[2] She was a controversial modernist poet and an iconoclast, [3] writing from a female point of view. Because what matters, is to cultivate and nourish one's own positive characteristics until one reaches a level worth of being a human. Farrokhzad's poetry was banned for more than a decade after the Islamic Revolution. Narrated by Farrokhzad with her own verses, the film portrays the colony as an allegory for Iranian society. [4] [5] Biography. Such precarities of signification are also prominent in the poems of Moussavi, whose six poetry collections have engaged with Forugh’s legacy to explore the liminality of diasporic life and the fragility of the quests to return to the departed land and belong in the new one. . However, the epistemic value of the Karbala mythology is more relevant than Christ’s passion would be for many contemporary poets writing political poems in English, the poem’s prophetic register intertextually relating to Forugh’s late poetry and to her voiceover in The House is Black. I Shall Salute the Sun Once Again, English-language documentary about Forough Farrokhzad, by Mansooreh Saboori, Irandukht Productions 1998. –from “Let Us Believe in the Dawn of the Cold Season” by Forugh Farrokhzad (translated by Jasmin Darznik). I know people whose poetry is not a reflection of their daily life. Finally, in the eyes of the literati and the media she had moved from being a good “poetess” to a great “poet.” Her poems were carefully and widely read, discussed and analyzed. “The Development of the Artistic Female Self in the Poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad”, in Mannani, Manijeh, and Veronica Thompson, Familiar and Foreign: Identity in Iranian Film and Literature. Iran; Middle East; World; Economy; People; Week in Review Keshavarz accuses Nafisi of a having written a ‘new Orientalist narrative’ by making Persian writing inferior to Western texts. "After her separation, and later her divorce (1954), from Parviz, she loses custody of her son because she has had several affairs. Rhyming ‘sea’ and ‘tenderly’ suggests the long syllables of the original, but the English features much shorter syllables and a less sorrowful sonic ambience. Forough relinquished her son to her ex-husband's family in order to pursue her calling in poetry and independent life style. Moussavi begins the poem with the Arabic ‘wa’t-tin o wa’z-zaytun’, ‘By the fig and by the olive’, a phrase from a chapter of the Qur’an in which God ‘swears’ by the fig and olive. , German Documentary about Forough Farrokhzads adopted son Hossein Mansouri, by Claus Strigel, Denkmal-Film 2007., edited byAfsaneh Najmabadi (Cambridge [Massachusetts]: Harvard University Press, 1990).ISBN0-932885-05-5. Sullivan, Zohreh. Perhaps to all three at once. In fact to even voice such a suggestion is unethical. She was buried under falling snow. After returning to Iran, in search of a job she met filmmaker and writer Ebrahim Golestan, who reinforced her own inclinations to express herself and live independently, and with whom she began a love affair. The night, like a strange specter gathered and swelled in the pallid windows, and the roads released themselves into the dark. this haunting novel uses the lens of fiction to capture the tenacity, spirit, and conflicting desires of a brave woman who represents the birth of feminism in Iran—and who continues to inspire generations of women around the world. After all, fortunately I am a woman. Neyshabouri, Safaneh. Forough Farrokhzad(5 January 1935 - 14 February 1967) Forugh Farrokhzad was an Iranian poet and film director. The Little Mermaid, Critical Review of poems by Forough Farrokhzad. The mythologization of her life, already shared between writers in Iran and among ‘hyphenated’ Iranians in the diaspora, is being brought to the attention of non-Iranians, who are dependent for their knowledge on mediators such as Wolpé and Darznik as well as scholars such as Farzaneh Milani and Fatemeh Keshavarz. Shams uses the word again as virāneh-gi, the abstract noun meaning ‘ruination’, in the second-last couplet, which Davis translates as ‘loss’, whereas it is closer to ‘we refused to believe in our own destruction’ or even ‘we had no faith in our own desolation’. To understand her lasting power, one must understand the aesthetic, imaginative and spiritual power her bold Persian style made possible for later poets, and not simply allow her to become a cipher for the stories of nostalgic exiles or an icon of political activism. Israelis have Dahlia Ravikovich and Yona Wallach. The turn