The Translational Horizons of Iranian Modernism: Ahmad Shamlu’s Canon of the Global South

Abstract

This article explores how the Iranian poet and translator Ahmad Shamlu (1925–2000) reconceives the configuration of world poetics. Working at the intersection of global modernism and translation studies, it traces the formation of a Persian modernist poetics of solidarity on the basis of translations from so-called third-world literatures and explores how Shamlu’s political aesthetic traverses national borders to embrace ignored and marginalized poetic traditions. Rather than relying on French and other European modernisms to reinvigorate his national literature, Shamlu made available to his Iranian contemporaries a broad panorama of world literature that brought together Global Southern literatures, modernist poetics, and transnational political commitments. In tracing the literary and political forms shaped by Shamlu’s poetics of global solidarity, this article develops a post-Eurocentric framework for the study of Iranian literary modernism.