[Birth of Afghan Dari Free Verse] Bareq Shafi'i, Mohammad Hassan. Setak (The Stem): poems. Kabul, 1963. First edition. In Dari.

شفیعی، بارق. ستاک. چاپ اول.
کابل : دولتی مطبعه، د مطبوعاتو مستقل ریاست، ۱۳۴۲ [1963]. ۹۶ صفحه، مصور (پرتره).
پشتی کاغذی. قطع رقعی.
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Shafiei, Bariq [Mohammad Hasan]. Setak. First edition.
Kabul : State Press [Dawlati Matba'a], Independent Press Department, 1342 [1963]. 96 pp., with author's portrait.
Original publisher's softcover. Regular format.
Condition good: wrappers show natural age-toning and minor edge wear; text block is firm, pages are clean, well-preserved, and free of tears.

The first published collection of the poet, journalist, and statesman Mohammad Hassan Bareq Shafi'i (1931-2016), and, by the consistent account of Afghan literary historians, the first collection of modern Dari-language free verse (she'r-e nau) published in Afghanistan, following only a Pashto-language precursor. Born in Kabul in 1931 and trained in law and political science at Kabul University, Bareq Shafi'i began publishing poetry in the early 1950s and issued "Setak" in 1963 to considerable notice within Kabul's literary circles, both for its formal departure from classical prosody toward the free-verse forms associated with the Iranian Nima Yushij school, and for its content: the collection is dominated by political and protest poetry directed against the Afghan monarchy, reflecting the leftist intellectual currents of the period. Bareq Shafi'i went on to become a founding member of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), editor of the party's first newspaper "Khalq," and later Minister of Information and Culture; his subsequent poetry collections include "Shahr-e Hamasa" (1979), "Shipur-e Enqelab," "Doran-Saz" (1980, printed in Cyrillic script in Tajikistan), and "Milad-e Enqelab" (1987). As his literary debut and the foundational text of Dari free verse in Afghanistan, "Setak" holds a documented place at the origin point of modern Afghan poetry and is of strong interest to collectors and researchers of twentieth-century Persian-language literature, Cold War-era Afghan intellectual history, and the literary left in South and Central Asia.