Lúcia Araújo left for Pasárgada – and came back to tell about her experience. This veteran Brazilian journalist, who ran Canal Futura for 17 years, recently released the book “Trágica e Bela: Uma Viagem Pelas 1001 Faces da Persia e do Iran” (320 pages, R$69.90). The work recounts his visits to Iran and presents the contradictory faces of a country so mentioned in the news and still little known.
It is an informative book that draws attention precisely because of its personal and vulnerable tone, in which the author’s curiosity appears. Instead of looking like an encyclopedia entry, a risk this kind of text sometimes takes, “Tragic and Beautiful” presents an image built by experience. The Iran that appears in the book is Brazilian.
It is not by chance that the book opens with a reflection on the inescapable poem by Manuel Bandeira that says: “I’m leaving for Pasárgada / I’m a friend of the king there”. “By creating the metaphor”, writes Araújo, “the poet dethroned history itself, attributing to the name Pasárgada such a symbolic charge that it ended up eliminating any shadow of the real facts”.
To some extent, “Tragic and Beautiful” is reminiscent of the book “The Iranians”, by journalist Samy Adghirni, a former correspondent for the Sheet in Tehran. Adghirni even writes the preface to the work, praising Araújo for not having taken his eyes off the repulsive facets of Iran. “The ayatollahs’ regime is a suffering machine,” Adghirni writes, “but that doesn’t stop Lucia from being dazzled by the country and its people.” There are also echoes in the book of the classic “The Shah of the Shahs”, by Polish artist Ryszard Kapuściński – another one who left for Pasargada and returned.
