“Il n'y a plus d'après A Saint-Germain-des-Prés Plus d'après-demain Plus d'après-midi Il n'y a qu'aujourd'hui Quand je te reverrai A Saint-Germain-des-Prés Ce n'sera plus toi Ce n'sera plus moi Il n'y a plus d'autrefois…”
– A Saint-Germain-des-Prés by Guy Béart
Shusha (Shamsi) Guppy born Shamsi Assar (December 24, 1935, Tehran, Iran — March 21, 2008, London, United Kingdom), was a writer, editor and - under the name of 'Shusha' - a singer of Persian and Western folk songs. She had lived in London since the mid 1960s. She was also a talented amateur documentary filmmaker who was even nominated for an Oscar® (a First for an Iranian) back in 1976 for her feature documentary People of the Wind co-directed with Anthony Howarth which was narrated by British Hollywood Star James Mason. Her books were reminiscent of the very first generation of Iranian expatriates to study and live outside Iran and who redefined and enriched their Persian heritage within a cosmopolitan identity both by necessity and choice. Her illustrative, often amusing but always profoundly thoughtful outlook on herself and her compatriots as well as the Western cultural community which she encountered on friendly and professional levels was profoundly nostalgic of an era now long gone …
The last two decades of her life were bitterly affected by controversies that surrounded her troublesome son’s illegal financial activities. It did not however ebb the literary and artistic achievements and ambitions of the iconic Persian Girl of Saint Germain. Her autobiographical works were celebrated both in Great Britain and France where “Un Jardin” à Teheran aka “The Blind Fold Horse: Memoirs of a Persian Childhood” was to receive the much envied Grand Prix literary Award of ELLE Magazine.
Her most recent book, The Secret of Laughter (2005), is a collection of Persian fairytales from Iran’s oral tradition. Many had never previously been published in written form.
She promoted Persian culture and history, and was a commentator on relations between the West and the Islamic world. For twenty years until 2005, she was the London Editor of the American literary journal The Paris Review.
Her death at the age of 72 is a great loss for the Persian Community and the Literary and music World at Large.
May She Rest in Peace!
See Below Telegraph Article :
Shusha Guppy, who died on March 21 aged 72, was an Iranian-born writer, composer and singer, and a salonière of literary, cosmopolitan London.
Trilingual in Persian, French and English, she wrote stylishly and succinctly in the last two and made a reputation as an interpreter of Persian love songs and French chanson. In exile from her native country, she became a passionate advocate of Sufi wisdom and the Persian classical literature on which she had been raised.
In 1961, after her marriage to the explorer and art dealer Nicholas Guppy, she moved to London, where her beauty, intelligence and gentle exoticism won her a wide circle of friends and admirers. Soirées at her Chelsea home attracted a diversity of talents, including such figures as AJ Ayer, Ted Hughes, Kathleen Raine, Alain de Botton, Frank Johnson and Bill Nighy.
The daughter of Mohammed Kazem Assar, a distinguished liberal-minded Shia theologian and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tehran, she was born Shamsi Assar on December 24 1935 and grew up in an atmosphere of poetry and mystical chants in the Persia of the Shahs. She movingly evoked her childhood and the civilized Tehran of her youth in The Blindfold Horse: memories of a Persian childhood (1998).
From Tehran's French lycée she won a scholarship, aged 16, to study French Literature and Philosophy at the Sorbonne. Arriving in Paris, she was soon swept up by the bohemian romance of Left-bank café culture; she trained as a singer and began performing in nightclubs and cabaret.
Encouraged by Jacques Prévert, she recorded Persian ballads, French chanson and traditional French songs, adopting the name Shusha - after the pre-classical capital of southern Iran.
In A Girl in Paris (1991) she recalled the heady atmosphere of post-war Parisian artistic and intellectual life, while exposing the morally dubious 'anti-bourgeois' posturing of Leftist intellectuals such as Sartre and Louis Aragon. Her career really took off, however, in London, where she continued to sing professionally, expanding her repertoire to include English folk songs, works by Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and others, and songs of her own composition.
As well as performing at concerts, she brought out 10 albums and published several books, while working as London editor of the American literary journal The Paris Review. In the 1970s she travelled with the nomadic Bakhtiari tribes of southern Persia and worked on two films, one of which, People of the Wind (A Persian Odyssey), won an Oscar nomination for best documentary.
