شعری از مجید نفیسی: برای صدمین سالگرد تولدش | به جلال آل‌احمد

At the Centennial of his Birth

To Jalal Al-Ahmad

by

Majid Naficy

You got sick of the West

And returned from the U.S.S.R.

To co-ops of Zahra villages in Iran

And kibbutzes in the State of Isreal.

The machine depressed your soul

And the party shattered your dream.

So in search of the East

You became the curse of a land

Cultivated by a peasant co-op

But owned by a holy shrine.

At youth, you moved out of your father’s home

And the patter of your little gutter

Got lost in political storms.

But when your beehives were plagued by ants

And your paper-eating goats

Were scattered by oil tankers from the Kharg Island  

You withdrew and like a nobody

Returned to your father’s sanctuary.

You were hurried like your beautiful prose.

Alas! Three generations

Gulped it like a bottle of araq

Over which they stil have hangovers.

You wanted to be a third force

Against two superpowers.

Alas! Your savior Mullah

Turned out to be an antichrist.

You longed for a child.

This is his epitaph on your gravestone.

If you were alive today

We would have moved out of this house together.*

February 16, 1986

*- Jalal Al-Ahmad (1923-69) was the most prominent Iranian nonconformist intellectual in the 1960s. He died ten years before the Revolution but the Islamists falsely claim him for themselves. In this poem, I have alluded to the titles of ten of his books including his essay “Westernization” and his translation of Andre Gide’s book “Return from the U.S.S.R.”. I met him once at age fifteen in Tehran.