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Chapter 3-E

As has already been shown regarding the poem Afsâneh, “heart” has a pivotal role in the Romantic outlook because it is the center of a person's natural emotions and the place where he can relate to his own natural desires and to the whole universe. Man begins to suffer when he breaks from nature and destroys his or her essence with the ills of civilization: school, office work, reason and, above all, party politics:

     Whether or not one is a loner, an enemy of the oppressed, or, like you and me, suffers for them, my dear, either way is the work of the heart.

     Through agitation and provocation one cannot affect someone's heart with burning emotion except if that person has a natural disposition to getting burnt.

     In 1928, Nimâ finds himself in the city of Bârforush, now called Babol, a small city near the Caspian Sea, not very far from his native village, Yush, up in the mountains. He is now married, and he and his wife both work as school teachers. It was at this time that with the eradication of malaria, the building of textile factories, and the production of rice and tea, the area around the Caspian Sea became increasingly urbanized. But Nimâ's heart is still in Yush. In a letter dated 1928 from Barforush to Khalil Bayâni who lived in Yush, Nimâ writes:

     Whenever you cast your eyes upon the snowy mountains, remember me. You live in my homeland. Gaze upon its whole joyful landscape. My soul is always there.

     In another letter which he sends to Meftâh the same year, he finds the distancing of man from nature to be the source of human flaws, “In my opinion, flaws are things contrary to one's nature.”

     In the same year in a letter to the representative of the Ministry of Education in Bârforush, he reveals the hypocrisy of civilization in different walks of life:

     They [children] are educated in higher institutions to learn artificial sciences like law and similar studies which are created for unnatural purposes or they become judges in ridiculous organizations which are called houses of justice or representatives in institutions where the rights of the weak are sold out.

     Here again, Nimâ singles out the school system as being particularly destructive:

     How shall I start? Neither blind imitation of others, nor ethics, nor improperly founded schools, nor conventional human education should be used to guide children, and school especially is a place in which they are led to an abyss.

     In response to a principal's request for Nimâ to write a text for fifth and sixth grade pupils about chastity (nejâbat) and veiling (sarpushi), Nimâ writes,

     The chaste are those who do not wish to become future bosses by increasing the number of pages in their newspapers without increasing their knowledge. They do not want to become legislators or ministers. In spite of that, they will think of the burden which is put on the shoulders of the weak, and especially, the weakest of them, the women. They do not fool people for fame nor do they sell them for money.

     The noble chaste person was a hero who died unknown in the spring of 1926. He is a young vagabond who has the name of one of these mountains. He is a well-known songwriter who is wandering in the city of Hamedân.

     He defines the chaste in his religion as a person who acts according to his or her nature:

In my religion, one which I have founded and am not afraid of disclosing, even if I lose my position and I do not use it as a means of cheating others, the chaste is the person who acts according to the laws and effects of nature.

     In a letter dated 1929 to Zabihollâh Safâ, an anthologist and a literary writer, he glorifies the simple natural life and discourages him from getting entangled with the “crowd”:

  Now, distance yourself from people and become a loner like me. Acquire a house near a faraway forest and make a living raising cows and sheep. Breed chickens and make a farm and occupy yourself cultivating the local black wheat.

  Neither pay heed to the rich nor befriend criminals and people who in the name of rescuing workers and toilers incite lawlessness.

     Then he goes beyond his customary humility and encourages Safâ to read works written by people like himself, as a means of getting closer to nature:

Read the literature by people like me submitting yourself to nature, then you will see that there are benefits in nature which do not exist in the throngs.

 Nimâ in 1933 moved to Tehran where he resided until his death. In a letter which he wrote from there the same year to his friend Rassâm Arzhangi, a painter, he calls Tehran “a dirty city” and expresses his homesickness:

     Finally this place of peace and natural scenery that I was just narrating to you, has all of a sudden disappeared. To make a living I was separated from my roots and like all wage-laborers who went out from our village and had to say farewell to that beautiful land with pity, I came to this dirty city of Tehran. You don't know how much the mountain folk suffer when they leave their home.

 Nimâ sent this letter from an address in the middle of Tehran, Moniriyeh Avenue, Sirus Alley. After paraphrasing what Said Nafisi, a writer and novelist, had noted about him “that Nimâ is a free spirit,” he compares his life in that alley with his previous life in the countryside:

     One month ago, on my way home, I had to pass through fields of barley, hay, and wheat, and today through a narrow alley in which women are sitting along a muddy, smelly stream and quarreling incessantly among themselves, and all that in the cheapest neighborhood.

