Iranian poetry today is characterized by a joy of experimentation and discovery in a country undergoing significant change, both aesthetically and socially. To this day, Ferdowsi's epic verses and the formally strict ghazals of Rumi are revered, and many memorize the poems of the saintly Hafiz. Contemporary poetry has liberated verse from its metrical and formal constraints. Everyday language, children's speech, dialects, as well as new themes and motifs have found their way into poetry. The House of Poetry invited six voices of Iranian contemporary poetry to Berlin: In the fall of 2016, they met with six German-speaking poets to participate in the workshop VERSschmuggel and embark on the adventure of translating each other without understanding the other's language. The poets worked in pairs with pre-prepared interlinear translations.