Ahmad Shamlou

Ahmad Shamlou (, Ahmad Šāmlū, also known under his pen name A. Bamdad ) (December 12, 1925 – July 23, 2000) was an Iranian poet, writer, and journalist.

Shamlou was arguably the most influential poet of modern Iran.

His initial poetry was influenced by and in the tradition of Nima Youshij.

In fact, Abdolali Dastgheib, Iranian literary critic, argues that Shamlou is one of the pioneers of modern Persian poetry and has had the greatest influence, after Nima, on Iranian poets of his era.

Shamlou's poetry is complex, yet his imagery, which contributes significantly to the intensity of his poems, is accessible.

As the base, he uses the traditional imagery familiar to his Iranian audience through the works of Persian masters like Hafez and Omar Khayyám.

For infrastructure and impact, he uses a kind of everyday imagery in which personified oxymoronic elements are spiked with an unreal combination of the abstract and the concrete thus far unprecedented in Persian poetry, which distressed some of the admirers of more traditional poetry.

Shamlou has translated extensively from French to Persian and his own works are also translated into a number of languages.

He has also written a number of plays, edited the works of major classical Persian poets, especially Hafez.

His thirteen-volume Ketab-e Koucheh (The Book of Alley) is a major contribution in understanding the Iranian folklore beliefs and language.

He also wrote fiction and screenplays, contributing to children's literature, and journalism.

Ahmad Shamlou was born to Haydar Shamlou and Kowkab Araqi on December 12, 1925, in Rasht to an army family.

Ahmad was the second child and the only son in a family of six children.

In the manner of many children who grow up in families with military parents, he received his early education in various towns, including Khash and Zahedan in the southeast of Iran, and Mashhad in the northeast, and Rasht in the north.

Shamlou's childhood and adolescence were neither privileged nor easy and home was not an environment that could foster his sensitivities and he often found solace in solitude.

Moving with his family from one town to the next proved a hurdle to Shamlou's education.

By 1941, his high school education still incomplete, he left Birjand for Tehran.

He intended to attend the German-established Tehran Technical School, one of the best secondary schools of that period and learn the German language.

He was admitted to this school on the condition that he be demoted two years.

Soon in 1942, he and the rest of the family once again left Tehran to move to Gorgan.

In 1945, he made a final attempt at completing his high school degree in Urumieh, but he failed.

At age 29, following the fall of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, Shamlou was arrested for being a member of the communist Tudeh Party of Iran and imprisoned for more than one year.

Shamlou's debut work, Forgotten Songs, was a collection of classical and modern poetry which was published in 1947 with an introduction of Ebrahim Dilmaghanian.

In 1948, he started to write in a literary monthly called Sokhan-no.

Two years later, his first short story, "The Woman Behind the Brass Door", was published.

His second collection of poems, Manifesto, was published in 1951.

He showed inclinations toward socialist ideology.

He got a job in the Hungarian embassy as their cultural advisor.

His third collection of poems, Metals and Sense (1952), was banned and destroyed by the police.

His translations of Gold in Dirt, by Sigmund Motritz, and the voluminous novel The Heartless Man's Sons by Mór Jókai, together with all data gathered for his work on the colloquial culture of urban Iranian life (to be known as The Book Of Alley) were also confiscated and destroyed.

In 1954 he was jailed for 14 months.

in 1955 he translated and published three novels by European writers.

He became the editor-in-chief of Bamshad literary magazine in 1956.

He rose to fame from his next volume of poetry, Fresh Air, published in 1957.

Zia Movahed, poet and philosopher commented that "Anyone who reads Fresh Air today can see that this language, this texture, is different from anything else. In contemporary poetry, few have accomplished this kind of rhythm as Shamlou has. Fresh Air was the greatest event in our poetry—after Hafiz".

His translation of Barefoot, a novel by Zaharia Stancu, was released in 1958, establishing Shamlou's authority as a translator.

In 1959 he began publishing short stories for children, as well as directing documentary films and working for film studios.

In 1960, a new collection of his poems, The Garden of Mirrors, was released.

In 1961, he became editor-in-chief of Ketab-e-Hafte, a magazine that changes the tradition and language of literary journalism in Iran.

In 1962 his translations of André Gide and Robert Merle were published.