in her last two collections toward sharply political and ontological questions has always been well received, a less ‘confessional’ yet still fervent late style, reaching for a prophetic register. Forugh’s poetry appears more translatable than the other modernist poets because of the greater simplicity and directness of her language, and because of the investment of visual images with emotion in a quasi-cinematic style. At a time when literature and the arts, and just about everything else in Iran were dominated by men, when very few women were respected as poets, a young woman by the name of Forugh Farrokhzad (Dec. 29, 1934- Feb 13, 1967) began writing and publishing poems that radiated with sensuality, pushing the boundaries of what could be uttered or put on paper by women. Director Abbas Kiarostami has drawn from her work repeatedly, including in his 1999 masterpiece The Wind Will Carry Us. Forugh Farrokhzad was a poet of great audacity and extraordinary talent. Pishbin, Shaahin. Everyone seems to have a favorite poet and can recite whole poems by heart. In Veils and Words, Farzaneh Milani’s classic book about the emerging voices of the Iranian women writers. [3] She was a controversial modernist poet and an iconoclast, [4] writing from a female point of view.[5][6]. Forugh Farrokhzad (en persa: فروغ فرخزاد) (Teheran, Iran, 5 de gener de 1935-Teheran, Iran, 13 de febrer de 1967), va ser una poeta i directora de cinema iraniana. For diasporic or exiled Iranian poets, the word connects these aesthetic and spiritual meanings to contemporary political dynamics, the destruction of reformist hopes, the ruination of promising lives and exilic uprooting. These were more political than her previous poems, scrutinizing the social injustice under the Shah’s rule, the modern Tehran with its increasingly mechanized way of life, and the hopelessness of those struggling to make a living. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011. The thought of her son thinking that she willingly abandoned him, is a source of great sorrow and constant torment for her."[7]. Forough Farrokhzad on Film Jeva Lange Featured March 11th 2018 "She was made up of magic and of energy in equal parts," writes fellow documentarian Chris Marker of the legendary Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad , whose death in 1967 at the age of 32 left the world with just a single example of her brilliance behind the camera. “Between Nostalgia and Activism: Iranian Australian Poetry and Cinema”. Amirrezvani, Anita, and Persis Karim. As well as Hussain, allusions are made to the Sufi martyr Mansur Al-Hallāj, who was killed and cut to pieces for political reasons (though ostensibly for religious blasphemy). Four years later The House is Black, her documentary set in a leper colony, received near universal acclaim. The boldness of that voice, together with the curtailment of her life, forge in the diaspora a shared sense of the interruptedness of lives, of lost promise, and the longing for a prelapsarian state. "Let Us Believe in the Dawn of the Cold Season" is a poetic translation/re-creation by poet Sholeh Wolpe in Sin:Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad', "Former lover of the poet known as Iran's Sylvia Plath breaks his silence", "Speaking Laterally: Transnational Poetics and the Rise of Modern Arabic and Persian Poetry in Iraq and Iran", "Suman Pokhrel's Blog: सुमन पोखरेल Suman Pokhrel - म र मेरो म (Nepali translation of Anna Swir's poem "Myself and My Person") - August 14, 2011 20:12", "Suman Pokhrel's Blog: सुमन पोखरेल Suman Pokhrel - भित्तामा टाउको बजारेँ मैले (Nepali translation of Anna Swir's poem "I Knocked My Head against the Wall") - November 05, 2012 11:09", The Legendary Iranian Poet Who Gave Me Hope, Literary Hub, I Have Sinned. A year later she gives a birth to her son, Kamyar. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1992. Volume 1, Number 4 (Winter 2017), XXIV-LI . In 1950's Tehran, in Iran, Forough Farrokhzad is 16 years old and has just gotten married to her cousin Parviz Shapour, against her family's will. Moussavi, Granaz. Neyshabouri, Safaneh. My Tehran for Sale: A reflection on the aesthetics of Iranian poetic cinema. In Iran, meanwhile, there is no higher art form. Routledge Handbook of Diaspora Studies. Tehran, 1972. [original research?] Torch passes to torch. The House is Black (Forough Farrokhzad, 1962) Forough Farrokhzad stands as one of the great feminist poets anywhere in the 20th century. Forugh Farrokhzad is arguably one of Iran's most influential female