My Country I Will Build You Again
Simin Behbahani, Outspoken Iranian Poet, Dies at 87
Simin Behbahani, a prizewinning poet known as "the lioness of Islamic republic of iran" for using her verse every bit a means of courageous social protest, died on Tuesday in Tehran. She was 87.
Her decease was appear by the Iranian Republic News agency, the country's official information service.
Ms. Behbahani wrote more than 600 poems, collected in twenty books, on subjects as various as earthquakes, revolution, war, poverty, prostitution, liberty of speech and her own plastic surgery. In poems and public speeches, she confronted Iran'due south religious authorities, challenging them on practices similar the stoning of women who commit infidelity.
"She became the voice of the Iranian people," Farzaneh Milani, a University of Virginia professor who translated many of her poems into English language, said in an interview on Th. "She was the elegant voice of dissent, of conscience, of nonviolence, of refusal to be ideological."
In 2006, the Iranian authorities close down an opposition newspaper for printing one of her works. In 2010, when she was 82 and virtually blind, she was barred from boarding a Paris-jump plane and interrogated through the night regarding poems she had written about Iran's 2009 elections, which were considered fraudulent past government opponents.
"Stop this extravagance, this reckless throwing of my country to the wind," she wrote in "Terminate Throwing My Country to the Wind." The verse form ended:
You may wish to have me burned, or decide to rock me
Just in your hand match or stone will lose their ability to harm me.
In a 2011 video message to the Iranian people in commemoration of the Persian New year, President Obama said Ms. Behbahani'south "words have moved the world" and quoted a verse form she wrote in 1982, "My Country, I Will Build You Again": "Old I may be, but given the take chances, I will acquire."
Fittingly, it was poetry that brought her parents together.
Her mother, Fakhr-e Ozma Arghun, had sent a verse form she wrote to a magazine edited by Abbas Khalili, a translator and poet himself. He liked the poem and was surprised to notice it had been written past a woman. He said he wanted to marry the poet, whom he had non all the same met.
He did marry her, but iii days after their wedding he was arrested and exiled for articles that offended the ruling Pahlavi dynasty. He did not see his daughter — born Siminbar Khalili on July 20, 1927, in Tehran — until she was 14 months onetime, and did not come across her again until she was eleven.
In the concurrently, the girl'due south parents divorced. Simin's mother raised her to love literature and, when Simin was 14, sent a poem Simin had written to a literary journal, which published it. In 1951, Ms. Behbahani published her first volume of poems.
One of her first innovations was with the ghazal, a sonnetlike Persian poetic form. Information technology had traditionally been written from the perspective of a male lover admiring a woman, but Ms. Behbahani fabricated the adult female the protagonist. She later used the ghazal class to write most all mode of subjects, including the Islamic republic of iran-Iraq war. She also used her skill in writing about dear to compose lyrics for popular songs.
Ms. Behbahani studied to exist a midwife before pursuing a police force degree, which she earned but never used. She taught high school — physics and chemistry, then literature — for more than xx years.
Among the many literary awards she won was, in 2013, the Janus Pannonius Poetry Prize from the Hungarian PEN Club, which carries a 50,000-euro prize and is sometimes called the Nobel Prize for poetry. She was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Ms. Behbahani's offset union, to Hassan Behbahani, ended in divorce. Her 2d spousal relationship, to Manuchehr Koushyar, ended with his death in 1984. She is survived past her sons, Ali and Hossein Behbahani; her girl, Omid Behbahani; and several grandchildren.
Jahan News, a hard-line Iranian website, in one case characterized Ms. Behbahani's writing as treasonous, saying, "Her poetry, with its slanderous and scandalous way of addressing Iranians, merely serves to make Islamic republic of iran'due south enemies happy."
But Ms. Behbahani viewed herself as patriotic, insisting her impassioned writings and public statements were intended only to brand Iran better. The poem President Obama quoted began:
My Land, I will build you once again,
If demand be, with bricks made from my life
I will build columns to back up your roof
If need exist, with my bones.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/22/arts/international/simin-behbahani-outspoken-iranian-poet-dies-at-87.html
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