Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Literature, Music & Cinema
LITERATURE
Iran is a nation of poets and overwhelmingly the most important form of writing is poetry.
Familiarity with famous poets and their works is universal: ask almost anyone on the street
can quote you lines from Hafez or Rumi (see the boxed text,
Click here
)
.
While writers have long been persecuted in
Iran, their numbers increased dramatically dur-
ing the Khatami years, particularly women nov-
elists who regularly topped best-seller lists. But
writers haven't fared so well under the conser-
vative Ahmadinejad government. All books
must be approved by government censors before
publication and thousands of new and old works have been banned, from Dan Brown's
The
Da Vinci Code
to all works by Sadeq Hedayat, one of Iran's most famous prerevolutionary
novelists.
Paragraphiti (
www.paragraphiti.com
) translates
titles into English and publishes new Iranian fic-
tion.
Poetry
The 9th century AD saw several poetic styles
born in Persia. These include the
masnavi,
with
its unique rhyming couplets, and the
ruba
'
i,
similar to the quatrain (a poem of four lines).
Poems of more than 100 nonrhyming couplets,
known as
qasideh,
were first popularised by
Rudaki during the 10th century. These styles later developed into long and detailed 'epic
poems', the first of which was Ferdosi's
Shahnamah
.
Many epic poems celebrate the glories of the old
Persia, unencumbered by the foreign rulers who
reigned through this period.
THE GREAT IRANIAN POETS
Iranians venerate their great poets, who are often credited with preserving the Persian language and culture during
times of occupation. Streets, squares, hotels and
chaykhanehs
(teahouses) are named after famous poets, several of
whom have large mausoleums that are popular pilgrimage sites.
