Sohrab Sepehri was a notable Iranian poet and a painter. He is considered to be one of the five most famous Iranian poets who have practiced modern poetry. Sepehri was also one of Iran's foremost modernist painters.
Background
The third of five children, Sohrab was born to Māhjabin and Asad-Allāh Sepehri. About three months after Sohrāb’s birth, his family went to Golpāyegān and then to Ḵānsār, before settling in the Darvāza ʿAṭṭār quarter of Kāšān. A painter, skilled calligrapher, Sepehri’s father worked for the telegraph and post office there until he became paralyzed early in Sohrāb’s adolescence, leaving Sohrāb’s mother to take a position in the same office to support the family. A published poet, Sepehri’s maternal grandmother Ḥamida Sepehri was wife to Malek al-Mowarreḵin and daughter to Mirzā Moḥammad Taqi Khan Lesān al-Molk Sepehr, the noted historian. For the first part of his life, Sepehri lived in their family home which had a large orchard, an experience he would later recount in his posthumously published book “Oṭāq-e ābi.”
Education
From 1933 to 1940, he attended the Ḵayyām School (later named Modarres), where he started painting early on and wrote his first poem, a traditional quatrain, at the age of ten. From September 1940 until June 1943 he attended Pahlavi High School where he briefly studied the santur (hammer dulcimer) and continued painting. In September 1943 Sepehri moved to Tehran to attend the Teachers’ Training School.
In the summer of 1940 Sepehri took his first job at the Kāšān Textile Factory and was then temporarily hired by the Ministry of Agriculture as a field worker to combat a plague of lotuses that had afflicted Kāšān that year. Graduating in June 1945, he returned to Kāšān and in December found employment at Kāšān’s Office of Education, where he met the poet Mošfeq Kāšāni who familiarized him with Persian prosody and encouraged him to write poetry. Never thinking highly of his poems from this time, Sepehri would later burn almost all of them. In summer 1947 he published his first book of poetry titled “Along the grass or love’s resting place” with an introduction by Mošfeq Kāšāni. That same year Sepehri wrote an introduction to “Memories of youth.”
In summer 1948, Sepehri met the poet and painter Manučehr Šeybāni who introduced him to the works of Vincent van Gogh and Nimā Yušij, the first Persian modern poet successfully to break free of Persian classical prosody and its traditional imagery and conventions. While living in the capital, he worked for eight months for the then Anglo-Persian Oil Company and became more immersed in the works of Nimā Yušij, as well as Fereydun Tavallali. His first poem in the manner of Nima, entitled “Bimār”, was published in September 1948 in the journal Jahān-e now.
In fall 1951, Sepehri published his first collection of Nimāic poetry titled “The death of color.” The early 1950s also marked the beginning of his friendship and acquaintance with other notable poets and painters, many of whom would become important figures in Persian modernism in their own right. In June 1953, Sepehri completed his bachelor’s degree with honors, took a position as designer with the Organization of Public Health, and briefly collaborated with the art magazine Panja Ḵorus. This same year he participated in a number of group exhibits and published his third book of poetry, “The life of dreams”, with one of his own paintings on the cover.
In 1954 Sepehri took a position in the Office of Fine Arts and started to teach at the School of Fine Arts. During the course of the next two years Sepehri published translations of Japanese, French, and English poetry along with some of his own poems. In 1956 he participated in a group show at the Mehregān Club, and in August 1957 he traveled to Paris. On April 14, 1958 a number of his paintings were exhibited in the first Tehran Biennale. Four were selected together with works by other Persian artists and sent to the Venice Biennale. Later that spring Sepehri participated in the Venice Biennale in June 1958 before returning to Tehran, where he worked at the Ministry of Agriculture as a supervisor of audio-visual programs.
In January 1960 Sepehri briefly traveled to Tokyo before returning to Tehran to participate in the second Tehran Biennale, where he won the Grand Prize of Fine Arts. Very soon thereafter Homāyun Ṣanʿatizāda, director of the Franklin Book Program, purchased 150 of Sepheri’s. That August Sepehri used the proceeds from this sale to return to Tokyo for nearly six months to study woodblock printing with Unichi Hiratsuka, one of the most noted names of the 20th century Japanese art. On his way home in late winter 1961 he traveled to India for the first of several visits, completing a journey that would leave a permanent mark in his creative life.
Back in Tehran Sepehri had his first solo exhibit at Reżā ʿAbbāsi Gallery and a group show at The Export Bank of Iran. In September he took a teaching position at the School of Decorative Arts, and gave up his post six months later. This would be his last government or public service position. This same year three of his poems appeared in an anthology of modern Persian poetry “Examples of free verse.” He also published his next book of poetry “The downpour of sunshine” with an introduction by himself. In May-June 1962 Sepehri had another solo exhibit at Farhang Gallery and published, along with a number of his own poems, translations of Chinese poetry in Soḵan.
