To celebrate International Poetry Day, we go through the poems of Abbas Kiarostami, which were recently translated into Romanian by Vlad Drăgoi for OMG Publishing – and we take a look at how his literary work blends together with the leitmotifs of his cinema.

A few months before his untimely death in 2016, director Abbas Kiarostami – famously mentioned in Jean-Luc Godard’s axiom that “Film begins with D. W. Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami” – was the focus of a retrospective organized by TIFF, who invited the filmmaker to do a masterclass at the Bell Lightbox theater in Toronto for the occasion. The reason why I’m mentioning this talk – which was published online one day after his passing – is the following thing that he said, back then:

“I never made any film out of novel or literature or theatre. The only thing that inspires me to make a film is ‘life’ and my own observation of life. These observations can lead to one another. The films are not made by me, they make themselves.”

This vision about art was applied by Kiarostami not just within the bounds of cinema – and this is something that we can now discover due to a special translation of his poems into Romanian, recently issued by Cluj-based publisher OMG, conducted by the young local poet and writer Vlad Drăgoi. In The Shadow of Trees is an editorial event in and of itself, which adds another title to the ever-increasing landscape of cinema titles available in Romanian, which has gotten all the richer in the past few months.

To say that Abbas Kiarostami is one of the most important figures in the contemporary cinematic canon is already somewhat of a self-evident truth – in the latest Sight and Sound poll, his monumental 1990 work, Close-Up, is ranked amongst the top 20 films of all time by critics and takes the 9th spot in the filmmaker’s top. But, just as in the case of many prolific artists who play a quintessential role in (post)modern culture, Kiarostami also left many works behind that are lesser-known to the large audience – and I’m thinking especially about his late-period observational, contemplative documentaries (Five Dedicated to Ozu, 24 Frames), to his work as a photographer (for example, the Snow White series, 1978-2004) and, finally, about his poetry.

I’m not enumerating the above just for the sake of it (that is, of his body of work) – but because, by reading this tome, one may discover that these sides to Kiarostami are if not complementary, then, at the very least, they are convergent. They reveal to us a Kiarostami that is principally close and preoccupied with the natural world, with landscapes, with the so-called “non-human”: combining a predisposal for certain topoi (snowy landscapes, the sea, abandoned buildings, empty streets) and subjects (animals, trees, the moon – often personified), which he set to words in a manner that was often very similar (or, at least, correspondent in terms of the economy of its means) with the way he put them into images. Focusing on composition, with much patience, showing little preoccupation towards narratives ampler than the ones contained within, but rather focusing on the intrinsic symbolism and aesthetic value of his tableaux, Kiarostami often plays with the tension between static and dynamic, between a nature that is capable of both nurturing and destruction, of evoking both wonder and profound sadness, and with poetic images that imply a certain lack of clarity (fog, smoke).

Put together, his images – be they photographic, cinematic, or textual – weave a message that, at its core, speaks about time and duration. The primary matter of cinema: images that seem timeless, or blinks of an eye that, through the technique of juxtaposition, underline the elusive, passing manner of time – both entropy and natural flow. This montage sometimes comes across as a sudden fracture – from one stanza to another, time jumps from early fall to a scorchingly hot summer. Sometimes it seems to chain together small details from within a larger landscape, and at others, it takes a turn towards a more abstract, metaphysical style of writing, in which the lyrical I jumps to the fore. This latter mode is especially prominent in the book’s first chapter, which is underpinned by melancholy emotional outbursts and quasi-diaristic entries that are inserted between poetic images – wherein we discover a lyrical subject that is ruminating over various contradictions or conflicts (mostly with lovers or with friends).

The Romanian edition of In The Shadow of Trees contains a selection of three poems from the poetic oeuvre of Kiarostami: A Wolf Lying in Wait, Carried by The Wind, and The Wind and The Leaf. (The English edition, which contains the integral of his works, is over 600 pages long, as it also contains poems by influential Persian poets – such as Rumi or Hafez – that were reinterpreted by Kiarostami, or various selections made by him from the works of contemporary poets). These three poems are modernist in form – employing free verse, sparse usage of verbs, a variable and unequal rhythm, showing a predisposition towards tercets and quatrains (yet ranging from couplets to sestets), insisting upon repetition and ellipses. As pointed out by Aria Fani, a professor of Persian literature at the University of Washington, these characteristics come into contrast with the formal rigorousness of classical Iranian poetry, but, at the level of thematic preoccupations, Kiarostami’s poetry is oriented towards sacramental, universal topics: nature, seasons, time, and love.

As any potential reader will discover, there are two main modalities in which one can read these poems: either by seeing them as small, stand-alone poems that share a certain thematic continuity (for example, the recurrent nuns in Carried by the Wind), that are self-contained within their respective stanzas, either as long, flowing poems – which are not in any case epic, but rather, they’re more like montages of lyrical sequences, most of them contained within a single stanza (but not always – see, for example, the rhetorical sequence towards the end of the same chapter). These two perspectives don’t necessarily cancel each other out – instead, they reveal the complexity of Kiarostami’s dispositif, where the landscape and the detail are not competitive, co-dependent forces that are mutually exploitative, but rather energies that co-exist, that are complementary.

Those familiar with the cinematic works of Kiarostami will discover many references here. Some are very direct, outright textual – the village of Koker is evoked, together with the devastating earthquake that destroyed it; recurrent mentions of cherries; a brief, but startling appearance of the mythological character of Shirin – while others are more subtle. For example, objects are recurrently described as tumbling, conjuring the famous image of the rolling aluminum can in Close-Up, a fundamental signifier of a cinema (and of a vision) with a radically democratic force, whose fundamental message is that nothing is unworthy of being seen, observed, and recorded.

One can also find small flashes of criticism towards the situation in Iran: such as the disturbing image of a „man hanging / in a noose / in the early morning”, or of an encounter with the system („I press the paper / with the tip of my finger / dabbed in ink. / I feel less humiliated / when I see all those stripes / on the tip of my finger”). Far from being a major thematic preoccupation, these small references are rather the impulses of a consciousness so radically focused on its surroundings – which also includes the political –, wherein nature, the ultimate ordering principle (especially, temporal) of a world that cannot be fully contained, lying above all human activity, has the final say.

In the Shadow of Trees is an essential volume for cinephiles that have already encountered the works of Kiarostami, and that will equally delight readers who are passionate about Persian poetry. For those who are less familiar with his films, the volume has all the necessary force to persuade them to also tread down the path of his cinematic oeuvre.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.