Shamlu's 'Dar In Bonbast': The 1979 Poem Explained

This is Part 11 of "Persian Poetry for People Who Don't Read Poetry." The classical poets in this series hid their politics inside wine and roses. Ahmad Shamlu didn't. If you've ever looked for ahmad shamlu poems english translations and wondered why his name comes up whenever Iranians talk about censorship, this short poem from the summer of 1979 is the place to start.

← Ep 10: Hafez's "Salaah-e Kaar" | Series Index | Ep 12: Forough's "Tavallodi Digar" →

Who Was Ahmad Shamlu?

Ahmad Shamlu (احمد شاملو) was born in Tehran on 11 December 1925 and died there on 23 July 2000. The Encyclopaedia Iranica calls him "a celebrated poet of the second half of the 20th century, and a pioneer of free verse in Persian." He published under several pen names, among them Bamdad (بامداد), which means "dawn", and Alef. Sobh (الف. صبح), where sobh (صبح) means "morning". That is where the nickname you'll see online, "the poet of dawn", comes from.

His politics cost him. He was imprisoned for almost two years from 1942 for opposing the Allied occupation of Iran, and again after the 1953 coup, until the winter of 1954; he refused to sign the recantation that would have freed him. He spent the years before the revolution (from 1976 or late 1977; sources differ) in voluntary exile in the United States. After 1979 the new government blacklisted him: from 1982, for twelve years, none of his books got a publishing permit. (Sources: Encyclopaedia Iranica; MERIP obituary by Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, 2000.)

What set Shamlu apart wasn't just his politics. It was his form. Hafez and Rumi wrote in the ghazal tradition (strict meter, rhyme scheme, couplet structure). Shamlu, Iranica notes, made "a conscious decision to abandon rhyme and the metrical prosody of traditional Persian poetry," and pushed past even Nima Yushij's new-poetry rules to find a voice of his own. The broad movement is called she'r-e now (شعر نو), "new poetry".

The Poem: "Dar In Bonbast" (In This Dead End)

The Persian title is "Dar In Bonbast" (در این بن‌بست). A bonbast (بن‌بست) is a dead-end street, from bon (بن, bottom, end) and bast (بست, closed), as Wiktionary breaks it down. Every Iranian city is full of them: narrow alleys that lead nowhere. English translators usually call the poem "In This Blind Alley".

The date matters more than anything else about it. Shamlu wrote it in the summer of 1979, shortly after the revolution (PBS Frontline's Tehran Bureau), not under the Shah. That same summer, on 26 July 1979, he launched Ketab-e Jom'eh, a weekly that Iranica describes as the unofficial organ of the Writers' Association; it ran until 22 May 1980. The poem was collected in Taraneh-haye Kuchak-e Ghorbat (ترانه‌های کوچک غربت, "Little Songs of Exile"), published in 1980.

It's an early warning. A poet who had been jailed after the 1953 coup watched the new order settle in and wrote, within months, that the dead end had a new set of guards. Writing in 2000, Karimi-Hakkak said the poem "achieved the status of an aphorism on life in the Islamic Republic of Iran" (MERIP).

The poem is still under copyright, so we quote only its most famous lines here. You can read the full Persian text on Asriran and a full English translation at PBS Frontline's Tehran Bureau.

The Lines Everyone Knows

دهانت را می‌بویند
dahaanat raa mibuyand
They sniff your mouth

مبادا که گفته باشی دوستت می‌دارم
mabaadaa ke gofte baashi dustat midaaram
in case you've said "I love you"

Those are the poem's first two lines (translation ours). The image is a checkpoint: a guard leans in and smells your breath the way he'd check for alcohol. But what he's looking for isn't wine. It's love. In the world of this poem, tenderness is the contraband.

