Persian Poetry Tuesday: Conversation in the Dark, by Nader Naderpour

Nader Naderpour was born in 1929 in Tehran. He studied literature at the Sorbonne in Paris during the 1950s and in Rome in the 1960s. He began publishing his poems in the 1940s and is counted among the leaders of the Modern Poetry movement in Iran, where he helped establish the Association of Writers of Iran in 1968. Before he fled his country in 1980, he worked for the Department of Arts and Culture and Iranian National Radio and Television; he also edited several literary magazines. The Islamic Republic of Iran banned publication and distribution of all Naderpour’s works after he left the country.

In France, where he first lived after going into exile, he was elected to the Author’s Association,  and then, in 1986, he moved to the United States, where he lived until his death in 2000. All told, Naderpour is the author of ten volumes of poetry, and his work has been translated into English, French, German and Italian. In 1993, he was awarded a Hellman/Hammett Grant by Human Rights Watch and he is said to have been a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

This gorgeous love poem, which Naderpour dedicated to his wife Jaleh, was translated by Niloufar Talebi and is included in her volume Belonging: New Poetry by Iranians Around the World, which is also my source for the brief biography of Naderpour above.

Conversation in the Dark

To my dear Jaleh

Mid nights, when I’m ill and awake
And no light is visible even from a pinhole
And the soft song of your deepest breaths
Accompanies the treble and bass of my heart
To the constant ticking of the clock,
Then I see that even if my thoughts are alone,
My heart, in the hollow of my chest is not.

Softly, I bend my head over your bedside
And lightly kiss your lashes, joined in sleep.
You feel the weight of this kiss on your eye and smile.
I kiss you cheek warm
And although the clamor of your laughter echoes in my ear,
In the dark waves of night,
Your laughing face does not manifest.

Quietly, I strike a match
To illuminate your face,
But soon, the red sulfuric spark,
Rising and falling upon my two blackened fingers,
Dies in the twist and turn of its dance
And again, dense darkness
Settles in our little bedchamber.
I tell myself: Aside from that brief instant–
The moment I glimpsed your dear face
–My eye does not have fortune enough to see.

Like a child fearing darkness,
I pave a path to your embrace
And petrified of something I can’t name,
I steal this whisper in your ear:
Kinder than all the world’s kindliest creatures!
Oh friend, sweetheart, mother, companion on this voyage!
Scream away so even stone-hearted death
Does not undo us in the promised moment!
For we both know that in a riotous
World of swarming crowds,
And of all that avails on the endless horizon,
If we have a destiny, it is our loneliness.

And this house, smaller than a boat, sails us–
The distressed–into the sea of exile.
But on the alarming horizon of the sea,
Night prevails
And reveals no path in darkness
To tomorrow.

Cross posted on The Poetry in The Politics and The Politics in the Poetry.