poets of the twentieth century. Literary Self-disclosure & Forugh Farrokhzad Socially, disclosure has an inevitable impact upon the literary scene of a historical period because social ideas and perceptions constitute a significant portion of human identity – either of the writer or reader, or each and all characters in a literary work. Another Birth, a collection of 35 poems published in 1964, was recognised by critics and the poet herself as a writerly maturation, with more compelling work in metaphor and style. Such mythmaking for a non-Persian speaking audience tends to cover over linguistic, stylistic and culturally specific aspects of the work, which are, admittedly, difficult to bring across. Australia, 2011. Fatemeh Shams has been required to develop the same resistance. Farrokhzad was the most significant female Iranian poet of the twentieth century, as revolutionary as Russia's Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva and America's Plath and Sexton. I was five, and yet the details are strangely vivid: my grandmother sitting me on her lap to watch the pop diva Googoosh on television while my mother packed our suitcases. Scholar Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak’s translation: I knowa sad little fairywhose home is in an oceanand who softly, softly,pours her heart out into a flute. Like the thousands of other Iranians who left Iran in the late 1970s, my family escaped the country in a hurry. . Ebrahimi, Mehraneh. Written and delivered by an Iranian woman, Hagar’s exile and her thirst in the desert as a rewriting of the killing of the saints Hallāj and Hussain are strident political commentary. “Fourteen Poems by Forugh Farrokhzād,” Literature East and West 20, 1976, 111-29. —. Farrokhzad's last public appearance in Sweden 10 […] Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Forugh sang of intense loneliness and loss in an unguardedly heartbroken Persian voice. Also about her is a chapter in Farzaneh Milani's work Veils and words: the emerging voices of Iranian women writers (1992). “We were very close, but I can’t measure how much I had feelings for her. The Literature of the Iranian Diaspora: Meaning and Identity Since the Islamic Revolution. Individualism and social conformity in the poetry of Furugh Farrukhzad. The result of this marriage was a son named Rostam Farrokhzad, who was named after the great Ancient Persian General of Sassanid Dynasty. In the famous poem ‘Another Birth’, for example, the last stanza begins with the phrase, ‘Man/ pari-e kuchek-e ghamgini-rā/ mishenāsam keh dar oghyānus-i maskan dārad,/ va delash-rā dar yek neylabak-e chubin/ mi-navāzad, ārām, ārām’. London, United Kingdom: I.B.Tauris, 2010. Additionally, it can mean ‘sign’, ‘proof’, or even ‘symbol’. Such cultural alterity and agony of eros should not be effaced for pure positivity and sameness costumed as diversity. Her son Kamyar, whom she affectionately calls Kami, is taken away from her and brought up by Parviz and his family. Biography Forugh (also spelled Forough) was born in Tehran to career military officer Colonel Mohammad Bagher Farrokhzad and … The madness or ‘drunkenness’ of love in Rumi and Hafez is valuable as it destroys a status quo predicated on prestige, reputation, and ‘getting and spending’ for a vision in which profit and loss mean nothing. Farrokhzad's poetry was banned for more than a decade after the Islamic Revolution. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2019. Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian American Writers. They had been in our basement for a long time, probably since the victory of the 1979 revolution. (Original works in Persian). Produced by Look What She Did. Throughout the millennium-old Persian literary tradition, Forugh is by far the most original poet, whose verse mirrors some of the most vivid concerns, sorrows, joys and desires of a contemporary individual. Farrokhzad, Forugh. Com a poeta va ser una de les més influents de l'Iran al segle xx.Era una poeta moderna, iconoclasta i controvertida. Darznik’s book, aimed at a non-Persian speaking audience, may leave readers unfamiliar with Forugh’s poetry believing her work was based almost entirely in confession and autobiography. They both shook me in ways that no other piece of literature had up to that point. Son oeuvre la plus importante a pour titre Une autre naissance. She had already published three volumes by the time the producer and filmmaker Ebrahim Golestan offered her the chance to direct a documentary short. But part of her immediacy