The three poems that follow depict a moment of transition in the course of topical poetry in contemporary Iran. The advent of the revolution caught many modernist Iranian poets off guard, particularly because it did not seem to confirm their vision of revolution. Secular and predominantly leftist, Iranian poets and writers anticipated a socialist revolution and were surprised at the revolutionary potential of Shiᶜite Islam. These poems, written in 1978-1979, depict the speaker in the act of acknowledging the passage of one era and the advent of another while at the same time distancing himself from its increasingly religious cast. In the first poem, “Akher-e bazi” (End of the Game), the poet seems to welcome the demise of an unwanted political order through an utterance that can be read as an address to its chief personage, perhaps even the person of the last Iranian monarch.

Although the predominant language of Iran's literature is Persian, a trickle of literary works has always been written in other languages, most notably in Azeri Turkish, the language spoken in Iranian Azerbaijan as well as in the Republic of Azerbaijan to the north of the Araxes river. The following two poems, translated from the original Azeri Turkish, demonstrate the presence of that minority voice.

With regard to the translated poems, a reference to a historical event is necessary here. From 1946, when the autonomous movement in Iranian Azerbaijan was defeated, to the downfall of the Iranian monarchy in 1979, contact between the people of the two regions was discouraged on both sides, and Azeri Turkish was aggressively suppressed by the state, which defined Iranian nationalism through the increasing dominance of the Persian language. However, individual poets of the two regions were in sporadic contact.

Hushang Golsmri's masterfully crafted short story “Fathnamehye moghan” (The Victory Chronicle of the Magi) captures a sobering moment in the transitional period of revolutionary Iran. Golshiri delves beneath the surface of the ongoing revolutionary confusion to reflect on the events and gains insight into an aspect of the culture deeply rooted in the Iranian psyche. Golshiri conveys the sentiments of the collective narrator “We,” which represents, if not all Iranians, at least the intellectuals who had been supportive of a revolution in order to acquire freedom but are suddenly faced with a situation in which the freedoms they had been taking for granted have been curtailed. In a manner, perhaps not very different from before, they are trying to learn, or, as Barat sees it, to conform to the new restrictions placed upon their lives. Wine and its prohibition are used as a symbol of restrictions on other liberties.

The Qasida that follows provides an easy and obvious example of how topical literature can assume a specific political relevance within a specific social context. Written and first published in 1983, the poem was immediately seized upon as containing the poet's opposition to the ruling revolutionary state. This node between patriotism and political dissent was made possible only in the context of certain pronouncements by the leaders of Iran's revolution interpreted largely as their disregard for the country of Iran in an overzealous pursuit of the Islamic component in Iranian identity. Ever since his response to a question put to him on the plane that brought him back to Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini was widely believed to feel no great affection for the country he was about to rule. Asked what he was feeling as he was returning to his homeland after fourteen years of exile, the Ayatollah had dismissed the question by saying, “Nothing!”

Simin Behbahani (B. 1927) is by far the most prominent woman poet of the last two decades. Her recent works manifest a sensitivity to feminist themes and adhere to a new notion of literary endeavor and a new ideology of representation that promote women's causes and gender equality. Her short story “Fenjan-e Shekasteh” (The Broken Cup), for example, brings to the fore the theme of love and man-woman relationships, thereby manifesting the author's new ideological orientation. The story offers these themes in the context of the history of intellectual activities in Iran, by virtue of which it gains additional significance.

The story portrays a woman who, as was common among intellectuals in the decades prior to the 1979 revolution, devotes her life to the political movement for freedom and sacrifices everything, including her love, in its path.

Mitra Davar's short story “Homework” takes us into the world of a young woman still at school but already grappling with a deep sense of alienation. Manizheh, the protagonist, leads a life delimited by her movements between home and school. Both sites demand duties and responsibilities she finds herself unable to fulfill. At school, her teachers complain that she is absentminded. At home, her mother urges her to take the medication a doctor has prescribed to combat her melancholia and to devote herself to her homework.

We do not know the exact causes of Manizheh's depression, but something in her longing gaze tells us of a need to get beyond barriers that circumscribe her life. She is forever looking out of windows, staring at stray cats, and collecting feathers and autumn leaves. Yet she cannot find the vital link between all that she observes and is asked to do.

It was very early in the morning. She was looking at the yard from behind a window. The tree was in full bloom. She removed a lock of white hair from her forehead. It was the forty-first time that she was watching the tree blossom. She was standing in front of the window in her thick white nightgown with long sleeves and closed collar. She was a bit cold. The wind made the blossoms shiver. It seemed that the flowers never felt cold. The woman recalled the very first time she watched them.

She has awakened to the sound of her husband's voice, “Wake up! Come and see! The tree has blossomed!” They have stood watching together at the window. Her long white nightgown was sleeveless and thin, with lace around its open collar. She wasn't cold, or perhaps it was her sense of decency that made her forget the cold.

From 1980 to 1988 Iran fought a bloody war with neighboring Iraq. Those who died in the war are eulogized as the “martyrs of the war of truth against falsehood” and have been accorded an almost sacrosanct status in the Islamic Republic. A tragedy of unprecedented proportions in modern Iranian history, the war was also the catalyst for important social and political transformations within the country. Iranian warriors went to war not so much to kill as to sacrifice their lives for a larger community that was itself being transform through the exigencies of warfare. As succinctly explained by one Iranian fighter, “We are fighting not for revenge, but for Islam, country and honour.”

