- Shadab Vajdi
- University of London
- "Immortality in Poetry"
Shadab Vajdi was born in Shiraz, Iran. She studied Persian literature and Social Science at the University of Tehran. She taught Persian literature in Tehran for a number of years. Later in her life, she embarked on her linguistic research at the University of London (School of Oriental and African Studies) where she obtained her Ph.D. in linguistics in 1976. She has published six collections of her own poems in Persian and one collection of Jon Milos's Swedish poems in the form of Persian translation. Her own poems have been translated into English, German and Swedish. She has also translated two books into Persian: "Inside the Third World" by Paul Harrison and "Return to China" by Liang Heng and Judy Shapiro. When in Britain, she worked as a producer and broadcaster for BBC World Service and also as a lecturer of Persian literature at the School of Oriental and African Studie, University of London.- AbstractThe paper shows that the main characteristic of Simin Behbahani's poetry is that it is a manifestation of love for humanity. It takes the listener on a journey through Simin Behbahani's poetic life by going through different stages and giving examples of her poetry at each stage. It looks at those of her poems that have the form of "ghazal" (lyric) and at her invention of a new rhythm for "ghazal". It explains the fact that Simin Behbahani's poems cannot be placed within the confines of any ideological framework (their scope is wider and they belong to humanity as a whole). The paper also explains the fact that even when Simin Behbahani talks about harsh laws against women, she surrounds this unpalatable fact with a halo of melody and beauty.
