translating not only informed Shamlou’s own work, but it put him in direct conversation with a global knowledge base. Translation, a tool with which he bridged the world to his own work, bled into his own poems, a grafting of aesthetic innovations of other literatures to imagery from classical Persian literature to new subjects and languages, creating a third language.
Translating gave Shamlou the opportunity to deploy and experiment with the vernacular: street language in Langston Hughes’ work and in Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don, and everyday language in the works of Lorca and Margot Bickel, to name a few.
Some of Shamlou’s translations were twice removed from their original sources. Shamlou’s knowledge of the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s work, for example, which informed his poem, “The Final Word,” came from French translations of the Russian originals. He translated ideas, images, prosody, music, language, tone, techniques, patterns. His creative renderings—and occasional errors—all played an integral part in the fresh air that he breathed into Persian poetics, shaping the disruptions he made. In many ways, Shamlou’s importing of inter-national literatures and ideas into his native one was equally, if not more, disruptive as Ezra Pound’s, whose translations and introductions of Chinese and Japanese poetry into English changed the course of American poetics, still reverberating in the poetic practice one century later.
In importing and remixing ideas, Shamlou also drew from a wide swath of sources beyond the page: the protest music of the executed Chilean artist, activist, and songwriter Victor Jara, the Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis’ rendering of Neruda’s homage to his continent, Canto General, classical music, and films are a few of the works I remember being introduced to personally.
Shamlou not only wrote and adapted a number of seminal works for children, including the iconic works, Pariyah (The Fairies) and Dokhtaraye Naneh Darya (The Daughters of Mother Sea), in that familiar yet new language that he created at the crossroads of the high and low, he also translated Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. For some time, he was considering my little brother, whose voice had not yet turned, as the little prince for the dramatic recording of the work he was preparing.
In a 1972 article in Keyhan-e Sal magazine, Shamlou expressed his dissatisfaction with existing Persian translations of the novels Virgin Soil Upturned and Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don, the latter of which Shamlou later translated, satisfying the poet’s love for the novel and the epic. Shamlou posed the question as to whether social commitment alone sufficed for literary workers, and whether that commitment could override a broader commitment to literature and language. He questioned whether a subpar translation—be it through sheer neglect, the absence of knowledge, or linguistic weakness—was excusable if the literary worker creating it was socially committed.
On July 30, 2010, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the poet’s passing, Faraj Sarkoohi writes in a BBC Persian online article that Shamlou rejected the approach of word by word, phrase by phrase, and in the case of poetry, verse by verse translation, arguing that the translation of poetry, as opposed to prose, hinged on the strength of the internal music and language of the rendition. The only option was the re-recitation of a poem in the target language. Poetry was to be translated in the obliteration and re-creation anew in language.
While Shamlou was inventive and literary in his translation output, he was neither always accurate—looking up terms in reference books and sometimes translating word by word—nor was he, by his own admission, always faithful, believing instead that the translator had to edit in the interest of the final work and its audience, lest the work be suspended in some linguistic and cultural limbo. In the documentary The Final Word, Shamlou mentioned his intervening in the translation of a short story by Kafka, whose language he found complex and in need of some kneading into Persian. Essentially, in his practice, Shamlou broadened the notion of “faithful” in translation, prioritizing artfulness and accessibility in the new language over a strict adherence to words in the original.
But Shamlou also thought that translation could at most transmit meaning, images, ideas, imaginary figments, that language and the internal music of a poem was lost in translation. In other words, what was lost in the translation of poetry was poetry. Did he think this applied to himself as a poet or as a translator, or both? These comments coming from a writer who translated a vast body of international literature reveal Shamlou’s quite complex relationship with translation.
Shamlou was arrested and held as a political prisoner just after the 1953 coup d’état orchestrated by the United Kingdom under the name “Operation Boot” and the United States under the name “Operation Ajax.” Political prisons were packed with people from all strata of society in close quarters. University professors, farmers, merchants, and laborers were eating together, commiserating, exchanging ideas. Away from home, desperate to forget their surroundings, they came together, told stories, recited poetry, hummed songs together. Early among these songs was a lullaby Shamlou composed, “Laalaa’i,” a folkloric song gathered and edited by him, a practice he would continue to masterful levels for the rest of his life. This poem of resistance circulated, filled prisoners up with hope and the zeal to fight.
Laa laai laai lai laai lai, little rosebud
your daddy’s gone, my heart is blood
Laa laai laai, your daddy’s not coming home tonight
maybe they’ve taken your daddy, laa laai laai
Laa laai laai lai laai lai, little iron bud
the enemy killed your daddy
Laa laai laai, this is the enemy’s mark
hands soaked with blood, laa laai laai
sleep peacefully in your cradle tonight, laa laai laai
like fire in ashes, laa laai laai
tomorrow you’ll ignite
avenging daddy’s blood, laa laai laai…
In his estimation of his own work, Shamlou’s first serious volume of poetry was Fresh Air (1956), the publication of which was an event in Iranian poetics, largely inspired by Paul Éluard’s poem, “Air Vif,” from his 1951 volume, Le Phénix, which Shamlou translated and published under the title “Fresh Air” in 1955:
I looked before me
I saw you in the crowd
I saw you among the wheat
I saw you under a tree
At the end of my journeys
In the depths of my torment
At the corner of every smile
Emerging from water and fire
I saw you summer and winter
I saw you throughout my house
I saw you in my arms
I saw you in my dreams
I will never leave you.
Shamlou’s poem, “Collective Love,” from his volume, Fresh Air, is especially reminiscent of Éluard’s “Air Vif.”
In 1954, when Shamlou was making his young mark on poetry and struggling to break with tradition, he composed one of his most well-known poems, “Poetry That is Life,” while imprisoned, witnessing poets and activists tortured and executed. The long poem is considered his version of Archibald MacLeish’s poem, “Ars Poetica,” a poem about what a poem should be, which ends with, “A poem should not mean/But be.”