Mohammad-Reza Rahmani-Yarahmadi, who went by the pen name Mehrdad Avesta was born in Boroujerd in 1930. His poetry collections titled “Hamaseh-ye Arash” and “Az Karavan Rafteh” present him as a moral poet who was humble and chaste, according to his friends. His elegies and sonnets, which have an epic setting, reveal his rich background in ancient literature and learning from the schools of literary academies; schools that have had a considerable role in training young poets in the past decades.
Mehrdad Avasta has left behind poems with a fluent and eloquent language that is extremely powerful and structured. Like the rest of his generation, he was born in a time of historic pain: in the pre-revolutionary decades of rapid social and political changes. His poetry was the result of directly witnessing the injustice and oppression that befell the powerless people of his time. The poet is the narrator of this non-healing wound.
Speaking of pain and hearing of pain
Is so painful with those without pain
Avesta, who was sent to jail in the years following the 1953 coup d’état (28th Mordad Coup), later published his poetry collection titled “Sharab-e Khanegi Tars-e Mohtaseb Khordeh” and his critical book titled “Tirana”; his mention of Imam Khomeyni’s name in both of these works led to the ban of his books, and thus Avesta paid the price of his dissidence.
Nonetheless, he never moved away from his intellectual and religious tone. Although he is recognized as one of the most cherished contemporary sonneteers and ranks beside Shahriyar and Sayeh for his finely composed sonnets, he used other forms of poetry to grasp his concern for his revolutionary homeland and an ideal world. It is maybe for the same reason that many of the conscious poets of the Arab world have composed eulogies in his remembrance. Mehrdad Avesta passed away in Tehran in 1991.
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