Ahmad Shamlou (Persian pronunciation: [忙h藞m忙d(-e) 蕛藞蓲藧mlu藧], also known under his pen name A. Bamdad (Persian: 丕. 亘丕賲丿丕丿鈥�)) (December 12, 1925 鈥� July 24, 2000) was a Persian poet, writer, and journalist. Shamlou is arguably the most influential poet of modern Iran. His initial poetry was influenced by and in the tradition of Nima Youshij. Shamlou's poetry is complex, yet his imagery, which contributes significantly to the intensity of his poems, is simple. As the base, he uses the traditional imagery familiar to his Iranian audience through the works of Persian masters like Hafiz and Omar Khayy谩m. For infrastructure and impact, he uses a kind of everyday imagery in which personified oxymoronic elements are spiked with an unreal combination of the abstract and the concrete thus far unprecedented in Persian poetry, which distressed some of the admirers of more traditional poetry. Shamlou has translated extensively from French to Persian and his own works are also translated into a number of languages. He has also written a number of plays, edited the works of major classical Persian poets, especially Hafiz. His thirteen-volume Ketab-e Koucheh (The Book of Alley) is a major contribution in understanding the Iranian folklore beliefs and language. He also writes fiction and Screenplays, contributing to children鈥檚 literature, and journalism.
讴鬲丕亘 讴賵趩賴 噩賱丿 丕賵賱 = Ket芒b-e Kucheh = The Book of Alley Volume I (The Book of Alley #1), Ahmad Shamlou
The Book of Alley is a series of books about Persian idioms and proverbs by Ahmad Shamlou coauthored with his wife Aida Sarkisian.
Shamlou devoted four decades of his life to collecting and organizing Iranian folklore. Folklore from his perspective is a body of traditional beliefs, customs, and expressions. The language in general, and oral languages in particular, address it through different uses such as proverbs, laments, cries and so on. Therefore the language could be used as an index to folklore as a body of tradition.
The research work entitled Ketab Kuche (Translation: The Book of Alley) indexes the Iranian folklore through the Persian language. The book is a multi-volume, multi-disciplinary work designed as a major source of information, providing a detailed and accurate picture of an important world civilization over a span of several thousand years.
Ketab Kuche is one of the third Iranian national projects on Persian heritage and language beside the Encyclop忙dia Iranica, a multi-disciplinary reference work and research tool designed to record the facts of Iranian history and civilization and the Dehkhoda dictionary, the largest comprehensive Persian dictionary ever published, comprising 15 volumes. 14 volumes of this book were printed during his lifetime.