When Persian Poetry Meets Contemporary Music

For centuries, Persian poetry has crossed borders, generations and cultures. The words of Rumi, Hafez and Saadi have travelled far beyond the Persian-speaking world, while the voices of many remarkable modern Iranian poets remain far less familiar to international audiences.

Persian Poetry After Dark | In English is a contemporary music and poetry project created by Tony Zohari with a simple idea at its heart: to introduce Persian poetry to a wider audience by allowing it to live within the sounds of today.

Rather than presenting poetry only on the printed page, the project reimagines selected Persian poems as English-language musical works, bringing poetry together with electronic music, cinematic sound, deep house, trip-hop, downtempo, soul, indie pop and ambient textures.

It is an experiment in what can happen when literature, translation and contemporary music meet.

Beyond Rumi and Hafez

For many people outside Iran, Persian poetry begins — and sometimes ends — with Rumi, Hafez and perhaps Saadi.

Their international recognition is deserved, but Persian literature is considerably broader.

The twentieth century in particular produced an extraordinary generation of Iranian poets whose writing explored love, loneliness, freedom, identity, memory, social change, desire and the complexities of modern life.

Persian Poetry After Dark therefore moves between classical and modern voices.

Alongside Rumi, Hafez and Saadi, the project explores works by poets including Forough Farrokhzad, Nima Yushij, Ahmad Shamlou, Fereydoon Moshiri, Sohrab Sepehri, Simin Behbahani, Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, Nosrat Rahmani, Mohammad-Reza Shafiei Kadkani, Vida Farhoudi, Ghazal Tajbakhsh and Mohammad Zohari.

Each poet brings a different world.

The mystical language of Rumi demands a very different musical landscape from the intimate modernity of Forough Farrokhzad. The melancholy of Fereydoon Moshiri calls for something different again, as do the darker, more restless images found in the poetry of Ahmad Shamlou or Nosrat Rahmani.

The music therefore changes with the poem rather than forcing every poem into the same musical formula.

Translation as a Bridge

One of the greatest challenges facing Persian literature internationally is language.

Poetry is particularly difficult to translate because its meaning rarely exists in words alone. Rhythm, metaphor, cultural references, ambiguity and musicality all contribute to the experience of a poem.

A literal translation may preserve meaning while losing emotion. A freer translation may capture the feeling while moving too far from the poet’s original language.

Persian Poetry After Dark approaches this problem from another direction.

The English adaptations aim to retain the central imagery, meaning and emotional character of the original poems while allowing the words enough freedom to function within music.

The intention is not to replace the original poetry or to suggest that a musical adaptation can become a definitive translation.

Instead, music becomes another doorway into the poem.

A listener may encounter a poet for the first time through a song and subsequently become curious about the original work, the poet and the wider tradition from which it emerged.

In that sense, the music is an invitation.

Why Contemporary Music?

There is something interesting about hearing words written decades — or sometimes centuries — ago surrounded by contemporary electronic sound.

A poem by Rumi can suddenly inhabit cinematic electronica and deep house. Hafez can emerge through minimal grooves and atmospheric downtempo. Saadi can move through progressive electronic music, while the intensely personal poetry of modern Iranian writers can find new expression through trip-hop, soul or cinematic sound.

At first these combinations might seem unusual.

But Persian poetry has always possessed its own musical qualities. Rhythm, repetition, silence and sound are fundamental to the Persian poetic tradition, and poetry has long had a close relationship with Persian music and oral culture.

The project simply moves that relationship into another musical era.

Electronic production also provides something particularly useful for poetry: space.

Not every moment needs to contain words.

Long instrumental passages allow an image or a line of poetry to remain with the listener. Sometimes the music becomes expansive; sometimes it becomes almost silent. A poem can be sung, spoken or whispered, while at other moments the human voice disappears altogether.

The result sits somewhere between a song, a soundscape and a poetry performance.

Poetry After Dark

The words “After Dark” are important to the identity of the project.

Much of Persian poetry inhabits emotional spaces that feel particularly powerful at night: longing, memory, solitude, desire, loss, dreams, uncertainty and the search for meaning.

There are lovers waiting for one another, travellers searching for a friend’s house, memories returning unexpectedly, questions about existence and identity, and voices speaking from places somewhere between hope and despair.

Contemporary atmospheric music provides a natural environment for these emotions.

The aim is not simply to put a beat behind a poem. The music should create a space around the words — a landscape in which the poetry can breathe.

Connecting Generations

Projects such as Persian Poetry After Dark also raise a wider cultural question.

How do we keep literary heritage alive for generations whose cultural lives increasingly exist in digital spaces?

Preservation is essential. Original manuscripts, authoritative editions, academic research and faithful translations remain fundamental to understanding literary history.

But preservation alone does not necessarily guarantee engagement.

A younger listener discovering a Persian poet through Spotify, YouTube or another digital platform may be experiencing that literature very differently from someone encountering the same poet in a university library.

Neither experience needs to cancel the other.

Digital culture can instead become a starting point.

Music, film, visual art, podcasts and other contemporary forms can create new routes into literature — particularly for people growing up outside the language and culture in which that literature was originally created.

For members of the Iranian diaspora, this can have another significance. English-language adaptations can provide a bridge towards a literary heritage that may feel culturally familiar but linguistically distant.

From Ancient Words to Digital Culture

The history of poetry is also a history of changing forms of transmission.

Poetry existed in oral traditions before it lived in books. Manuscripts gave way to printing. Recordings brought poets’ voices into people’s homes. Radio, television and eventually the internet transformed how literature travelled.

Streaming music and digital media are simply the latest chapter in that process.

What changes is the medium.

What remains is the human need to express love, grief, desire, fear, wonder, loneliness and hope.

That may be why a Persian poem written hundreds of years ago can still feel unexpectedly contemporary when heard through headphones late at night.

The technology surrounding the words may be new.

The emotions are not.

A Continuing Experiment

Persian Poetry After Dark | In English is an evolving project rather than a finished collection.

New poems and poets continue to be explored, with each work suggesting its own musical language. Some become intimate cinematic pieces; others move towards deep house, electronica, soul, trance, trip-hop or ambient music.

What connects them is the attempt to preserve something essential from the original poetry while allowing it to exist in a completely different cultural and musical environment.

Perhaps the most interesting possibility is not that contemporary music can modernise Persian poetry.

Persian poetry does not need modernising.

Its questions about love, mortality, identity, freedom, belonging and the meaning of human existence are already timeless.

What contemporary music can do is create another way of encountering those questions.

For someone who has never read Persian poetry, a four-minute piece of music might become the first encounter with Forough Farrokhzad, Ahmad Shamlou, Nima Yushij or Fereydoon Moshiri.

And from there, perhaps, curiosity begins.

A listener searches for the poet.

A song leads to a poem.

A poem leads to a book.

And words written in another language, another country and another time begin a new journey.

Persian Poetry After Dark | In English is ultimately about that journey — allowing the voices of Persian poetry to travel once again, this time through contemporary music and into the headphones of a new generation.

Persian Poetry After Dark | In English is a music and poetry project by Tony Zohari. The growing collection brings English adaptations of classical and modern Persian poetry together with contemporary electronic, cinematic and atmospheric music.