شش شعر از

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.