Mirza Jafar Khamenei

Jafar Khamenei was born in Tabriz in 1887 and was educated here. He was the son of Hajj Sheikh Ali Akbar Khamenei, one of the Tabriz merchants, who was a very respected resident of the city and a very religious person. Jafar Khamenei secretly from his father learned French and became acquainted with the Turkish "new literature". Around 1913, he violated the traditional form of Persian poems and began to print fragments (Kytya) without a signature, with a new and unparalleled rhyme and relatively fresh content. One of these passages (“Homeland”) was even quoted by Edward Brown in his work “The History of the Press and Literature of the New Iran” ^[1] .

Many years before Nima, Yushija Jafar Khamenei wrote his poems in a new style, so he can be considered the first poet, a representative of new poetry. The newspaper Tajaddod wrote that Jafar Khamenei “destroyed the dam of conservatism in the world of literature and lyrics” ^[1] . His sensational poems were published in such well-known magazines as “Khabl al-Matin”, “Chakhre Nema”, “Asre Jadid” and “Shams” ^[2] .

Jafar Khamenei, in addition to being a writer and poet, was a constitutionalist and an active participant in the political struggle. Ahmed Kesravi in the book “My Life” introduces him as one of the friends of Sheikh Mohammad Hiyabani and adds that it was Jafar Khamenei who introduced him to Hiyabani. According to him, in the house of the father of Jafar Khamenei, Hajj Sheikh Ali Akbar Khamenei, supporters of the national liberation movement often gathered at night. In addition, in another of his works, “The History of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution,” Kesravi also mentions Jafar Khamenei as a translator ^[3] . So, for the Khabl al-Matin magazine, which was published in Calcutta, he translated from Turkish into a Persian article written by Akhmed-bek Agaev in the Hayat newspaper.