheh Azadi (A
Window of Freedom, 1995) and her collected poems in 2003. She also wrote three autobiographical
volumes, two collections of short stories, literary articles and essays and many lyrics for Iranian singers.
Among the volumes that included English translations of her works were A Cup of Sin (1998), Shayad
ke-masee hast: guzide-ye ashar (2004; Maybe It’s the Messiah), and Dobareh misazamet,
vatan (2009; My Country, I Shall Build You Again). She also penned the memoirs An mard, mard-e
hamraham (1990; “That Man, My Companion Along the Way”) and Ba madaram hamrah:
zendeginameh-ye khod-nevesht (2011; “With My Mother: My Autobiography”).
Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Simin Behbahani's Iran has been plagued with some serious political
and social problems, and it appears that these problems have acted upon this prolific and courageous
poet in some immediate and urgent ways. As she reminds her readers in a 1992 autobiographical essay,
which opens the volume A Cup of Sin, fighting "injustice" has been the primary reason behind her
poetry. But in responding to the excessive orthodoxies of the Islamic state and the pressures of the less
volatile world before it, Behbahani turns away from epic ambitions and visions of grandeur, focusing
instead on a world of little things that is both concrete and knowable and deeply human. Now in her
 seventies, Behbahani writes mainly in the traditional Persian poetic style known as the ghazal. The
traditional ghazal has an easily recognizable pattern: ten to fifteen lines bound by a single rhyme and
dealing, in a characteristically melancholic and masculine voice, with the deep pain and sensation
commonly associated with romantic love. The language is decidedly elevated and ornate. Behbahani
maintains this basic structure but expands its terrain, making it much more diverse in theme, more
flexible in form, and more speech-like in style. She uses the genre to meditate on history and memory,
nature, war, repression, revolution, cruelty, corruption, censorship, patriotism, East and West, as well as
the daily struggles of a common prostitute, the agony of a mother who refuses to believe her son has
been killed in war, and her own problems with loneliness, old age, and self-doubt. Looming large among
these themes in this selected edition of 103 poems, spanning from 1956 to 1995, are the problems
resulting from the many orthodoxies the Islamic Revolution has put in place since coming to power and
the huge losses in men and material the nation has suffered from eight years of a pointless war with
Iraq. "Twelve Fountains of Blood" is a bitter denunciation of the state for its violent campaign to
eliminate political dissent, in this case a young woman who sat in Behbahani's class "politely, for a year
“and is now "fallen." In "I Can't Look" the victim is a young man whose "horrifying outline" is "punctured
by bullets, “followed by a woman accused of adultery in "From the Street 6": "at last, death-by-stoning
has given way \ to death by-the-cement block."
The war with Iraq (1980-88), the bloodiest since World War II, left more than a million Iraqis and
Iranians dead; thou-sands are still unaccounted for, and thousands more still languish as prisoners of
war. In rendering the conflict's many horrors, Behbahani focuses on the concrete particulars of ordinary
individuals, as in "A Man with a Missing Leg." It is not just a leg he has lost; though he is barely twenty,
already "Lines of bitterness mark his cold, parched face." Sometimes the scope is much wider, as in
"Raining Death":
"A thousand homes were destroyed, a thousand eyes wept,
Spring roll back your carpet of joy, as all
I can see is mourning."

o Poems
o I want a cup of sin [April - May - 2012]
o Gracefully She Approached [April - May - 2012]
o Wine of Light [April - May - 2012]
o My Country, I Will Build You Again [April - May - 2012]
o It's Time to Mow the Flowers [July-August - 2010]

My country, I will build you again

My country, I will build you again,
if need be, with bricks made from my life.
I will build columns to support your roof,
if need be, with my bones.
I will inhale again the perfume of flowers
favored by your youth.
I will wash again the blood off your body
with torrents of my tears.
Once more, the darkness will leave this house.
I will paint my poems blue with the color of our sky.
The resurrector of “old bones” will grant me in his bounty
a mountain’s splendor in his testing grounds.
Old I may be, but given the chance, I will learn.
I will begin a second youth alongside my progeny.
I will recite the Hadith of “love and country”
with such fervor as to make each word bear life.
There still burns a fire in my breast
to keep undiminished the warmth of kinship
I feel for my people.
Once more you will grant me strength,
though my poems have settled in blood.
Once more I will build you with my life,
though it be beyond my means.

I want a cup of sin

I want a cup of sin, a cup of corruption,
and some clay mixed with darkness,
from which I shall mold an image shaped like man,
wooden-armed and straw-haired.
His mouth is big.

He has lost all his teeth.

His looks reflect his ugliness within.
Lust has made him violate all prohibitions
and to grow on his brow an “organ of shame.”
His eyes are like two scarlet beams,
one focused on a sack of gold,
the other on the pleasures found in bed.
He changes masks like a chameleon,
has a two-timing heart like an eel.
He grows tall like a giant branch,
as if his body has acquired vegetable properties.
Then, he will come to me,
intent on my oppression.
I will protest and scream against his horror.
And that ogre called man
will tame me with his insults.
As I gaze into his eyes
innocently and full of shame,
I will scold myself: you see,
how you spent a lifetime wishing for “Adam.”
Here you have what you asked for.