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During this time, several poets began to consider classical Persian poetic forms inessential and started to follow Nima and use traditional meter in modified ways. By the 1920s, Nima Yushij (popularly known as the father of modern Persian poetry), had turned to medieval Persian literature, including the Indian Classical Style, to explore diverse ways of writing and constructing poetic relation. To modernize the poetic language and its formalistic and stylistic possibilities, poets not only had to push aside the essential role that poetic tradition attributed to traditional forms and meters but also develop alternative narrative strategies to establish fresh forms of poetic relation. From the late 19th century, Persian poetry, like poetry in Arabic, Turkish, and Urdu, was subjected to literary and aesthetic contestations that sought to redefine the relationship of poetry to classical forms (such as ghazal, mathnavī, qaṣīdah), traditional meters (known as buḥūr) and classical and established modes of expression. To situate Bijan Elahi’s contribution to Persian modern poetry within a larger context, we need to look back in time to the rise of Shi’r nu (New Poetry) and literary modernism in Iran.
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One example of a recent attempt at translation of a selection of his poems into English is Rebecca Ruth Gould and Kayvan Tahmasebian’s High Tide of the Eyes: Poems by Bijan Elahi (New York: The Operating System, Glossarium: Unsilenced Texts & Modern Translations series, 2019).
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As such, Bijan Elahi’s poetic legacy remains unsettled and contested and much of his work remains untranslated. However, some critics (such as Ali Satwati Qaleh) question this sudden rise of interest in Elahi’s work, seeing in it a consequence of the growth of contemporary de-politicized, nativist approaches to modern Persian poetry. While some readers revere him as a modern Sufi, others, including many young rising poets and literary translators in Iran, have been inspired by Elahi’s modernist approaches to poetry and translation.
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Over the past decade, a whole new generation of poets and poetry lovers in Iran has been exposed to Elahi’s work. Since then, the Iranian publisher Bidgul has published two collections of Elahi’s poetry, eight collections of his poetry translations (from English, French and Arabic), and one collection of his prose translation. It was only after Bijan Elahi’s death in 2010, that his daughter, Salma Elahi, authorized the publication of his massive collection of poems and literary translations. Unlike these poets, Elahi chose to live in relative seclusion for over three decades and only attempted to publish a selection of his poetry twice during his lifetime– an attempt that remained unmaterialized. July 7th marks the birthday of Bijan Elahi (1945-2010), a modernist, experimental poet who has posthumously acquired a position in Persian modern poetry that only a few canonical poets, like Nima Youshij (1897-1960), Ahmad Shamlou (1925-2000), and Forough Farakhozad (1934-1967), have previously achieved.