Poetry
زمستان
Mehdi Akhavan-Sales · 1956
Synopsis
Thirty-nine poems. The title poem opens on a world where no one wants to return a greeting any more, where no one raises their head, where one draws one's hand from under the armpit only reluctantly to hold it out, and where breath, barely out of the chest, becomes a dark cloud; the speaker comes knocking at the door of an old Christian whom he calls his messiah. In “Mon jardin”, the leafless garden is left alone day and night, and autumn, king of the seasons, gallops there on its horse with a golden mane; elsewhere comes the feverish wait for a lovers' meeting.
Context
The author's second collection, it appeared in Tehran in 1956. It shows his growing adherence to Nima's new poetry, without yielding anything of the language of the classics, and made him a celebrity; from then on he was counted, with Naderpour, among Nima's heirs. The critic Gholam-Hossein Yusofi saw in the title poem the penetrating image of Persian society in the dark years of the fifties. Mohammad-Reza Chadjarian sang it in concert in California in 2000, to music by Hossein Alizadeh.
Who it is for
A collection of short poems, in Persian. It helps to know that the language blends the forms of Nima with the vocabulary of the old poets of Khorasan, and that the cold of the title is also political.
Prizes and reception
The collection that made its author famous; its title poem is the best known of his entire body of work.