Were he still alive, perhaps no reader would more greatly praise this academic study on the reception in Iran of America’s most seminal nineteenth century poet than Walt Whitman himself. Proclaiming in an early poem, “I see Teheran!” (p. 154), he seemingly catches up to his own visual projection toward a foreign country and poetic tradition that long intrigued him, inventing a persona of “the greybeard sufi” near the end of his career in his poem “A Persian Lesson” (p. 418). As if taking the poet’s playful image of himself as an older and bearded mystic more seriously, Behnam Fomeshi’s The Persian Whitman: Beyond a Literary Reception figuratively repositions the iconic American figure within the political and poetic history of Iran. Inverting Whitman’s relationship to his fantasy of a foreign country, this extensive examination considers how, according to the American poet’s self-professed ability to “contain multitudes” (p. 78), he takes on different meanings in modern Persian culture.
Using at times quite innovative critical methodologies to reveal the aesthetic and societal complexity of Iran through the multitudinous ways the country has viewed Whitman in the modern era, true to its title this historical approach tracks the Romantic poet of transcendence “beyond a literary reception.” Rest assured, Fomeshi indeed offers compelling comparative analysis of verse, demonstrating particularly keen insights that relate Whitman to his modern form-breaking Persian counterpart Nimā Yushij. Further interdisciplinary interrogations, however, broaden what Whitman means to the verse and culture of Iran as well as how he comes to mean it. Consequently, this book will appeal to those in the fields of both American and Persian studies along with translation studies, transnational (Iranian-American) literature, cultural criticism, political science, and more.
Effectively organized along a loose historical trajectory, with nine chapters further broken down into several subtopics, the study follows Whitman’s figurative origins in the nineteenth century across the Atlantic and deeper into modern Persian culture. Though consistently developed over 200 pages and best appreciated when read from beginning to end, the author’s claim that the text can also be accessed at any point as a reference proves equally valid. Opened at random like the divan of Hāfez, I land upon a comparison of Iranian politics and poetry to the physical image of the American poet used to further reflect upon Iranian literary and political culture. The next attempt arrives in addenda one page after the conclusion: juxtaposed time lines of “Sociopolitical and Literary Events of Iran” with “Whitman’s Reception in Modern Iran.” These six pages alone comprise a fascinating structural analysis, offering an invaluable resource for those interested in a broad range of comparative analysis between two disparate nations.
Lest such an entry point into a review of this book seems excessively creative, consider Fomeshi’s critical experimentation in the middle to later chapters. It’s almost worth skipping ahead to such especially innovative scholarship, though to fully grasp the implications of Whitman’s significance in what ultimately becomes a rather well-developed and substantiated argument, the first few chapters warrant some attention for the necessary biographical background of Whitman in his home country. The reader will need to first understand the early connections made between the American poet’s democratic politics and poetics as well as his conflation of democracy and nationalism to best follow the more intricate comparisons of Whitman to Iranian politics in the later pages.
The only slight critique to offer about this early assessment of Whitman is a missed opportunity to introduce his own engagement with the Persian verse tradition. Just two paragraphs, for example, cover the entirety of the poet’s relation to the Civil War. It would be worth mentioning Whitman’s personal copy of William Alger’s Poetry of the East, filled with translations of Persian verse, which the poet claimed to have carried with him throughout the war while by his own admission reading the introduction about the poets of Iran “over and over again.”Footnote 1 The poet’s interest in such a text during the most definitive political turning point in his nation’s history might further advance the keen political insights about Iran found later in this study. More broadly, a brief critical survey of how Whitman’s verse has been shown to reveal an uncanny resemblance to the classical Persian poets by such scholars as Arthur Ford, Ghulam Feyez, and Massud Farzan could provide an even more comprehensive critical framework by which to consider the reception of the foreign poet in a nation with a rich verse tradition that especially intrigued him in his later writing.
After the first few chapters, when Whitman crosses into Iran through translation, the scholarship becomes refreshingly innovative and revelatory. Chapter 4 considers Iran’s turn toward modernity around the Constitutional Movement through the influx of intellectual ideas and art from the West. Deft synthesis of the correspondence between the foreign importation of progressive ideas with new changes experienced within Iran aptly introduce Whitman’s arrival. Fomeshi’s focus on Mīrzā Yūsīf Khān I’tisām Mulk Āshtīyānī as the poet’s first translator as well as an especially active participant in the emerging twentieth century literary scene with the founding of Bahār—his country’s first contemporary literary journal—orients Whitman around Iran’s multifaceted turn toward modernism.
Whitman’s “Song of the Broad Axe” as an early poem rendered into Persian proves representative of both the poet’s and Iran’s spiritual, intellectual and material transformation. As if to further exemplify the kind of inventiveness associated with this historical period and the revolutionary poetics of Whitman, the author experiments with translating the poem into Persian, then back into English. Such a reading creatively advances the historical account of Iran’s radical changes centered upon its patriotism and nationalism leading up to and following the Constitutional Revolution. In addition to grand historical reckonings, the role of translation here and throughout much of the book consistently leads to necessary comparative political considerations, such as how the slave in Whitman’s nineteenth century American poem can’t quite offer the same connotative meaning in a Persian rendering.
