Parvin

About Parvin

Parvin Etesami is the most recent of the seven and the only woman among them. She was born in Tabriz, published her Divan in 1935, and died at thirty-four.

Her form is the monazere, the debate poem, in which two things argue: a needle and a thread, an ant and an eagle, a candle and a moth. The argument is the lesson. She is also the poet here for whom no public domain English translation exists, her work being too recent for one.

She grew up inside the material. Her father Yusef Etesami was a translator and editor who published the literary journal Bahar, so the house held books, visiting writers and a classical training most girls of her generation were never offered. She was writing publishable verse in her early teens and her father printed some of it.

What the debate form lets her do is argue without preaching. Putting the case in the mouths of a needle and a thread, or a full jar and an empty one, means the poem can take a side on poverty, labour or the treatment of women while appearing to be about household objects. Persian readers have always understood that the objects are not the subject.

She published one book. The Divan of 1935 collects the work, and a second expanded edition followed after her death; there is no late period, no change of direction, because she did not get one. She died of typhoid in 1941, aged thirty four, and is buried in Qom beside her father.

She is the hardest of the original five to read in English, and the reason is copyright rather than difficulty. The public domain collections that carry Hafez, Rumi, Saadi and Khayyam were made in the nineteenth century, decades before she wrote. Anything in English is modern and rights-bound, so her page here relies on the Persian, which Ganjoor holds in full.