Mahoud Moshref Azad Tehrani (M. Azad)
Poet
Iran

by: Manavaz Alexandrian

born in 1933
M. Azad began his career as teacher of Persian literature and is active with children's book.

His poetry is distict and independent from his predecessors such as Nima, Akhavan Saless, Shamlou, and Forough, although he has profited from them. His later works display a simple and soft poetic rhythm and a clam lyricism. At times falling to excessive abstract pedantry, as a whole his poems are exquisite and sincere.

His amorous and human feelings and pain is so deep and intimate that the reader understanding its meaning without a need for an intermediary.

Works:
The Realm of Night, The Lone Ode to the Wind, Mirrors Are Empty, the Sprig Breeding of the Gazelle and Rise with Me


Among the Kind
Translated to English by M. Alexandrian

What has happened to us that
No more
Do we compose a poem for the jungle
(A poem for the town),
A poem for the rose,
For a heart,
For a wound,
Or for a star?
Has the glory of the event caused the mass of poets
To get confounded?

Has your lyre ruptured,
And your plectrum is broken,
That you are sitting subdued and unbelieving
While the river is gliding by.

You have given up your ruptured lyre with your plectrum and
You are awake
And from your ivy covered narrow window whose red color
Stretches to the silent solitude
(You cry and do not cry!)
As if there is no window,
With heavy curtains,
And in your melancholy night ghosts
Are bending
With trembling hands.

In the assembly of the kind,
I wanted to say:
"Friends...",
For God's...
Pause...,
Rain!"

And it was a heavy bewilderment
And all that was there was hatred and damnation.

What nights I have seen
In the nocturnal privacy of friends,
With too much hue and cry
How heavy the bewilderment had sat?

In the assembly of the kind,
Those who cried
For many years:
"Ah, voice of the prisoner,
Ah the last voice of voices,
Will not your complaint of disappointment ever
Dig a tunnel towards light
From any corner in this hateful night?"

Alas, I am sunk in my pain,
And in accompanying astonishment
I wanted to say:
At the morning twilight
The cry of the purple
Is cold and sterile!"
But how?
What a heavy bewilderment...!




    Caroun Photo Club (CPC)