Persian Lesson 147 - The Little Black Fish

The Little Black Fish – Mahi siah e koochooloo – Samad Behrangi – Page 3 – A brief note on the life of the author

Dubareh salam; khosh amadid!

As I promised, today, I am going to talk a bit about Samad Behrangi, the creator of our little black fish.

Before going there, I want to share parts of a comment with you. Hopefully it is useful.

You may remember that last week I said, ‘to my knowledge, Persian is the only language, or at least one of the languages, that has only one pronoun for both ‘man’ and ‘woman’: /u:/.’

Here is the comment by LaRoza: (… It is true, to your knowledge, but there are other languages. Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu and other Indic languages also have no words for “he” and “she”, although Hindi and Urdu have grammatical genders, unlike Farsi. (Sanskrit has three genders). Finnish commonly uses the same pronoun (translated to “it”) as well but I think they have separate words technically. I don’t know other languages that do this…)

Thank you LaRoza for the comment. As you see, the languages you have mentioned still have more than one word, either in written or spoken form but in Persian we have only one word in both written and oral language, and that word is /u:/.

Anyway, now let’s go back to the life of Samad Behrangi.

Samad was born in June 24, 1939 in south of Tabriz city, Iran. After graduating from high school and the Teachers Training Academy, he started his career as a teacher in village schools in his area in 1957 and continued this job for about eleven years.

Apart from teaching, Behrangi wrote several stories for children the most famous of which is ‘The little black fish’. He also collected and published samples of oral Azarbaijani (Turkish language) literature, and translated poems of Ahmad Shamlu, Forough Farrokhzad and Mehdi Akhavan Saless from Persian into Turkish language.

Having ideas of Socialism and Communism, Samad Behrangi’s works reflect themes such as poverty, injustice and the need for social reforms in the society.

At the age of 29, Samad was found dead in Aras River, at the border of Iran and the Republic of Azerbaijan. The Shah’s Secret Army was blamed to be the assassin. (Iran sure has a long history in freedom of speech! In some countries, you just can’t have ‘light’ and ‘life’ at the same time!)

Behrangi’s books are certainly among the best in our modern literature in both form and meaning.