Iran Book News Agency (IBNA) - With Lamp and Mirror

Reading a page of a book out of thousands and millions of pages is, for us, like looking through a window on brighter side of the world that is constantly calling us, tempting us to set on a journey with the frigate of a book for more and more adventures...

The truth about Shamlou's character should be 'analyzed' for the young generation. During such an analysis many of his good qualities may turn out to be weaknesses, yet this is inevitable as the forthcoming generations will do this more relentlessly as we do. Had the new generation known how the literary character of Mr Shamlou is formed, they would never devote their whole lives on poetry – and particularly the type of poetry we find on newspapers. You know much better than anyone else that if you divide the so-called signifier of 'A. Bamdad' or 'Ahmad Shamlou' into a hundred pieces, fifty to sixty percents have nothing to do with poetry. The brought up fame and credit is the result of fifty to sixty years of constant activity in the newspapers. Once he was glorified by the Tudeh Party, then by the monarchists, then the partisans and now by the sociopolitical dissenters. And these idolizations have nothing to do with his poetry at all, but with his savoir-faire, or in his own term influenced by Mayakovski, admitting the time's demands. Neither Akhavan nor Forough or Nima or Sepehri could admit to the demands of their time as he did. One I was in Tehran a student of Social Sciences had made a computer analysis of a hundred issues of 'Adineh Magazine' for a cultural research and had found out that in almost all these issues- except for a few – the name of Shamlou has appeared with titles like 'the great poet of our country', 'peerless poet', etc. most of which I cannot remember and he was right: all photos and compliments and commendations, Yet the names of Nima and Akhavan and Forough are brought just as Nima and Akhavan and Forough without any other epithets while he was always called as the great poet of our country . . . Had he been publicized for successive fifty years in the largest political and cultural periodicals of the country, a figure like Shater Abbas Sabouhi and the whole clan of him would have been granted the Nobel Prize by now – so no surprise with the qualified Shamlou.