- Reza Baraheni
- University of Toronto
- "The Poetics of Simin Behbahani's New Ghazals."
The author of more than fifty books of poetry, fiction and literary theory, Reza Baraheni is currently Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. He has taught in the University of Tehran, Iran, the University of Texas, Austin, Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, the University of Toronto, and York University. He has also been a Fellow at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, and a Fellow at Oxford University, England. From 1982, the year he was fired from the University of Tehran for his advocacy of equal rights for Iranian women, to 1996, the year of his forced departure from Iran, he taught courses in creative writing and literary theory, first at the home of friends, and later at the basement of his own apartment. A former prisoner of both the Shah's regime and the Islamic Republic of Iran, an original writer and signatory of the "Text of 134" Iranian Writers and the Charter of the Writers Association of Iran, Baraheni has been in the forefront of the struggle for democracy and human rights in Iran for more than four decades. He is a founding member of the Writers Association of Iran, a member of the International PEN, and was President of PEN Canada from June 2001-June 2003.
Baraheni has won numerous honours and awards, among them: The Sepass Award in Canada, for Life-long Achievement in Literature (2005), A Canada Arts Council Grant (2005) The Yalda Life-long Achievement Award (2003); The Iranian Critics and Journalists Award (2000); Scholars at Risk Program Award of Massey College, University of Toronto (1999); an award from The International Freedom to Publish Committee of the Association of American Publishers (2000); and The Overseas Press Club of America Award (1977). His fiction has been anthologized along with works by Vladimir Nabokov and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; his poetry along with the poetry of Anna Akhmatova, Jorge Luis Borges, Paule Eluard, Nazim Hekmat, Osip Mandelstam, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz and Wislawa Symborska (Approaching Literature in the 21st Century, ed. Peter Schakel and Jack Ridl, Bedford/St. Martin's, Boston, New York, 2005; God's Spies, ed. Alberto Manguel, Macfarlane, Walter & Ross, Toronto, 1999; The Prison where I Live, ed., Siobhan Dowd, Forward by Joseph Brodsky, Cassell, London, 1996; Voices of Conscience, Poetry from Oppression, ed. Cronyn, McKane and Watts, Iron Press, Great Britain, 1995) and many other anthologies. His works have been translated into a dozen languages, among them: Arabic, Dutch, English, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. He has also written poetry and prose, originally in English, among them: The Crowned Cannibals (Random House, Vintage, New York, 1977, introduction by E. L. Doctorow); the long poem, "Exile Poem of the Gallery," in Making Meaning (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 2000); and the long poem, "Death of a Greek Woman in Seattle," in Exile Writes Back (Massey College, Toronto, 2001). His poetry and translations of his poetry by himself and others have appeared in the Time Magazine, City Lights Anthology, The New York Review of Books, The American Poetry Review, Magazine of the International PEN and many other prestigious periodicals. There have been numerous and laudatory reviews of his books in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Le Monde, Le Figaro Litteraire, Figaro Magazine, Liberation and other world press. The publication of the French translation of his long suppressed novel in Iran, Les Saisons en enfer du jeune Ayyaz (Pauvert, Fayard, Paris, 2000), and two recent novels, Sheherazade et son Romancier (Fayard, Paris, 2002), and Elias a New York (Fayard, Paris, 2004) have gained him comparisons with Georges Bataille, Jean Genet and many other French and world authors. Two plays of his, Enfer and Queskes, directed by Thierry Bedard, the outstanding modernist director in the main section of the Avignon International Festival in July, 2004, were widely reviewed by the major press in France and other parts of Europe. A recent novel of his, Exilith, adapted for the stage by Bedard, has been performed in all major festivals of France.
- Abstract The last quarter of the twentieth century witnessed a transformation in Iranian literature which was unprecedented in its earlier periods. For the first time the element of time, almost a revolutionary time, was thrust to the foreground, turning itself into a determining factor in the destiny of Persian literature. Poetry had always been considered to be the symbolic archetype of the Iranian psyche. The social transformation pushed poetry to the background, giving narrative forms an unprecedented dominance and variety. The re-making of history led to the prominence of fiction over poetry. In order to survive, poetry had to go through a tortuous transformation, a linguistic and formal transgression in the frameworks of both the modernist Nimaie poetry and the classical sonnet. The paper, outlining briefly the nature of these transgressions, will concentrate solely on the dynamics of change, brought about by Simin Behbahani's voluminous production of the sonnet form. Generically, her sonnet transgressed the literary devices of the classical formatting by making internal changes in the beyt (1). It revolutionized the element of content by upholding thematic progression from the beginning of the sonnet to its end, as against the fragmentariness of the the theme in the classical ghazal (2). It made the sonnet a political, social and feminist testimonial, an outcry against the horrors of war, oppression and the diabolical rule of masculine history (3).
