***
With poetry and cigarettes
I go to war against inequalities.
I am an absurd Don Quixote who,
instead of lance and helmet,
has a pencil in his hand and a saucepan on his head.
Take a photo of me as a keepsake;
I am the human of the 21st century!
***
Summer was a cool watermelon,
sliced, on the plate of noon.
They ate.
We watched.
They were rich.
We, poor.
***
Behnam, Mehrdad, and I
have come to this remote coffeehouse
to take revenge.
Life has scarred us,
but neither James Dean nor John Wayne enters.
Tough luck!
We get angry.
We break into tears, just so we have broken something,
and then fire up in our dreams,
but only three cigarettes are lighted on our lips.
***
I’ve never seen any ashes not going with the wind.
Your corpse, too, won’t remain on the ground my friend.
Put back the hive you stole from someone else’s dream.
Give back the naan you stole from others.
What is not yours
is not yours.
Don’t live at all costs!
Don’t worry;
your corpse won’t remain on the ground.
You die, we’ll bury you!
***
By the seaside,
if you’re in love, you’ll fall deeper.
And if crazy, you’ll go crazier.
This is the sea’s nature;
it gives everything an immensity of lunacy.
Poets won’t make it back in one piece
from beach cities.
***
You go to Boston,
I don’t know where that is and I feel blue.
You go to Gabbata,
I don’t know where that is and I feel blue.
Wherever you go and I’ve never heard of it,
I feel blue.
I don’t know why I feel that distant and obscure roads
are located in the realm of death!
I’m not saying, “Don’t travel.”
Do travel, but to Tabriz, Ahwaz,
or wherever else you can come back from on a late-night bus.
Trusting airplanes is a tricky business.
they turn people into birds,
and I don’t remember a swallow coming back from Boston,
or a crane coming back from Gabbata.
Six Poems
Rasool Yoonan
translated from the Persian by Siavash Saadlou
Listen to the poems read in the original Persian by Amir Maleki:
Rasool Yoonan is a profound minimalist. My first exchange of emails with him is a testament to how laconic he can be. I had asked him for a brief biography; this is the reply I got: “I am Rasool Yoonan, the son of Mohammad. At times, when I feel blue, I write poems, and at other times, prose.”
Translating Yoonan’s poetry is much like a game of chess, with every move potentially leading to a triumph or fiasco. He chooses his words both meticulously and nonchalantly. The difficulty thus lies in translating the terribly tricky tone of his language. Some of his poems can render you simultaneously lovelorn, affectionate, cogitative, mournful, and elated. As well, Yoonan employs personification and metaphor as though constantly defamiliarizing himself with places and objects he has come to know.
Although most of his poems strike a universal chord, Yoonan’s voice can be interpreted as that of the scarred, the deprived, the unseen, the unheard, and the outraged of today’s Iran. Certain images stem from his childhood, like that of the train and pier. He grew up in a village near Lake Urmia. His mother tongue is Azerbaijani, and, after Mohammad-Hossein Behjat Tabrizi (better known by his pen name Shahriar), Yoonan is only the second Azerbaijani-speaking poet who pens such powerful Persian poetry.
Yoonan is fairly unassuming and has a certain distaste for holding lengthy conversations on poetics. Many a critic has chastised him for being, in their opinion, overly minimal. Yoonan himself, however, believes that no poet should be judged by the mere length of their poems. “Many Iranian poets have written minimal poems and didn’t manage to succeed. By the same token, there are many poets who have written longer poems and didn’t manage to find a lot of readers,” says Yoonan. He adheres to what Coleridge once said of poetry: “[poetry] is the best words in their best order.”
Rasool Yoonan is one of the important harbingers of postmodernism in Persian poetry, which is in stark contrast with its classical counterpart: simple, minimal, and free from pomp and pageantry. Perhaps it is no accident that his first name means “the messenger” or “the chosen one” and his last name means “the country of Greece” in Persian: they could be taken as a metaphor for how philosophical he sounds in many of his poems.
Translating Yoonan’s poetry is much like a game of chess, with every move potentially leading to a triumph or fiasco. He chooses his words both meticulously and nonchalantly. The difficulty thus lies in translating the terribly tricky tone of his language. Some of his poems can render you simultaneously lovelorn, affectionate, cogitative, mournful, and elated. As well, Yoonan employs personification and metaphor as though constantly defamiliarizing himself with places and objects he has come to know.
Although most of his poems strike a universal chord, Yoonan’s voice can be interpreted as that of the scarred, the deprived, the unseen, the unheard, and the outraged of today’s Iran. Certain images stem from his childhood, like that of the train and pier. He grew up in a village near Lake Urmia. His mother tongue is Azerbaijani, and, after Mohammad-Hossein Behjat Tabrizi (better known by his pen name Shahriar), Yoonan is only the second Azerbaijani-speaking poet who pens such powerful Persian poetry.
Yoonan is fairly unassuming and has a certain distaste for holding lengthy conversations on poetics. Many a critic has chastised him for being, in their opinion, overly minimal. Yoonan himself, however, believes that no poet should be judged by the mere length of their poems. “Many Iranian poets have written minimal poems and didn’t manage to succeed. By the same token, there are many poets who have written longer poems and didn’t manage to find a lot of readers,” says Yoonan. He adheres to what Coleridge once said of poetry: “[poetry] is the best words in their best order.”
Rasool Yoonan is one of the important harbingers of postmodernism in Persian poetry, which is in stark contrast with its classical counterpart: simple, minimal, and free from pomp and pageantry. Perhaps it is no accident that his first name means “the messenger” or “the chosen one” and his last name means “the country of Greece” in Persian: they could be taken as a metaphor for how philosophical he sounds in many of his poems.
Rasool Yoonan was born in 1969 in Urmia, Iran. He is a poet, playwright, novelist, and translator. His debut collection of poetry, Good Day My Dear, was published in 1998. Further collections include Concert in Hell, I Was a Bad Boy, Carrying the Piano Down the Stairs of an Icy Hotel, and Be Careful; Ants Are Coming. Yoonan is currently one of the most widely read living poets inside Iran. His poetry has previously been translated into Armenian and French. Yoonan’s most recent published works are three collections of microfiction: You Idiot! We’re Dead; Damn It, Pick Up the Phone; and Go to Hell!
Siavash Saadlou was born and raised in Iran. He is a writer, literary translator, editor, and interpreter. He is the authorized translator of Rasool Yoonan, the minimalist Iranian poet. His translations have been published or are forthcoming in Washington Square Review, Indian Review, Visions International, Blue Lyra Review, and The Writing Disorder. Saadlou is currently an M.F.A. creative writing candidate and a teaching fellow at Saint Mary’s College of California.
