Sayyed Hasan Hoseyni

Culture and Art
Sayyed Hasan Hoseyni

Today the pure word of ‘Hezbollah’

Seems to be a deep insult

In the ‘enlightened’ lexicon of these people!

But I remember well

The day when the ‘enlightened’

Got drunk

In the cafes of the turbulent city

Away from the uproars

With the sacrifices of ‘Hezbollah’ devotees

The pages of this nation’s history

Were being turned

Dr. Hasan Hoseyni was born in Tehran on March 21, 1956. After completing secondary school, he attended Mashhad University and earned his bachelor’s degree in nutrition in 1979. In 1980, he left for military service and during this time, he undertook program writing for the military radio. A year before this, Dr. Hoseyni had begun to participate in poetry analysis circles held in Hozeh Honari along with a number of other poets and artists; this continued up until 1987. It was in 1990 that the late Hasan Hoseyni entered university to continue his education and studied Persian language and literature until earning his doctorate. He had started to teach at al-Zahra and Azad Universities two years before this. Through two of his works titled “United with the Voice of Ismail” and “The Sparrow and Gabriel,” Hoseyni was able to lay the basis of a new trend in a religiously-inclined free verse, continuing the movement of Saffarzadeh and Garmaroudi. He recognized poetry as a sword raised in defence of society’s spiritual values; he utilized the literary method as a structure for this poetic frame. Leisure had no way into his works.

It is for this reason that we can search for the date of events, personalities, and various cultural and social issues of Iran in his poetry. Dr. Hasan Hoseyni passed away on the 29th of March, 2005.

Without prior notice

I get martyred at the hospital door

And on the verge of the Martyr’s Square

A young angel sighs in her heart

And bids farewell to my hungry wishes…

Although Hoseyni is successful in moulding his intellectual system into free verse, he also has a large share in outlining the composition of a type of revolutionary-religious quatrain; a simple language and structures in which one can see the combination of love and religion in many of them:

Those who know the language of love

Sing the song of love with closed lips

With their leaving is the melody of return

They are like the sun that has set

Hoseyni’s untimely death caused the loss of a particular tone in contemporary religious poetry which none has compensated for.

They had told us

That the sorrow of bread

Kills faith

In everyone

On a night as cold as death

That the air shivered

And the city’s tired body

Was the bed of winter snow

I left for home

I was hungry

I saw my father

Who in that cold darkness

Was fighting hard

With the ice in the yard’s old pool

‘Til from the enemy’s blood

To perform ablution after that war

Without saying a word

My father said, “Oh son!

The cure to our pain

Is faith”

 

 

Archive of Culture and Art

Comments

leave your comments