TEHRAN -- World-famous filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami is convinced that one of the problems Iranians encounter in understanding poetry is that they pay too much attention to rhythm.

Kiarostami believes that in reading a piece of poetry, one should not overly focus on repetitive patterns of sounds because this way one would fall short of grasping the meaning. In “Sadi According to Abbas Kiarostami” and “Hafez According to Abbas Kiarostami”, he writes from top to bottom to encourage the readers to focus on meaning rather than the musical patterns of the poems.
“I do not know how the idea came to me to write these books, I just found myself doing this. I tired to choose verses that did not rely on the next couplets. After collecting such verses, I changed the style of writing and wrote from top to bottom rather than right to left. Also I did not make any use of punctuation marks,” Kiarostami said in a session entitled “In Praise of Sadi” which was held at Tehran Central Book City on Tuesday.
He went on to say, “The critiques should pardon me; I had not worked on literature before. I should say that I only used the poems of Sadi and Hafez as raw material for my work; I did not nullify or remove any parts.”
“I started to apply the same modus operandi to the poems of Khaqani, but my attempts met with no success. It seems that Sadi was friendlier to me -- maybe because more dialogue pieces are found in Sadi’s poetry. I am currently working on Divan of Shams by Molana Jalal ad-Din Rumi.”
“I once advised my children to read the works of Sadi and said that it is like a window to a new world, but they told me to go to the internet window to understand who is who in the world.”
Kiarostami also said that it is very dangerous to make a crude use of poetry in cinema. “But in preparing dialogues, you can benefit from the impressions you get from the works of a particular poet; this is what I did in the movies ‘The Wind Will Carry Us’ and ‘Under the Olive Trees’,” he explained.
Several scholars and cultural figures including Gholam-Hossein Ebrahimi Dinani, Ahmad Samiei Gilani, Ahmad Jalali, and Tahmures Sajedi were present at the session.