Works
Naderpour is well known for his extensive research on Iran's contemporary poetry, and also his thorough, insightful analyses of Iranian poets (Hafez, Ferdowsi, Omar Khayyám, Molawi Rumi, and many others). In addition, he is recognized for his perceptive commentaries on Iran's recent history and his astute observations on Iranians' cultural and political challenges. Naderpour published his first poems in the 1940s and completed four collections by the 1970s. He published various collections of poems, many of them translated into English, French, German, and Italian. Here is the list of his publications:
- Eyes and Hands (in Persian: Cheshm-haa-o Dast-haa): (1954)
- Daughter of the Cup (in Persian: Dokhtar-e Jaam): (1955)
- The Grape Poem (in Persian: Sher-e Angoor): (1958)
- Collyrium of the Sun (in Persian: Sormeh-e Khorsheed): (1960)
- Not Plant and Stone, but Fire (in Persian: Giaah-o Sang Nah, Aatash): (1978)
- From the Sublime to the Ridiculous (in Persian: As Aasemaan taa Rissmaan): (1978)
- The Last Supper (in Persian: Shaam-e Baazpaseen): (1978)
- False Dawn (in Persian: Sobh-e Drooghin): (1982)
- Blood and Ash (in Persian: Koon-o Khaakestar): (1989)
- Earth and Time (in Persian: Zamin-o Zaman): (1996)
In the introduction to his tenth and last collection of poems, Earth and Time, Naderpour noted that,
Poems come from “Heaven” and remain alien on “Earth”; instead of “place” they deal with “nature” and instead of “time” they deal with “history.” A poet who leaves his country and migrates to an alien land talks about his new home in terms of his original homeland. With his words he pictures the nature of his homeland, and instead of speaking of the “past” or the “future,” he links “history” with “eternity.” For an exiled poet the images of his homeland will always stay alive, but the homeland’s history, as well as its present, will be (for him) “eternity”.
The poems composed by Naderpour are rich in imagery and deeply imbedded in the texture of Persian language. Naderpour was an imagist, a wordsmith in one, and he ultimately was a classic poet living in a modern world, in a modern style.
Naderpour also published a large number of scholarly and research papers on Iran’s politics, culture, history, and literature in various print journals and magazines such as Iran-Shenasi, Mehregan, Sokhan, and Rahavard as well as in many different online journals.
Naderpour was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature and was awarded the Human Rights Watch Hellman-Hammett Grant in 1993. The grant is mostly awarded to the writers in exile whose works are banned in their own homelands.
Read more about this topic: Nader Naderpour
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.”
—William James (1842–1910)