Mahdi Akhavan Langeroudi
Mahdi Akhavan Langeroudi was a poet and novelist from Langarud, near the Caspian coast. He came to Tehran to study sociology, met Kourosh Yaghmaei there, and wrote the lines Yaghmaei set on his first single; by the early seventies he had moved to Vienna, and he wrote in Persian from that distance for the rest of his life. He died in Vienna in 2020.
He grew up in Langarud, the son of a tea-factory owner, and published his first poetry collection, Sepidar, in 1966, years before the song that would carry his name furthest. The Gol-e Yakh credit sits inside a much larger shelf: collections of poems - Choob o Aj, Abnoos bar Atash, Khaneh, Salia - novels including Anubis and Tuska, a memoir of a week spent with the poet Ahmad Shamlou, and translations of Juan Ramon Jimenez into Persian. In 1999 he chose Gol-e Yakh as the title of his own selected poems: the poet accepting that one lyric, written young, had become his flag. When he died in Vienna in May 2020, the Persian press wrote it simply - the poet of Gol-e Yakh has died - and he was buried in the city's Central Cemetery, as far from Langarud as the song had traveled.
