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Elegies for a Lost Leader: Six Poems on the Death of Khomeini
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2022
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Extract
Since the beginning of the Persian poetic tradition, “occasional” poetry has played a significant role in Iranian political, social, and literary life. Although it lost much of its literary prestige in the mid-twentieth century with the Romantic and Modernist valuation of “pure poetry,” the new holidays and heroes of the Islamic Republic have given a fresh purpose and status to commemorative verse. After several decades of speaking for the political opposition, modern Persian poetry in Iran now often serves as a means of articulating and celebrating the rhetoric and ideology of the government. This, too, marks a return to one of the principal functions of poetry in the classical tradition.
Perhaps nothing illustrates these developments more clearly than the outpouring of verse that followed the death of Ayatollah Khomeini on 4 June 1989. Within a year, a collection of nearly 300 elegies was published under the title Sugnameh-ye Emam (Book of Mourning for the Imam).
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Iranian Studies , Volume 30 , Issue 3-4: Selections from the Literature of Iran, 1977-1997 , Summer Fall 1997 , pp. 277 - 289
- Copyright
- Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1997
References
1. Sugnameh-ye Emam (Book of Mourning for the Imam), ed. Mahmud Shahrokhi and ᶜAbbas Moshfeq-Kashani, (Tehran: Sorush, 1369/1990).
2. Some twenty poets represented in Sugnameh are also to be found in the general anthology of poetry of the last decade entitled Sheᶜr-e emruz: pezhuheshi mobtani bar majmuᶜeh-ye sheᶜrha-ye montasher shodeh-ye 1358–69, ed. Saᶜed Baqeri and Mohammad Reza Mohammadi Niki, (Tehran: al-Hoda, 1372/1993), including Bahmani, Rakeᶜi, and ᶜAbbasi-Dakani (58–69), whose poems are translated here.
3. My understanding of the elegy is largely informed by Sacks, Peter M., The British Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985)Google Scholar. Although Sack's approach is rigorously Freudian and concentrates on the English tradition, many of the literary features that he identifies in the English elegy have clear counterparts in the Persian, and his book provides a solid foundation for a comparative understanding of poetic mourning.
4. Sugnameh, 230–231.
5. Ruh, the word here translated as “spirit,” is also a pun on the first element of Khomeini's first name, Ruhollah.
6. Sugnameh, 29–31. I have corrected two apparent misprints in the Persian text in my translation: qadami for qalami in line 32 and dush for du tan in line 58.
7. Qurᵓan 99:2.
8. Qurᵓan 81:1–2.
9. This verse and the quotation below are both taken from a ghazal by Jalaloddin Rumi on the death of his spiritual companion Salahoddin Zarkub. See Rumi, Jalaloddin, Kolliyat-e Shams, 10 vols. (Tehran: Daneshgah-e Tehran, 1336–46/1957-67), 5Google Scholar: 148 (ghazal no. 2364).
10. Qurᵓan 89:28.
11. See note 5 above.
12. Qurᵓan 108:1.
13. Assuming this is not a misprint, this verse conflates two separate Qurᵓanic citations: 16:120 and 2:213, based on two meanings of ummah, “model” and “people.”
14. This is a cemetery in south Tehran where the martyrs of the Revolution and the Iraq-Iran War are buried. Khomeini's tomb and shrine are located nearby.
15. Qurᵓan 19:15, referring to John the Baptist. The poet quotes the Arabic and for the first time in the poem, gives its Persian translation.
16. Sugnameh, 50.
18. Ibid., 262–65.
19. Zahhak was a legendary king of ancient Iran. The ultimate symbol of injustice and political terror, he had two serpents growing from his shoulders that had to be fed with human brains.
20. A reference to Reza Khan Pahlavi (1878–1944), who ruled Iran from 1921 to 1941.
21. This verse can also be translated, “We speak together with Al-e Ahmad,” referring to the writer Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923–1969). His critique of Iranian society during the Pahlavi era, Gharbzadegi (Plagued by the West), exercised a powerful influence during the Islamic Revolution.
22. Karbala is the site in present-day Iraq where Hosayn ebn ᶜAli was killed on the tenth of Moharram in the year 61 (10 October 680). Hosayn's martyrdom was the defining moment in the history of Shici Islam and is memorialized each year in the ceremonies of ᶜAshura.
23. Sugnameh, 15–19.
24. See note 5 above.
25. A suburb north of Tehran where Khomeini lived and preached during the last years of his life. Jamaran was the center of political and religious leadership during the first decade of the Islamic Republic.