In 1963 Sepehri had six solo and group exhibitions, and one of his paintings appeared on the cover of Nāderpur’s selected poems entitled “Bargozida-ye ašʿār-e Nāder Nāderpur, 1326-1341.” That same year Abby Weed Grey purchased a number of his paintings for the Ben and Abby Grey Foundation. These pieces were subsequently included in a show called Fourteen Contemporary Iranian Artists, which opened in Tehran before circulating in the United States for four years under the auspices of the Western Association of Art Museums.
In 1964 the journal Musiqi, a prominent literary and cultural journal edited by Ḡolām-Ḥosayn Minbāšiān, published Sepehri’s translation of a Japanese play, and he designed the set for the production of the play “Āhan (Iron)” written and directed by Ḵojasta Kiā. This same year he traveled extensively throughout India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. In 1965 he had one group and one solo exhibition in the Borghese Gallery in Tehran, and published his poem “Ṣedā-ye pā-ye āb” in Āraš, a popular modern literary journal of the 1960s edited by Sirus Ṭāhbāz. In 1966 he published “Mosāfer”, again in Āraš, and translations of hymns from the Rig Veda.
In 1968 Sepehri published “Ḥajm-e sabz.” Its release coincided with the opening of his exhibit at Seyḥun Gallery in February 1968. In the next decade, he published few poems yet remained extremely active as a painter. In April and March 1969 he traveled to London, and then to Cagnes-sur-Mer in South of France where he exhibited his work at the town’s International Art Festival. In late spring 1970, Sepehri went to New York and briefly stayed with his friend Manučehr Yektāʾi in Long Island before moving to Manhattan in late August for eight months, during which time he had a group show in Bridgehampton.
After a brief return to Tehran he was back in Manhattan by mid-May 1971 for a solo exhibit at Elain Benson Gallery in Bridgehampton, which opened on 10 July. He had an extended stay in Paris in 1974 and traveled to Greece and Egypt on his way back to Iran. In 1975 he participated in Tehran’s First International Arts Festival, and later that year he received the Foruḡ Farroḵzād Poetry Award. From 16 - 21 June 1976 he participated in a group exhibit of modern Persian art at the International Art Fair in Basle, Switzerland. In winter 1977 Sepehri moved back to Kāšān, and published “Eight books”, an almost complete collection of his published work since Marg-e rang with the addition of the new collection “We nothing but gaze.”
In 1978 Sepehri had another solo exhibit at Seyḥun Gallery. This would be his last exhibit before his untimely death. In fall 1979 Sohrāb Sepehri was diagnosed with leukemia. He traveled to London with his sister Paridoḵt in December 1979, where they stayed until January 1980 for treatment, before returning to Tehran. On April 2, 1980 Sohrāb was admitted to Tehran’s Pārs Hospital where he died at 6:00 PM on April 21, 1980. Sepehri was buried on April 22, 1980 in the eastern courtyard of the shrine of Solṭān b. ʿAli Moḥammad Bāqer in Mašhad-e Ardahāl, a village near Kāšān.
Achievements
Sohrab Sepehri is not nearly so well known in the English language as he deserves to be. Very few of his poems have been translated, and there does not yet exist a translated collection of his works. However, in the world-wide Persian community, his poems are well loved and known by heart. He is considered crucial in the development of modern Persian poetry. He is one of the first to use free verse, and he closely follows Rumi in his contributions to poetic spirituality.
Sepehri’s classicism comes through in his concern with perspective, light, and shadow, all characteristic features of the figurative representational school of Kamāl al-Molk, the father of realist painting in Persia. Unwavering in his belief in a delicate yet essential unity between mankind, nature, and a greater cosmic order, Sepehri spent the length of his artistic life in search of the most effective expression of this central belief.
To this end, he freely crossed over to a variety of myths and philosophies ranging from Zen Buddhism and Taoism to Sufism and European Romanticism, retaining from each those tenets most organically suitable to his vision. Well-versed in Buddhism, mysticism and Western traditions, he mingled the Western concepts with Eastern ones, thereby creating a kind of poetry unsurpassed in the history of Persian literature. To him, new forms were new means to express his thoughts and feelings.
Membership
By the early 1950s Sepehri had gradually integrated himself into Tehran’s burgeoning modernist literati and artistic society, gravitating most towards members of Ḵorus jangi (The fighting rooster).
Personality
He was a soft-spoken, calm, and unusually sensitive introvert with a high-pitched voice and an exceptionally captivating gaze. He was meticulous and orderly, as much about his daily life as his artistic production, never signing a canvas or sending a poem to print before he felt completely satisfied with it. As such, it was not uncommon for him to destroy paintings and manuscripts that, for him, never came to full fruition for one reason or another. He shied away from crowds and steered clear of personal confrontations, which is why he never attended opening nights of his exhibitions and never responded verbally or in writing to any number of negative critiques of his work.
Interests
Writers
Nimā Yušij
Artists
Vincent van Gogh
Connections
Sepehri never married and had no children. There are no records of a personal relationship anywhere in his writings or in any of his biographies published through 2008. For the greater part of his adult life, he lived with his mother and younger sister Parvāna in a two-story house in North Amirābād Street of Tehran.
