Outlook Bibliofile: In Conversation With Iranian Poet Rosa Jamali At RAZA Utsav
Outlook's Mahima Monga speaks to Poet Rosa Jamali, an Iranian poet who opened Persian poetry to new creative possibilities. Some of her books include 'This Dead Body Is Not An Apple, It Is Either A Cucumber Or A Pear', 'The Hourglass Is Fast Asleep', 'Highways Blocked'.
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00:00 The name of the poem is the Flintstone.
00:02 Block number one.
00:04 A whole nation has created this kindling which owes you desperately but it hasn't been specified
00:13 whether it's the Flintstone or a firestorm.
00:24 Welcome to Outlook Bibliophile.
00:25 We are here with Rosa Jamali.
00:28 Hello ma'am.
00:29 Hello and thank you for having me.
00:32 So could you talk about some of your recent books that have been published?
00:36 Let me talk about all my books.
00:39 I've been recognized as a kind of avant-garde poet.
00:44 The first book I published called This Dead Body is Not an Apple.
00:49 It's either a cucumber or a pear.
00:52 So Persian generally has got this tradition of poetry like set phrases, set similes, set
01:02 metaphors.
01:03 It's been repeated through the history for more than 1,000 years of Persian poetry.
01:10 Being creative in Persian poetry is really hard.
01:13 Anyone tries poetry could come to a kind of cliche stereotype.
01:19 Persian poetry repeating the imagery of roses and nightingales, a kind of ornamental, oriental
01:26 literature.
01:27 So I was a little bit bored with that type of literature, that type of poetry.
01:33 It was really hard for me to just think about new metaphors, new similes, new set phrases,
01:41 how to collocate words in a way that is different from what is kind of cliche in Persian poetry.
01:52 So the first book was really bold and creative and innovative, but I had my own critics for
01:59 a while.
02:00 And actually, just in the newspapers and magazines and literature journals, they wrote lots and
02:06 lots about my first book and the title of the book.
02:09 It was a kind of shocking book among literati.
02:14 And at that time, English poetry was not very well known, like avant-garde poetry, mostly
02:23 political poets, left poets, like the ones Ahmad al-Shamlou translated, mostly left poets
02:29 like Pablo Neruda or, I don't know, Elvar, or some...
02:37 But poetry as a kind of art for three or four decades, mostly intellectuals, poets talked
02:46 about politics, freedom, or such stuff.
02:51 And then I turned to become a kind of formalist poet, and some didn't like this notion of
02:57 being a formalist poet.
02:59 They said, "A poet should be for people, and you're not writing about people.
03:03 You're just writing poetry, and we don't know the meaning of this kind of poetry."
03:09 Then perhaps it was interesting for me as a kind of rebellion at that time.
03:15 I tried to take their advice and read more, and then I tried to mingle different things,
03:22 different types of discourses, like one part of poetry, an abstract piece, then the other.
03:29 I tried to adopt some fragments, and then my poetry turned to collage, bricolage, a
03:42 kind of discourse which could fragment itself.
03:45 One part is just abstract, the other part I have some lines, some perhaps quotations
03:53 from people in the street, like a carnival-esque poetry.
03:57 I have the voices of people in the street, and I have some formal discourse of language.
04:04 I've got some new metaphors, new similes, and I tried to delve into myth.
04:13 And so when did you start writing?
04:16 When did you know that you want to become a poet?
04:22 I published my first book when I was quite young.
04:26 I was 20.
04:29 So since that time I've been working as a kind of professional poet, being among the
04:38 literary...
04:41 I've been involved in literary sessions, poetry sessions, and quite often I read in literary
04:50 journals, I write in literary journals, and my poetry is published quite often.
04:56 And that's it.
04:58 And recently my poems have been translated to different languages, different anthologies,
05:03 like in Sweden it's been published in the Kritiker, and then in the United States it's
05:10 been published in the Metropolitan Anthology of Avant-Garde Poetry.
05:18 And then in Czech, in different countries.
05:24 So perhaps I can say Dick Davis and Franklin Lewis are among the best translators who translated
05:32 my poetry.
05:33 One is the translator of Ferdow's Seed, the other one is the translator of Rumi, and the
05:41 head of Near Eastern Studies in Chicago University.
05:47 And how would you describe the poetry scene in Iran?
05:52 There are different trends, but I can say the time I started, language poetry became
05:59 fashionable.
06:00 You know, actually for two or three decades, like after the revolution or so, this kind
06:08 of grand narrative, just a kind of describing utopia in poetry became a sort of cliché
06:17 for our generation.
06:19 So we don't talk about big, big, big things like freedom, like changing the world or so.
06:28 My generation mostly like to write about the details of life or some simple things in life,
06:34 not big, big things like a kind of creating messages in poetry or just trying to change
06:47 the society or so.
06:49 No, it's not like that.
06:50 But I can say, but this decade, the language of poetry has become a little bit simplified
07:00 because I see there are two trends in Persian poetry.
07:07 The first trend belongs to, actually elites and those who know poetry very well.
07:18 And the second trend is for, I mean, the professionals read a kind of poetry which is sophisticated
07:26 and people like people who want to just enjoy a piece of writing or so read a simplified
07:34 poetry.
07:35 Just there are lots of collections these days.
07:38 You can see kind of, they are bestsellers perhaps, very simple poems about simple things
07:48 and they have their own readers.
07:51 And so you studied drama.
07:53 Yeah, bachelor drama and master English literature.
07:59 So while you were studying drama, there has been, you know, like poetry involved in play
08:07 writing and drama so much.
08:11 So are there any plays that you performed perhaps that had some of the poems?
08:18 Drama helped me to create different voices, to understand the meaning of persona in poetry,
08:24 the speaker in poetry.
08:27 So actually when there are different speakers, in a way you can mingle the subject, the object,
08:34 you can have your interior monologue and your dramatic monologue and the voices of people.
08:42 And then later just I try to put them in different fragments in a whole poem, a kind of collage,
08:51 then this fragmentary style in different pieces, different narratives.
08:56 And then, yeah, I like the way language is used in drama.
09:02 The time I was a student, I was quite young, I was really interested in Greek plays and
09:09 Roman plays.
09:10 And my favourite character was Medea because I just called her a kind of feminist character.
09:19 And then I played that and I enjoyed that.
09:23 And I tried to recreate that in my, recreate the voice of Medea in my poetry.
09:32 But I can say my poems could be performed on the stage as we performed one piece all
09:40 together with four or five people.
09:42 We tried to make a chorus out of some lines and we tried to repeat it.
09:48 The name of that performance poetry is The Fern and it's available on YouTube.
09:57 But I've got different forms of language.
10:02 I've got this kind of conversational, colloquial language which could be performed in a different
10:10 way.
10:11 Then I've got formal, archaic language just mingled with that, could be performed with
10:16 a kind of scenery and spectacles.
10:19 And so, yeah, I'm really happy that first I studied drama and it changed my mind.
10:26 It gave me lots of ideas to a kind of adaptation of drama in Persian poetry which was really
10:34 hard at the beginning.
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