Article by Niloufar Talebi in Tehran Bureau about Iranian literature in English translation.

‘Iran Away‘ – on the Iranian Literary Arts Festival 2009

A brief history on the story-telling tradition in Iran and how it has evolved:Naghali, Pardeh-dari, Pardeh-khaani, Ghavali (minstrelsy), Shahnameh-khaani, are Iranian story-telling traditions, practiced usually in the streets and coffee houses, story-teller titles varying according to their style of story-telling and the subject matter of the stories told. Pardeh-dari and Pardeh-khaani are visual forms of story-telling done before a big cloth or canvas (pardeh) hung in a square, or the walls of a tea of coffee house, painted on which are the events of the story being told, which the story-teller would refer to during their recounting.

Coffee house paintings are Iranian-style paintings, in the tradition of miniatures, but with European techniques and material, oil on canvas or cloth, which people in the streets and bazaars started to develop about 80 years ago. This was an attempt to distance art from royal courts and bring it into the hands of the people. Unknown artists who had gained experience in tile paintings, were inspired to create simple images on coffee house walls by the work of story-tellers and Shahnameh-khaans (those reciting the Book of Kings by Ferdowsi, which is in 50,000 couplets, and contains the history and epics of the Persian people from the Creation up to roughly the 7th C. before the Arab/Islamic invasion).

Further readings:

The Islamic Drama: Taziyah – by Jamshid Malikpour

The History of Theater in Iran – by Willem Floor

Coffee House Paintings – Iran Chamber Society

Video Clips of a documentary on Gordafarid and other storytellers in Iran

Coffee House Painting - Zoleikha (the Pharaoh's wife) and her companions, as she falls unconscious at the sight of Yousef's beauty; oil painting on canvas, Qajar period.

Battle of Karballa Royal Painting

Pardeh of the same royal painting

Naghali in a cafe

Naghali in a Cofee House (Ghahveh Khaaneh)

Pardeh-dari

Pardeh-dari

Pardeh-dari (Battle of Karbala)

Pardeh-dari (Battle of Karbala)

Tazieh in a Takieh

Watch clips (subtitled in English) of a documentary on Gordafarid and other oral storytellers in Iran

Gordafarid (Fatemeh Habibizad)-The first female Naghal

Gordafarid (Fatemeh Habibizad)-The first female Naghal

Gordafarid-The first female Naghal

Gordafarid (Fatemeh Habibizad)-The first female Naghal

Morshed Torabi at the Shahnameh Millenial Project

Morshed Torabi demonstrating Shahnameh Naghali

Morshed Torabi demonstrating Shahnameh Naghali

Ostaad Enayat Shafi'i

Ms. Baarootchi, second female Naghal - student of Gordarafid

Ms. Baarootchi, second female Naghal - student of Gordafarid

Romeo and Juliet in Naghali style

Our work is inspired by Iranian story-telling traditions. We perform new and contemporary Iranian poetry as our content, in both the Persian original and English translation. We also use multimedia video projections to create our Pardehs, and bring in other artists such as dancers and musicians on stage. We hope that this theatrical/literary tradition can find a place in American mainstream arts one day. To read about our 2007 multimedia show, ICARUS/RISE, scroll down and visit links about the making of the show, the collaborative artists, and view youtube clips.

Niloufar Talebi reciting new Iranian poetry in Persian and English translation

Niloufar Talebi reciting poetry outdoors

ICARUS/RISE

ICARUS/RISE

ICARUS/RISE

ICARUS/RISE

ICARUS/RISE

ICARUS/RISE

ICARUS/RISE

ICARUS/RISE

ICARUS/RISE

ICARUS/RISE

ICARUS/RISE

ICARUS/RISE

Excerpt from the Introduction to BELONGING: New Poetry by Iranians Around the World (North Atlantic Books, Aug 2008), edited and translated by Niloufar Talebi:

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‘In my eighth year as a child growing up in Iran, I spontaneously composed a stanza, a poem, observing the falling of snow, when something took over and I knew it was poetry I was jotting down in a nylon-covered notebook. That notebook remained in the piles of things left behind. This was the country in which I recited over and over again “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep” for our fifth-grade English class. In the fourth grade, the entire class would stand up from our wooden benches and recite an homage poem to mothers. At home, it was Sohrab Sepehri, “Wherever I am, let me be / The sky is mine / … Our work is perhaps / To run after the song of truth/in the distance between the lotus and the century.”

This was also the country in which I had the great fortune, as a teenager, during the four violent years I lived in Iran after the 1979 revolution, to sneak out of bed, way past bedtime, to eavesdrop on a poet in our living room. During these years of unrest, in order to usurp all the power, Ayatollah Khomeini was eradicating all other factions that had played a role in ousting the Shah. The old Iran was combusting into the Islamic Republic of Iran, and all homes were prey to sudden raids by the Islamic police. And though this was a poet so undeniably consequential that despite his outright opposition to Khomeini it would have been impossible to imprison him along with the thousands of other dissidents, we could never be too discreet about his visits to our home.

When he was visiting, it meant we were hosting a “literary salon.” It meant there were simultaneous discussions on art, literature, music, and world affairs. It meant Rachmaninov or Beethoven was blaring while a heated debate was under way in the kitchen, while another group in the living room provided endless commentaries on the nightly televised charades of the Iran-Iraq war, or the staged confessions by soon-to-be-released-or-executed enemy party leaders. Presiding over these salons, cigarette smoke rings dissipating over his full head of white hair, this poet would connect Nima, Lorca, Neruda, Hafez, Akhmatova, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Langston Hughes, Baudelaire, Hedayat, and Farrokhzad, among many others. He handed me many books over that time—carefully chosen, no doubt—each time asserting why this book was perfect for me at that time. In my thirteenth year, I got One Hundred Years of Solitude. Years later when I met him at UCLA where he was giving a lecture, he suggested Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita…’

‘Talebi addresses the state of writing in Iran’ – Iranian Literary Arts Festival in the SF Examiner

(content coming back soon)

Wikipedia list of Iranian writers throughout the centuries, which leads to other links with additional information.

Below is a partial list of poets featured in BELONGING: New Poetry by Iranians Around the World:

Write up in Perspective Magazine by Roxanne Rashedi  (Fall 2008, pg. 18-19)