From 1980 to 1988 Iran fought a bloody war with neighboring Iraq. Those who died in the war are eulogized as the “martyrs of the war of truth against falsehood” and have been accorded an almost sacrosanct status in the Islamic Republic. A tragedy of unprecedented proportions in modern Iranian history, the war was also the catalyst for important social and political transformations within the country. Iranian warriors went to war not so much to kill as to sacrifice their lives for a larger community that was itself being transform through the exigencies of warfare. As succinctly explained by one Iranian fighter, “We are fighting not for revenge, but for Islam, country and honour.”

The following ghazals by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini were written between 1365/1986 and 1367/1988. They are taken from his Bada-ye ᶜeshq: Ashᶜar-e ᶜarefana-ye Hazrat-e Emam Khomeini (Wine of Love: Mystical Poems by His Eminence Imam Khomeini). The collection includes twenty-three mystical ghazals, a number of quatrains, and some other material. When one approaches late twentieth-century Persian ghazals, the intellectual climate in which we live today compels one to ask a number of questions. Has the contemporary poet mastered and applied the formal requirements that govern the pre-modern style? Are the poems confined to the traditional topics of wine, spring, and unrequited love in all its aspects or do they explore new areas of broader social relevance? Is the contemporary poet following or reacting to earlier poets? Finally, what is the relationship of the poetry to the life of the poet?

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).

On 15 October 1994, 134 writers in Iran composed and published a statement in the form of an open letter entitled “We Are the Writers!” Writers with different cultural and political orientations signed this document to publicly support the establishment of a writers' association and oppose censorship.

The publication of “We Are the Writers!,” while attracting considerable support both inside and outside Iran, outraged the Islamic regime. Several signatories were approached by pro-government media to explain their action. Some authors were pressured to disavow the content of the letter. The signatories were accused of political conspiracy against the Islamic Republic. As the statement carefully and emphatically underlines, however, the association was to be apolitical and primarily centered on the writers' professional concerns, including copyright, censorship, paper shortage, and cost of publication. The official reaction points to a fundamental trait of writing in Iran: the very act of writing, regardless of content, is political.

The five poems below, as will be evident to the reader, are as “contemporary” as any poems in Persian, at least thematically. With shocking clarity, they are “about” traumatic experiences that have shaped recent Iranian history: revolution and war.

They are all the more shocking in this respect: for their choice of language and imagery. Simin Behbahani resists the penchant that remains, even in Modern Persian poetry (whether by choice, habit, or force of circumstance), for oblique and symbolic expression—whereby “skewered nightingales” stand for silenced or censored poets, “dogs giving up their freedom for shelter and a piece of bone” connote political and moral compromise, and “dark and stormy nights” and other meteorological signs serve as barometers for political, moral, and cultural oppression.

Crucial to an exile's perception of his or her identity is a sense of place and the exile's relationship with it. This has been one of the most productive sources of imagery that has shaped by Nader Naderpur's poetry since he left Iran in 1981. In much of his poetry of exile, strong emotions stand out: rage at the powers in Iran that caused him to go into exile, grief at what happened to his country as well as to himself, half-acknowledged acceptance of exile, tinged with nostalgia. The feelings aroused by increasing age and the pain of seemingly endless separation from Iran combine to make him contemplate an obscure future in a land without sun. Running through all these poems is the poet's sense of place. As exile, Naderpur inhabits two places at once: an inner, remembered place, now evoked in ever-more nostalgic images, and an outer, physical place where he dwells and passes his days.

Djavad Djavaheri's “Parvaz” (Flying) is a Meditation on the Concept of time and manifold perceptions of it. Does one second mean the same to two pilots, one in a commercial plane and the other in a fighter plane? What does the fighter pilot experience in that fateful moment on which his whole destiny depends— a moment indistinguishable from any other by the pilot in a commercial plane on his routine journey in clement weather? And from men to machines: how do we, in the age of artificial memories, microchips, and nanoseconds, translate time into both power and impotence against a background of cultures, themselves rendered intelligible only by making allowances for ambiguities, nuances, and uncertainties?

Closer to the context of this story, consider the situation of a man at the end of his time.

The Esfandiyar of the title is the hero of a cycle of stories in the Iranian national epic, the Shahnameh of Abolqasem Ferdowsi, and Bichareh Esfandiyar is Sacidi Sirjani's lengthy and impassioned interpretation of that cycle. The book has the form of lecture notes. That is, the author retells the story of Esfandiyar from the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, paraphrasing it at times, quoting from it at others, and commenting on the events and personalities of the story whenever he proceeds through it. This form of discourse, one which is relatively common in Iranian scholarly writing, has closer affinities to the tradition of the coffeehouse reciter or naqqal than it does to the scholarly essay, and Sacidi Sirjani says explicitly that he views himself as a naqqal not a scholar, a somewhat disingenuous claim inasmuch as he has spent a long and productive professional life as a scholar, editor, and professor of literature.