Chapter 5 continues exploring the implications of Iranian literary modernism by connecting Whitman to Nimā Yushij and his founding of the New Poetry. Even Persian readers familiar with Nimā’s contribution will benefit from his thorough positioning within the political context of the Iranian twentieth century. As throughout this study, further reading him relative to Whitman as a poet who previously broke from the stilted constraints of a European formal tradition shows the distinctiveness of a Persian modernism that nevertheless belongs to a greater global aesthetic movement. A particular highlight occurs with the featuring of Nima’s writing on Whitman, which the author convincingly claims really demonstrates the Persian’s poet subtle attempt to describe himself.
Chapter 6 further localizes Whitman’s effect upon Persian verse through a close comparative reading of Julā-yi Khudā or “God’s Weaver” by Iran’s first important contemporary female poet Parvin I’tisāmī and Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient Spider.” As if picking up on an earlier critical thread from Chapter 4 that considered Parvin’s father as the first translator of Whitman into Persian, Fomeshi weaves a reading of these poems into what he calls a “mixed breed spider.” More than a simple one to one correspondence of the Persian poet’s adaptation of Whitman’s earlier well-known poem, the author interrogates the patriarchal tradition in which Parvin writes, getting close enough to her biography to offer a necessary corrective to previous assumptions that she could not have read the original in English (since, he explains, she did in fact attend an American school). Much as Whitman’s industriousness attracted Nimā to his aesthetic, Parvin’s interest in that particular poem is claimed to derive from the repetitive physical activity associated with the soul. Importantly, the author distinguishes the American poet’s grandiose desire to connect his spider’s labor with the universe from Parvin’s spider’s humbler contentment of following the work appointed by the divine through the tracing of the connotations of the latter poem back to a Qur’anic parable. As with Nimā, the author further distinguishes Parvin’s unique cultural and, in her case, feminine position relative to the American poem, reinforcing how even in this kind of western imitation her poem retains a sense of a distinct literary and gendered tradition. The chapter concludes with the observation of how Goli Taraghi, perhaps through Parvin’s appropriation of Whitman, reworks such influence into his short story “Dirakht-i-Gulābi (“The Pear Tree”), which in turn was adapted into a movie by Dariush Mehrjui.
Having set up several points of political and poetic comparisons, Chapter 7 provides even closer historical and figural analysis between Whitman and Nimā. The author uses the 1940s leftist intellectual Ihsān Tabarī as a pivotal critic and activist to connect the two poets through their challenging of inherited formal conventions. Here again this study proves quite remarkable for its judicial positioning of source texts, this time presenting Ihsān’s introduction of Whitman’s verse in Sukhan, another important literary journal following Bahār, with his introduction to the poetry of Nimā on the following page. Examining both poets’ struggle with their reception in their home countries because of their innovative approaches, the argument primarily focuses on the trajectory of Ihsān’s political as well as aesthetic alliance with Nimā. The side story of the leftist political activist and the history of his Tudih party helps advance an argument about how poetry comes to speak for ideological movements and vice versa. An intensely devoted defender of Nimā against his critics, Ihsān was the first to write an introduction to Whitman and the second to translate one of his poems into Persian, which strongly supports Fomeshi’s contention that “the Persian people tend to look at Whitman through Nimā or the other way around.”
After such a reading into poetry and politics, a seemingly superficial consideration of how Whitman’s image has been represented in Iran greatly deepens the comparative interrogation. As the most photographed author in the American nineteenth century, Whitman curated his own image, most famously by depicting himself on the cover of Leaves of Grass as a vibrantly young and uncommitted man dressed in common clothes who, as in his famous “Song of Myself,” would simply “lean and loaf” (p. 29). Surveying a handful of the poet’s images featured on book covers of Whitman’s verse translated into Persian, Fomeshi convincingly demonstrates how Iran has instead preferred to depict him as a wiser and older Sufi mystic like Rumi. Even more intriguing is how Whitman is represented as both a realistic poet and a mystical or even prophetic figure with an especially illuminated face bathed in blue light.
The final chapter further contemporizes and complicates considerations of Whitman’s figurative and political positionings in Iran. Paratextual analysis of the second full-length book translation of Whitman’s verse a decade into the twenty-first century considers the contradiction of a paticularly apolitical image of the poet on the cover of a book appearing in a publication series titled “literature of protest” that offers subversive lines from Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road” and an introduction relating how Whitman was fired and censored for what he wrote. One of Fomeshi’s overriding claims that Iranian readers project their own culture onto Whitman receives especially strong support here through a close reading of the Persian rendering, which actually mentions “freedom” more than Whitman’s original poem.
As Fomeshi throughout these chapters successfully reveals how the history of Iranian politics changes the way the country looks at Whitman, something of the American poet’s own radical and ever-changing verse carries over into a different culture that continues to both welcome and transform it. An especially complex American figure thus comes to reveal how Persian literature and society remain far from monolithic. Like the American poet himself that informs this study, Iran “contains multitudes.”
