Poetry
افسانه
Not translated into English
Nima Yushij · 1923
Synopsis
In the night, a madman, guest of a cold and deserted valley, tells a story of affliction whose thread he has lost. The Lover questions Afsaneh, the legend, who has followed him since childhood: is she the cold wind of the mountain, a monster or a fairy? She answers that she is an incoherent tale, the fear that old women awaken in children, and the love that killed a young girl in a hut, one windy night. She invites him to spring and to forgetting; he sees only mirages, and each defends his share of truth.
Context
Begun in 1919 on the basis of legends from Mazandaran and completed in the month of Dey 1301, between December 1922 and January 1923, the poem is dedicated to Nezam Vafa, the poet who had been his teacher. Mirzadeh Eshghi published fewer than twenty stanzas of it in three consecutive issues of his weekly Qarn-e bistom, then stopped printing it; an anthology by Mohammad Ziya Hashtroudi soon reprinted a large part of it. It takes up, by allusion, a long autobiographical poem published in 1921. Roger Lescot gave a complete French translation in the Mélanges Massé, in Tehran, in 1963, declining to translate the word of the title.
Who it is for
A single piece in stanzas, to be read in one sitting; it exists in French. One must know that “afsaneh” means the legend, the folk tale, and that here it speaks.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the manifesto of the new poetry; critics date from it the break between Persian poetry before and today's.