In spite of residing in Tehran, Nimâ went back to Yush in the summer, sometimes even on foot, through mountains kilometers long, which separate Tehran from the Caspian Sea. In a bitter and beautiful letter he wrote to Nâktâ, his favorite sister, from Tehran in 1937, he describes his house in Tehran as a “tomb” and imagines himself walking alone towards his homeland:

     I go over mountains to find something which is unattainable. Then I come back to Tehran where I have made out of a lonely place the house of tears in order to find that “thing.” I am making a tomb for dying and not a nest for living.

     In a letter written in 1943 from Yush, Nimâ complains of urban life to a dear (but unidentified) friend who lives in the city. Nimâ encourages him to either come to the countryside or, like him, to shut the door to everybody in town:

     Here I have made friends with a young shepherd your age who comes to my cabin once or twice a day. By the time the shepherds bring the herds over the mountain, it is very late at night. He counts the hours by the movement of the stars, as he sits near the fire telling me about his contentions with the beasts. Many times when I have had your letter in front of me, I have told him about you. However, not once has he asked when I will see you again. Why? Because he knows you are not the same type of person as he. Return to your heart with remorse. Cleanse your heart and find the connection that undoubtedly exists between you and them.

     Living in the city makes Nimâ so tired that he sometimes even becomes dejected and does not even find refreshment in natural scenery. To find salvation he drowns himself in his work:

     I do nothing but go out in old tattered and stained clothes and then I come back to this hole of a house. If I have noticed something along the way I jot it down. Nothing moves my heart except for what waits for me in my poems. Not even the natural scenery. I do not get to it except on paper and when I exercise my pen.

     A young poet, Nurâ Emâmi, sent Nimâ some of his poems for an opinion and Nimâ, in a letter dated 1945, defines poetry as an emotion which connects the poet to all of life, people, and nature:

     Poems and poetry are like a flower which smells of different pains and pleasures. This flower does not belong in everybody's life and it cannot be so. It is not at the disposal of people who want to pin it to their lives.

The poet is the person who should become everyone and everything:

     He knows the language of all the birds as if he had previously learned it. He knows why in the fall, crows come to the plains from the high, cold mountains, why doves form different groups, and why at the time of migration from summer to winter ground the ortolan sits alone on the tree. Everything expresses its sadness or happiness to him.

In contrast, one who pretends to be a poet, merely assembles words without true feeling:

     That is why the work of pseudopoets does not inspire anything but words, rhythm, and rhyme. Their inspiration does not originate from passion, pain, and poetic feeling. They search not like a goat which looks for green grass, but rather like a goat which eats whatever is thrown at him. Their work is not akin to anything that exists in nature, no brightness, no creativity, [and they do present it] without any hopeful light.

Then Nimâ speaks of the sense of unity which poets have with rivers and trees:

     He likes to be on the green mountain slopes where the forest ends or alongside the river which comes with incessant moans from faraway mountains and fields of wheat (like the Bishel, which you have seen), until something passes before his eyes like a shadow and it carries him to illusion and he sees mountains afar, how they press against each other and how they speak to him of darkness and tell him the stories embedded in them.

Poetry is not making love to a beloved, but rather it is making love to the whole universe:

     We should not say like Anvari that “poetry is the man's menstrual cycle”, but that poetry is man's everything. Everything is in their bosom and you press it hard and make it the way you desire.

5. A Decline

Nimâ's poetry in the twenties was new in terms of diction, imagery, and outlook, but not in terms of metrics, although he did employ more liberal forms of classical prosody. Except for a few poems like Sham‘-e karaji (“The Boat Candle”), Qu (“The Swan”), and Dar javâr-e Sakhtsar (“Near Sakhtsar”), which are new in language, imagery, and message, other works by Nimâ from this period show experimentation with the traditional type of poetry. This experimenting took the form of didactic pieces like Khorus-e sâdeh (“The Simpleton Rooster”) or a narrative, such as Qal‘e-ye Soqrim (“Soqrim Castle”), which is an imitation of works of the classical poet, Nezâmi, like Haft gonbad (“Seven Domes”).

Nimâ, himself, compiled the didactic pieces of this period in one collection called Hekâyât (“Fables”). The form and message of most of these poems resemble those of the classical poets and serve primarily to teach a lesson. For example, in the short piece “The Simpleton Rooster”, a maid asks her mistress how she could want to kill a rooster that sings so charmingly. The mistress answers, “The eyes of a guest are open, but his ears are deaf.” Then the poem draws its moral conclusion:

As long as people want a feast,

Whether the rooster sings or not, it will be killed.