Vocabulary:

• دهان (dahaan): mouth. Written and formal; in speech you'll mostly hear دهن (dahan).
• بوییدن (buyidan): to smell, to sniff. می‌بویند is "they smell", present tense.
• مبادا (mabaadaa): lest, in case. A literary word for a fear that something has happened or will happen.
• گفته باشی (gofte baashi): "you have said", in the subjunctive. After مبادا که the verb goes into this "might have" form.
• دوستت می‌دارم (dustat midaaram): I love you. Note the می: this is the older, literary form. In everyday Persian people say دوستت دارم (dustet daaram), without it. Many online quotes "correct" Shamlu to the spoken form; the poem has the literary one.

Notice who is doing the sniffing: nobody. The verb ends in ـند (-and), "they", and Shamlu never says who "they" are. He didn't need to in 1979, and readers since have filled in their own decade.

The Refrain: "Strange Times, My Dear"

روزگارِ غریبی‌ست، نازنین
ruzegaar-e gharibi-st, naazanin
These are strange times, my dear

This line comes back again and again through the poem, between images that get darker each time. It's the line Iranians quote on its own, often as the poem's title: when something absurd or cruel happens, ruzegaar-e gharibi-st says it without shouting.

• روزگار (ruzegaar): times, age, era. Common in speech too: روزگار سختی بود, "those were hard times".
• غریب (gharib): strange, odd; also "a stranger, someone far from home". The same family as غربت (ghorbat), "exile, being away from home", the word in the collection's title. The strangeness of the times and the exile of the title are the same idea.
• غریبی‌ست (gharibi-st): غریب + ی ("a") + است ("is"), shortened: "is a strange one".
• نازنین (naazanin): dear, darling, precious. Still used in daily speech.

What the Rest of the Poem Does

We won't quote more, but here is how the poem moves, in paraphrase. Read it alongside the full text.

• Love is flogged beside a roadblock post. The word for the whip is تازیانه (taaziyaane); another word for a whip is شلاق (shallaq).
• A refrain tells you what must be hidden in the پستو (pastu), the small back room of an old Iranian house where things are stored out of sight. First love, then light, then joy, and at the end, God.
• The dead end comes back inside the poem, crooked and cold, where they burn songs and poems to keep a fire going.
• The one who knocks at the door at night has come to put out the lamp.
• Butchers stand at the crossings with bloody cleavers; smiles and songs are cut away from mouths.
• A canary is grilled over a fire of lilies and jasmine, and a drunk, victorious devil sits down to the feast of our mourning.

Every image turns something gentle (a song, a lamp, a canary, a flower) into fuel or food for violence. And between them, the same calm voice keeps saying: strange times, my dear.

Why Shamlu Broke the Ghazal

If you've been reading this series from the beginning, you've spent a lot of time inside the ghazal. Hafez's couplets, Rumi's rhyme schemes, the formal architecture of classical Persian poetry. Shamlu threw that out.

"Dar in bonbast" doesn't rhyme and doesn't follow 'aruz (عروض), the classical meter. Lines can be two words or seven. What holds it together is repetition (the refrain, the "hide it in the back room" line) and sound; Iranica says of this collection that "the harmony of sounds and the euphony of consonants and vowels fill the void of rhyme and rhythm." Read it aloud with the full text open and you'll hear it.

Compare this to Hafez. Hafez disguised his defiance in wine and mysticism, layers that could be read innocently if anyone came asking. Shamlu gives you a roadblock, a whip and a butcher. The distance between the two poets, six centuries, is also the distance between coded resistance and open protest.

Vocabulary Recap

Shamlu's language in this poem mixes everyday words with literary ones. That makes it a good bridge for heritage speakers who know spoken Persian and want to read.

FAQs

Our app, ZabanYar (coming soon), is built to drill vocabulary like the words in this poem until they stick.

If you want to read Shamlu in the original, and actually feel the weight of each word rather than relying on translations, let's work on your Farsi together on Preply. We'll start with poems you can carry with you.

This is Part 11 of the Persian Poetry for People Who Don't Read Poetry series.
Previous: Episode 10: Hafez's "Salaah-e Kaar"
Next: Episode 12: Forough Farrokhzad's "Tavallodi Digar"

All our Persian poetry posts, organized by poet and CEFR level: Persian Poetry for Learners: Where to Start.

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