The following ghazals by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini were written between 1365/1986 and 1367/1988. They are taken from his Bada-ye ᶜeshq: Ashᶜar-e ᶜarefana-ye Hazrat-e Emam Khomeini (Wine of Love: Mystical Poems by His Eminence Imam Khomeini). The collection includes twenty-three mystical ghazals, a number of quatrains, and some other material. When one approaches late twentieth-century Persian ghazals, the intellectual climate in which we live today compels one to ask a number of questions. Has the contemporary poet mastered and applied the formal requirements that govern the pre-modern style? Are the poems confined to the traditional topics of wine, spring, and unrequited love in all its aspects or do they explore new areas of broader social relevance? Is the contemporary poet following or reacting to earlier poets? Finally, what is the relationship of the poetry to the life of the poet?

Since the beginning of the Persian poetic tradition, “occasional” poetry has played a significant role in Iranian political, social, and literary life. Although it lost much of its literary prestige in the mid-twentieth century with the Romantic and Modernist valuation of “pure poetry,” the new holidays and heroes of the Islamic Republic have given a fresh purpose and status to commemorative verse. After several decades of speaking for the political opposition, modern Persian poetry in Iran now often serves as a means of articulating and celebrating the rhetoric and ideology of the government. This, too, marks a return to one of the principal functions of poetry in the classical tradition.

Perhaps nothing illustrates these developments more clearly than the outpouring of verse that followed the death of Ayatollah Khomeini on 4 June 1989. Within a year, a collection of nearly 300 elegies was published under the title Sugnameh-ye Emam (Book of Mourning for the Imam).

On 15 October 1994, 134 writers in Iran composed and published a statement in the form of an open letter entitled “We Are the Writers!” Writers with different cultural and political orientations signed this document to publicly support the establishment of a writers' association and oppose censorship.

The publication of “We Are the Writers!,” while attracting considerable support both inside and outside Iran, outraged the Islamic regime. Several signatories were approached by pro-government media to explain their action. Some authors were pressured to disavow the content of the letter. The signatories were accused of political conspiracy against the Islamic Republic. As the statement carefully and emphatically underlines, however, the association was to be apolitical and primarily centered on the writers' professional concerns, including copyright, censorship, paper shortage, and cost of publication. The official reaction points to a fundamental trait of writing in Iran: the very act of writing, regardless of content, is political.

The five poems below, as will be evident to the reader, are as “contemporary” as any poems in Persian, at least thematically. With shocking clarity, they are “about” traumatic experiences that have shaped recent Iranian history: revolution and war.

They are all the more shocking in this respect: for their choice of language and imagery. Simin Behbahani resists the penchant that remains, even in Modern Persian poetry (whether by choice, habit, or force of circumstance), for oblique and symbolic expression—whereby “skewered nightingales” stand for silenced or censored poets, “dogs giving up their freedom for shelter and a piece of bone” connote political and moral compromise, and “dark and stormy nights” and other meteorological signs serve as barometers for political, moral, and cultural oppression.

Crucial to an exile's perception of his or her identity is a sense of place and the exile's relationship with it. This has been one of the most productive sources of imagery that has shaped by Nader Naderpur's poetry since he left Iran in 1981. In much of his poetry of exile, strong emotions stand out: rage at the powers in Iran that caused him to go into exile, grief at what happened to his country as well as to himself, half-acknowledged acceptance of exile, tinged with nostalgia. The feelings aroused by increasing age and the pain of seemingly endless separation from Iran combine to make him contemplate an obscure future in a land without sun. Running through all these poems is the poet's sense of place. As exile, Naderpur inhabits two places at once: an inner, remembered place, now evoked in ever-more nostalgic images, and an outer, physical place where he dwells and passes his days.

Djavad Djavaheri's “Parvaz” (Flying) is a Meditation on the Concept of time and manifold perceptions of it. Does one second mean the same to two pilots, one in a commercial plane and the other in a fighter plane? What does the fighter pilot experience in that fateful moment on which his whole destiny depends— a moment indistinguishable from any other by the pilot in a commercial plane on his routine journey in clement weather? And from men to machines: how do we, in the age of artificial memories, microchips, and nanoseconds, translate time into both power and impotence against a background of cultures, themselves rendered intelligible only by making allowances for ambiguities, nuances, and uncertainties?

Closer to the context of this story, consider the situation of a man at the end of his time.

The Esfandiyar of the title is the hero of a cycle of stories in the Iranian national epic, the Shahnameh of Abolqasem Ferdowsi, and Bichareh Esfandiyar is Sacidi Sirjani's lengthy and impassioned interpretation of that cycle. The book has the form of lecture notes. That is, the author retells the story of Esfandiyar from the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, paraphrasing it at times, quoting from it at others, and commenting on the events and personalities of the story whenever he proceeds through it. This form of discourse, one which is relatively common in Iranian scholarly writing, has closer affinities to the tradition of the coffeehouse reciter or naqqal than it does to the scholarly essay, and Sacidi Sirjani says explicitly that he views himself as a naqqal not a scholar, a somewhat disingenuous claim inasmuch as he has spent a long and productive professional life as a scholar, editor, and professor of literature.