Azar Nafisi: What Persian poets influenced your work? | Big Think

Azar Nafisi: What Persian poets influenced your work?

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Khosro, among others.

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Azar Nafisi:

Azar Nafisi is best known as the author of the national bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which electrified its readers with a compassionate and often harrowing portrait of the Islamic revolution in Iran and how it affected one university professor and her students. The book has spent over 117 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Azar Nafisi’s new book, Things I Have Been Silent About: Memories, a memoir about her mother, was published in January 2009.

Azar Nafisi is a Visiting Professor and the executive director of Cultural Conversations at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, where she is a professor of aesthetics, culture, and literature, and teaches courses on the relation between culture and politics. Azar Nafisi held a fellowship at Oxford University, teaching and conducting a series of lectures on culture and the important role of Western literature and culture in Iran after the revolution in 1979. She has taught at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University and Allameh Tabatabaii.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What Persian poets influenced you?

Azar Nafisi: : Well the ones that I have been brought up with, but I think they are the best mainly are the classical poets – ..., which is one of the most wonderful poets of all times, not just Persian; the great ...poets.... . . That is how we found my daughter’s name. Usually Persians, they ask... advice for everything. And when someone is born, a lot of Persians are used to opening ...to see what is the future . . . what the future holds for the baby. And that is how we named our daughter. It’s a word from a poem by .... .... . ....I love..... And then there are modern poets. Iran at the beginning of 20th century had not just a political revolution, which led to the constitutional revolution and a constitutional monarchy, but also a very radical cultural revolution. And they introduced modern poetry and prose, so .... So there are many fortunately.