Ahmad Shamlou Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Ahmad Shamlou (احمد شاملو in Persian), (December 12, 1925 — July 24, 2000) was an Iranian poet, writer, and journalist.
Shamlou was born to the family of an army officer in Tehran. Like many children who grow up in families with militiary parents, he received his early education in various different towns, including Khash and Zahedan in the southeast of Iran, and Mashhad in the northeast. By 1941, his high school education still incomplete, he left Birjand for Tehran. He intended to attend the Tehran Technicum and learn the German language.
When, within a year, his father was transferred again, this time to Turkmen Sahra, Shamlou remained in Tehran to contribute to the war effort on the side of the Nazis. He was arrested by the Allied Forces in 1943 and was transferred to Rasht to serve a one-year prison term. When, at the end of his incarceration his father came to Azerbaijan to bring his son home, both father and son were arrested and placed before a firing squad. They were released, however, at the last moment, when new orders arrived. In 1945, Shamlou made a final attempt at completing his high school degree in Urumieh, but he failed.
Shamlou was a nationalist and a staunch supporter of the Mossadegh's government. After the fall of Mossadegh, he went into hiding for six months. Thereafter, he was arrested and incarcerated for over a year. All along, he continued a rigorous program of writing, translating, and composing poetry in the tradition of Nima Youshij.
Shamlou married three times. His first marriage in 1947 gave him four sons but did not last long. Neither did his second marriage in 1957 that ended in divorce in 1963. But his third marriage in 1964 to Ayda Shamlou lasted. His wife became a very instrumental figure in Shamlou's life and remained with him until his death in 1999. Her first name, Ayda, appears in many of his later poems.
Due to political unrest and oppression in Iran, Shamlou and his wife left Iran temporarily in 1977. After living in Princeton, New Jersey for a while, they left for England and lived there until 1979. After the Revolution of Iran, Shamlou returned to Iran as the editor of Ketab-e Jom'e.
Shamlou has translated extensively from German and French to Persian and his own works are also translated into English, Spanish, Swedish, and a few other languages. He has also written a number of plays, edited the works of major classical Persian poets, especially Hafez. His six-volume Ketab-e Koucheh (The Book of the Alley) is a major contribution in understanding the Iranian folklore beliefs and language.
Shamlou's poetry is complex. Yet his imagery, which contributes significantly to the intensity of his poems, is simple. As the base, he uses the traditional imagery familiar to his Iranian audience through the works of Persian masters like Hafez and Omar Khayyam. 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 was a co-founder of the Iranian Writers Association, and in the thirty intervening years before his death, he never ceased supporting its ideals. As he put it to an interviewer, "The Iranian Writers Association is alive because its ideas are alive in each and every one of us. That means every one of us cultural workers who remains true to its shining ideals, is individually an association".
Shamlou’s achievement go beyond poetry. He has written stories and film scenarios, has made an important contribution to children’s literature, and has been one of the most significant journalistic talents in the last few decades of Iranian history.
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