Simin Behbahani, the grand lady of contemporary Persian poetry has passed away in Tehran after a long struggle against illness. Simin was not only a talented poet but a loving and lovable human being, dedicated to her quest for new forms of expression within the parametres of traditional ghazal (sonnet).I was first introduced to her by Fereidun Moshiri, himself a great poet, in Tehran in 1958 when , still a teenager in secondary school I worked for the weekly magazine Roshanfekr of which Moshiri was Cultural Editor. Those were the days of hot debates about new poetry ( sheer now) and its place in an Iranian society still trying to set its course. Because Moshiri tried to marry modernism with tradition he was able to communicate with both camps. Simin was on the same trajectory as Moshiri. Her argument was that all change should be undertaken with extreme cautious and new literary styles should be developed with deep roots in well established traditions. At the time, of course, she was still unable to put her theories in practice. That required another 20 years of hard work during which she experimented with new metric combinations based on the nine classical metres (bohur) of Persian prosody. The result was simply amazing: she showed that the number of scales (owazan) hat one could make with the same nine metres was literally infinite. At the time, modernists argued that traditional Persian metres and scales were too limited to provide the vehicle for expressing new ideas and aspirations. AS a result, some, ,like my late friend Ahmad Shamlou, went straight for prose poetry inspired by the French vers-blanc. Over more than five decades of hard work Simin showed that it was possible to mould the traditional metres in a way that suited the thoughts and ideas one hoped to express, not the other way round. After a brief fascination with the 1979 revolution, Simin, like most Iranians, realised that she had been sold a bill of goods. As a result she devoted the rest o her life fighting the obscurantist regime created by semi-literate mullahs and opposing their reactionary policies. Simin was a fine poet and a feisty fighter. I will miss her greatly. I think all Iranians will.
Posted on: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 08:29:59 +0000