Mahmud Kianush

Mahmud Kianush was born in 1934 in Mashad, in the north-east of Iran. His family moved to Tehran when he was about 12 years old.

He began writing poems when he was 12 - mostly ghazal, a classical Persian form similar in some aspects to English odes and sonnets. In high school, when he was about 16, having already read the works of some European writers in Persian translation, he was encouraged to write short stories and his first story, published in the “National Students Organisation Weekly”, won a national prize. Later, while still in high school, his short stories were published, under different pen names, in leading literary weeklies. One of these weeklies was “The Third Force, Literary Weekly” whose editor, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, had assumed the stories sent by post to him were written by a writer of his own age and level.

After studying for two years in the Teachers Training School in Tehran, Mahmud Kianush began teaching in elementary schools. At that time he was nineteen and while teaching, he attended Tehran University and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English language and literature. In his first year in the university, he published his Persian translation of John Steinbeck's novel, “ To A God Unknown “.

It was at this time that he began writing modern poems, using a form similar to “free verse”, but this kind of freedom in style did not satisfy his search for aesthetic innovations and soon he returned to metrical poetry, developing new rhythms on the basis of the classical ones, making them for different subjects in accordance with their musical reflections in his mind. He used the same metre throughout a poem, but with lines of different lengths and with new arrangements of rhymes, in harmony with the images and meanings.

His contributions of poems, short stories, essays and translations to the leading literary magazines and periodicals soon made him famous enough to be invited to undertake the editorship of the most prestigious literary monthly, Sokhan (Speech). After four years, he resigned from this literary post and devoted all his time to writing. However, he was then invited by the Department of Educational Publications in the Ministry of Education, to examine the situation of children’s poetry in relation to their five biweekly magazines which were published for the students of the elementary and secondary schools. What he found was that the few poets who wrote for children thought that versifying educational and moral subjects in a simple, childish language was the only way of writing poems for children. Feeling that it was his national duty to do something about these cultural shortcomings, he began writing real poetry for children. During his eight years of contributing to these magazines, he derived certain principles from his own experience and wrote a book about children’ poetry. Later this book became a manual for the poets who wanted to write for children. To this day his poems are imitated by many poets who write for children.

Kianush collected and published his poems for children and young adults in eight books, all of which won different awards. He became known as the founder of children’s poetry in Iran. But he does not care for this title which he believes to be quite contrary to his real achievement as the messenger of the truth hidden in the heart of perceptible realities which, in occasional blessed moments, reveals itself to him on the horizon of artistic beauty. He says that in Iran, a country where the people, especially the intelligentsia, have since the late nineteenth century been possessed by the politics of freedom and social change, the popularity of a poet depends on his being the artistic mouthpiece and interpreter of the political aspirations of the populace. On the other hand a poet like himself, one of the few poets who have not sacrificed the universal principles of the art of poetry for the pleasure of temporal popularity, is considered difficult, obscure, elitist, philosophical, idealist, and so forth.

Poetry for Mahmud Kianush is the language of the childhood of historical man. He believes that the first human beings began to understand themselves, the world around them and the mysteries of the universe by their poetical interpretations of everything they saw and felt, and this is what real poets have always done and will always do. He agrees with the ancient idea that “man is a political animal”, but he adds that man must remain faithful to his primordial nature and first be a poet.

In 1974 Kianush who, as a civil servant in Iran, was an advisor to the Secretary of State for Administration and Employment Affairs in managerial and training publications, asked for early retirement, and in 1976, with his wife and two children, moved to London.
Mahmud Kianush has published fourteen books of poems, five collection of short stories, six novels and six books of literary criticism. For children and young adults he has published five books of stories and eight books of poems. He has also translated and published works by John Steinbeck, D.H.Lawrence, Eugene O’Neil, Aime Cesaire, Samuel Becket, Athol Fugard, Par Lagerkvist, Federico Garcia Lorca, Konstantin Cavafy, and others. He has a variety of other books ready for publication (among them five of satirical poems), but none of these has any chance of passing through the censorship in Iran.

Kianush edited and translated the anthology, Modern Persian Poetry (Rockingham Press, 1996), including the works of poets ranging from Nima Yushij (b. 1895) to those born in the 1960s. The first book of his own English poems, Of Birds and Men: Poems from a Persian Divan, was published by The Rockingham Press in 2004.