TEHRAN – The house of Nima Yushij (1897 –1960), who is famed as the father of modern Persian poetry, has been restored to the former state.

“Protective and emergency repairs, which include strengthening the gable roof and columns of the house, have been completed. Moreover, its walls, floorings, doors, and windows have been renovated and restored as well,” the director of the Tehran Municipality’s Beautification Organization said on Saturday.

Dating back to the second Pahlavi era, the house is now defined as the “Museum of Modern Iranian Poetry” and it is ready to open to the public, Reza Sayyadi said.

In 2019, Tehran Municipality purchased the house, which is situated in northern Tehran near the house of the famed Iranian couple Seyyed Jalal al-e-Ahmad and Simin Daneshvar who were novelists and short-story writers, the official explained.

Yushij began writing poetry when he was a high school student. Until the age of twelve, he lived in Yush, a village in the northern province of Mazandaran, near the Caspian Sea, where his father was a farmer.

In his speech to the First Congress of Iranian Writers, 1946, in Tehran, Nima Yushij said: “My first years of life were spent among the shepherds and horse-herders who, in their seasonal movements from one grassland to another, every evening sat around the fire on the Mountainside for long hours.

He continued these experiments until 1937 when he wrote his first symbolist free verse, “The Phoenix”, in which he successfully employed what he had learned from some of the French symbolists. Until then his dependence on classical forms had not allowed him to enter a completely new realm of poetry.

What made Yushij a great, powerful guru for the young poets of his time were his innovations in form and style rather than the content of his poetry.

He came to the scene of change at a time when all the conservative efforts of the Neo-classicists, Revivalists, and others had failed to free Persian poetry from the long decadence which was, to a great extent, the result of the ruling power of prosody over the subject matter.

The quantitative meters in Persian verse are numerous and they have equal possibilities for being broken and used in making lines of different lengths in a poem, but classical forms did not allow this. The other great obstacle to any innovation in the rhythmic construction of poems was the fixed pattern of rhymes in different forms.

AFM