beings to strive for a meaningful and utopian kind of liberation. The idea that the world could be changed by the power of literature was exciting in the 1950s. Shamlou was a Humanist in the sense that he took humanity as the center of a universe, and modern poetry as the grounds for expressing the ideal that people should be free and construct their own destinies. So crucial was freedom to Shamlou that he never stopped advocating for it:
Searching for success, prosperity, and happiness is futile unless people are absolutely free. But people are not even relatively free, so they cannot be happy. A person who is in the bondage of laws, rules, duties, attachments, dependencies, and their own conscience, struggling to satisfy other people’s greed and lust, will inevitably lose all of his or her creativity and will mistake the advancements of technology as his or her own when in fact that person is nothing more than a cog in the wheel of those machines. So, of what use is freedom to this person?
Humanity and human culture will only ever blossom in the context of freedom. But as long as prejudice reigns, society will suffocate. Humans rise through freedom from superstitions. Superstitious people defend their own ignorance and bondage, enslaving others in the process. Freedom is not an illusion, a rumor. Believe in freedom as the higher goal for which we fight.
Defending freedom in an oppressed and classed society that has conflicting interests is not easy. In such a society each person champions what they imagine freedom to be, but few are those who seek the mysteries of freedom from the position of freedom.
13 points on Shamlou’s ideas about art and society:
1. It is important to distinguish between political literature and socially engaged literature. Social Realism was the aesthetic doctrine of the Communist Party, but neither Shamlou nor other writers worldwide, such as Mario Vargas Llosa, could get behind political literature, which espoused literature as propaganda, a vehicle for disseminating political ideas to the proletariat. For example, though many of Shamlou’s socially themed poems were written while he was imprisoned, he did not consider any of them political poems, per se. To Shamlou, politics was such a dirty game that the mere hint of it soiled the very hem of the skirt of poetry.
2. Shamlou believed that the masses could not directly connect with the work of an innovator, whose primary job it was to incite innovation. An intermediary was needed to make the connection. Yet these works, which would not pander to the masses, were not to be confused with “bourgeois art.” Therefore, there was no “people’s art” in the literal sense of the word.
3. Shamlou’s critics attacked some of his work for being personal and not socially minded, and others for being deeply rooted in the events of his time, incapable of passing the test of time. But rather than succumb to the division of his works into eras, or react to such assessments, or try to please the critics, Shamlou remained unfazed. His intention was never to use poetry as a means with which to fit himself into society. He was not running a poetry factory, he said, to conduct market research on what kind of poetry people wanted so as to produce that marketable product.
4. Shamlou traced the seeds of the criticism that his work was not socially engaged to the 1950s and 1960s when junior members of the Communist Party, believing themselves proficient in cultural theory, yet whose knowledge, he said, did not equip them to distinguish between a mule and an ass, spouted off the idea that art should be for and understandable by the masses. Their ideas were directly lifted from the Zhdanov Doctrine, formulated by Stalin and his cultural agent, Zhdanov, and revered as scripture. The doctrine reduced all of culture to a sort of chart, wherein a given symbol corresponded to a simple moral value.
5. The masses were stratified, not monolithic. There were the illiterate, the semi-literate, the absolutely uninspired, the somewhat inspired, the inspired illiterate, the uninspired semi-literate and so on. Which “mass art” was to appeal to which of these substrata? What of high art, in the works of, for example, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and Glinka, upholders of the Russian musical heritage? (Shamlou cleverly mentioned Russian composers so that “friends” in the Communist Party could not dismiss his point for citing artists who had “betrayed” the proletariat.) Those composers channeled Russian national and folk themes in their compositions, themes that the masses, such as the semi-literate lumberjack in remote forests of Siberia, hummed and connected with as the very raw material of his soul. Shamlou questioned whether those composers’ innovative works were mass or high art in the eyes of Communist ideologues.
6. Shamlou said that literature is produced by singular literary workers from their own experiences. No clear path could be drawn for literature. Necessity is the mother of invention—what arrives at a point of urgency is a done deal. It can neither be rushed nor impeded.
7. This is a reminder of T.S. Eliot’s essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in which Eliot points out that scoffing at the notion of “tradition” is a failure to recognize that what is known and disparaged as “tradition” at any given time was a leap of innovation in its time, once a transgression that was likely resisted, mocked, and written off. So to dismiss it as passé or old-fashioned is paradoxical in some way, in that it subsumes innovation, the future.
8. Shamlou said that his poetry stemmed from his own pain. How honest would his poetry be if it pretended to be cried out from other people’s pain? Yet, he said, If my pain were common, then I have at once cried our common pain. Hence the lines, I am common pain/cry me out! (from Shamlou’s poem, “Collective Love”).
9. The irony is in that “commercial art,” popular amongst the masses, and devoid of any meaning, is in fact the enemy of a people’s culture, further distancing them from their freedom, enslaving them instead. In contrast, there is art that is not popular, but whose content is deeply pro-proletariat. Art that contains slogans for the masses should really count as “political activity,” not “cultural activity,” and the basis of its measure should be “historical value” not “cultural value.”
10. For the innovations of a lasting work of art to reach all strata of society, other artists with access to both the innovators’ visions and the masses were needed to act as intermediaries, to transmute the art for them. An example of such an intermediary was the Iranian poet, journalist, and leftist activist Khosrow Golesorkhi, executed by the Shah’s regime and the dedicatee of Shamlou’s poem, “Rupture.” 5
11. Shamlou considered the colloquial language he had been exposed to in his early years to be much richer and more expressive than the official language. He began to fuse high and low language together to create a new, multidimensional one. To him, the writer who embodied his or her time must make these two poles speak with each other. He struck a fine balance in his straddling of both high and low cultures. The Iranian poet and critic Mohammad Reza Shafiei Kadkani believed that even if Shamlou’s language spanned the vernacular registers of the street to the higher, more erudite ones, Shamlou managed to never write a common poem in his long career.
12. In Moslem Mansouri’s documentary, The Final Word—a different cut of which is presented as Master Poet of Liberty, an apt title for the poet of the people’s heart—Shamlou said that commitment was not implicit in the nature of art itself. It is the artist who has to be committed, bear witness to history. If artists do not understand the pain of humanity, they cannot be considered intellectuals—they are merely thieves with a torch.
13. Shamlou thought that many conflated the notion of social commitment to make art for the people with an imaginary debt that the artist owed to society.
As a translator, Shamlou brought dozens of international works into Persian. In this way, he had at his disposal several literary traditions, and aesthetic and poetic movements, a broad sampling of world literatures to draw from in concocting a unique recipe that fomented his cultural revolution. What made Shamlou the avant-garde poet of his time, beyond his unparalleled mastery of the Persian language and literary history, was his power of synthesizing through the filter of his own imagination and creativity all of the literatures from which he drew.
Even if he himself did not have direct access to most of the languages from which he translated,