Its singing comes from an internal world

Which this greedy world will have nothing to do with.

     There are half a dozen pieces in the fables, all called Angâsi, in which the poet makes fun of the people of a village called Angâs, located near his own place of birth, Yush, where people are known to be “simpletons” and “ignorant” by the native people. For example, one of these pieces, reads,

The foolish Angâsi wanted to return to the village 

Sooner than the other from the meadow

Ignorant and far from considering the results

He wanted to get ahead of all his friends

He saw that a light cloud in the sky

Was going faster than his donkey

He jumped and from the top of the mountain

Threw his leg over the cloud

After this wild fantasy comes the moral of the story:

He wanted to reach the goal fast

But he did not reach it altogether.

During this period, along with his wife, who was either a school master or a teacher, Nimâ lived in many of the major towns of Gilân and Mâzandarân, the two provinces near the Caspian Sea. They lived in cities such as Bârforush (today's Babol), Rasht, Lâhijân and آstârâ. These trips familiarized him with the culture of the area and imbued him with a sense of nativism. The local literature in the Tabari language played an important role in this influence. He was fond of collecting the poems of such native poets as Tâleb آmoli, Fayyâz Lâhiji, and Mahvi Bârforush. These divâns (collection of poems), which were in the form of old manuscripts, were bought by antique traders. In a letter, dated January 1930, Nimâ writes Mirzâ Mahmud from Lâhijân,

     However, here I have established a connection with a well known merchant who owns many old manuscripts. He is being very helpful to me. If he had a collection of poems by Tâleb-e Amoli (tâleb means one who desires), he would satisfy my desire...

     Recently I borrowed an anthology in the form of a manuscript from a tailor. This anthology was written by a person named Seyyed Ahmad Lâhiji in his own handwriting. I do not know him, but he has traveled a lot in the area and has at times composed poetry in Arabic. I have written down some of his poems in my notebook. However, in poetry he does not reach the level of Fayyâz, the famous poet of Lâhijân.

     As we shall see further on, interest in the local culture would later lead Nimâ to write his quatrains in the Tabari language. Nevertheless, one can see the first steps of this kind by him in this period. In a letter to Motkân, dated February 1929, Nimâ writes from Bârforush, 

     After Tâleb, you will find the story of “Tâlebâ” and “Najmâ” for me. The poems in this story are in the local language. They are related to the romance of the well-known Tâleb. The villagers have memorized them and sing them in a melancholy, rustic voice.

     The last work that Nimâ wrote in this era of poetic decline is a long narrative poem called “Soqrim Castle” in which he imitates the style of the versified stories of Nezâmi. The poem does not have the charm that one usually finds in Nezâmi's narratives. In the beginning of the poem, Nimâ speaks of a “sleep” which can be interpreted as a reference to a decade and a half of decline since he wrote the masterpiece Afsâneh of his youth:

I failed to tell the story of the night of horror

Blessed God that now it is a good time to do it

Because I fell to a heavy sleep

The caravan went and I opened my eyes

I have lost such an opportunity

I cannot get a hold of myself

One who falls to a heavy sleep in the path

Will give hand to the wind and feet to the water 

     “Soqrim Castle” is dated December 1934, whereas the next poem, “Phoenix” (Chicness), was written three years later in February 1938. What is surprising is not only the three years of not writing poetry, but also the fact that the first fruit of this silence is the first sample of Nimâ with his new metrics. What were the causes of this silence? What were the reasons for this leap? Were they rooted in Nimâ's final settling down in Tehran, a city that he called “dirty” and “of the dead”? Was it because he was influenced by a materialist concept of history, following the line of a social realism, and was forced into silence because of the consolidation of Rezâ Shâh's regime and suppression of individual rights including the famous “Black Law”? According to this law every person who adhered to communist ideology (marum-e eshterâki) was to be sentenced to three to ten years of imprisonment. Was the reason for this change because of the Pahlavi regime’s shift in affiliation from Britain to Nazi Germany, in which the balance of power had tipped and new ideas involuntarily were given the opportunity to rise up in the society? Perhaps it was only the effort of the poet, who had become tired of his stagnation and wanted to find a new way of poetic expression. 

     Mehdi Akhavân-Sâles (along with Ahmad Shâmlu is considered to be the most well-known modern Iranian poet after Nimâ Yushij) in his book Innovations and Novelties of Nimâ Yushij (Badâye va bed‘athâ-ye Nimâ Yushij) correctly passes judgement on this crucial period in Nimâ's literary life: “In my opinion, the years of puberty and full-blooming in Nimâ's poetry start from 1937‑38.”  >>> Chapter 3-E