Parvīn's “God's Weaver” and Whitman's “A Noiseless Patient Spider”

The work of Parvīn Iʿtiṣāmī (1907–1941), the first important twentiethcentury woman poet of Iran, has sometimes been criticised for too blindly endorsing patriarchy in her poetry and for choosing “the calm niche of traditional poetry” rather than “fishing for new ideas.” This chapter argues that the spider in Parvīn's poem “Jūlā-yi Khudā” (“God's Weaver”) provides a reply to those criticisms. One critic claims Parvīn was “her father's daughter;” I agree, but I find that relationship liberating rather than confining. Yūsif Iʿtiṣāmī (1874–1938), Parvīn's father, used his knowledge of foreign languages to transfer cultural and literary elements from other traditions into Persian society by translating Western literature and progressive Eastern works such as Taḥrīr-l-marʾa (The Liberation of Women); his daughter did the same thing through her creative reception of a poem by the American poet Walt Whitman.

The most influential factors on Parvīn's poetry included the social and political upheavals of Iran, her father, her father's friends, and the American school for girls that she attended. During her short life she witnessed a turbulent period covering some of the most significant events in the history of modern Iran, including the Constitutional Revolution, the 1908 coup d’etat, the prorogation and bombardment of the Majlis, the First World War, the 1921 coup d’état, and Riẓā Shāh's modernisation and autocratic rule. All these events highly increased her sensitivity towards the sociopolitical situation of her homeland.

Parvīn's father was Yūsif Iʿtiṣāmī, whose translation of Whitman's poem was analysed in chapter four. A reformist translator and literary journalist, Yūsif “very early recognized his daughter's extraordinary talent” and trained her in Arabic and Persian literature.5 He translated some forty works from French, Turkish and Arabic into Persian and encouraged Parvīn to write poetry based on those translations. He was familiar with the contemporary cultural issues of the world and was the first to introduce Esperanto to the Persian audience.