oṭāq-e ābī Persian 2025

The Blue Room (Otagh-e Abi) is a prose work written by Sohrab Sepehri in the final years of his life and published posthumously. It is best described as an unfinished autobiographical text that recounts three periods of the poet’s life: childhood, youth, and middle age. Sepehri was also a painter, and the book’s title, along with its images and notes, reveals to the reader his world of forms and colors.

The book opens with the mysterious story of a blue-colored room in the house of Sepehri’s childhood. In The Blue Room, the poetic quality of his inner world—infused with his distinctive philosophical reflection—appears this time through memories of childhood. He writes:

“The blue room was not far from the intimacy of earthly truth; we lived in this room. One day my mother entered the blue room. She saw a coiled snake on the wall niche and was frightened—terribly so. That same day we moved out of the blue room, to a room on the north side of the house, a white five-windowed room. We stayed there to the end, and the blue room remained empty forever.”

Through Sepehri’s knowledge and imagination, the story of this snake becomes connected to Indian and Greek myths and legends.

In the next part of the book, we encounter Sepehri as an adolescent trapped in the dull and exhausting framework of the educational system and school life. Just as in his poetry, where he constantly longs for untouched nature, here too he feels homesick for it and grows weary of a nature that one is forced to learn only through the details of geography textbooks.

In the final section, while recounting a memory of meeting a foreign artist, Sepehri reflects on and compares art in the East and the West, thereby also revisiting part of the history of Iranian art.