is that she always writes as if she were speaking—to herself, or a lover, or the reader. MSU Press, 2012. Forugh Farrokhzad was born in Tehran in 1935, to career military officer Colonel Mohammad Bagher Farrokhzad (originally from Tafresh city) and his wife Touran Vaziri-Tabar. Forugh Farrokhzad in Best American Poetry blog, Another website containing her poems in English, "Forugh Farrokhzad, a Pioneer Female Poet from Iran", Inscription of Xerxes the Great in Van Fortress, Achaemenid inscription in the Kharg Island, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Forugh_Farrokhzad&oldid=1005572180, Articles containing Persian-language text, Official website different in Wikidata and Wikipedia, Wikipedia articles with BIBSYS identifiers, Wikipedia articles with PLWABN identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SELIBR identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SUDOC identifiers, Wikipedia articles with WORLDCATID identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, Ali Salami translated Another Birth: Selected Poems in 2001 (Zabankadeh, Tehran), ‘’I Pity The Garden’’ was included in The Green Book of Poetry by. Brookshaw, Dominic Parviz, and Nasrin Rahimieh. On February 14, 1967, she swerved to avoid an oncoming vehicle, was thrown from her car and died in hospital. The Forbidden: Poems from Iran and its Exiles. Some of them become poets, and sometimes these poets slice through convention into an entire new realm of reality, altering forever what poetry can do. Her work had finally reached a level of maturity in both content and form that could not be dismissed. In 1958, Forugh co-directed a documentary about an oil refinery fire in the south of Iran, during which she came to understand the brutal exploitations of British colonial presence. Tavallod-ī dīgar (Another Birth). —. She played an influential role in the unfolding of Iranian art cinema (the ‘Iranian New Wave’) and her champions include critic Jonathan Rosenbaum and French auteur Chris Marker, who have celebrated her 1962 documentary, The House is Black (Khaneh Siah Ast). Seyed-Gohrab, Ali A. Metaphor and Imagery in Persian Poetry. Words Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement. Talebi, Niloufar. 12, Iss. When hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets of Tehran in 2009, their chants took the shape of poems, and often it was Forugh’s poems inscribed on their protest signs. Cohen, Robin, and Carolin Fischer. London, United Kingdom: I.B.Tauris, 2015. Here I have marked the long ‘a’ sounds as ‘ā’, and if one listens to Forugh recite the lines, the long, drawn out syllables create a particular soundscape of melancholic beauty impossible to reproduce in English. Forugh Farrokhzad was a poet of great audacity and extraordinary talent. Exegetical glosses of a literary, philosophical, theological nature should be provided to exposit these allusions, and to demonstrate the intertextuality of Forugh’s work with traditional sources, classical Persian poetry, and European modernism. It always will be. Milani, Farzaneh. Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad Edited and translated by Sholeh Wolpé Winner of Lois Roth Persian Translation Award. Finally, there is the riposte Forugh represents to decades of orientalist caricatures, racist stereotypes and slurs against Iranian people (and in particular against Iranian women) in Western corporate media and entertainment: as Persis Karim writes. Forugh’s turbulent life, gender and erotic subject matter have often overshadowed her work. Sun 12 Feb 2017 11.22 EST. She was a poet of great audacity and extraordinary talent. She denied that her poems are a simple reflection of her life. Forough Farrokhzad (Persian: فروغ فرخزاد) (January 5, 1935 — February 13, 1967) was an Iranian poetess and film director. Four years later, in order to regain her freedom to be an artist, she divorces from Parviz leaving their son with him. —. Farrokhzad continued her education with classes in painting… Forough Farrokhzad, 1955, translated by Jasmin Darznik, copyright 2017. Although elegant and elliptical, here Forugh’s influence overshadows the poet’s own voice. The Wall (Divār), from 1956, and Rebellion (Esyān), 1958, ignited more controversy for their open treatment of feminine desire, spurring attacks from conservatives. Mohammad Reza Vaez Shahrestani, Forough’s Existentialist Lifeworld: A Minimalist Reading, Literature & Aesthetics'' 28 (2): 33-50. Forugh’s political awakening involved coming to see the destructive role of the Iranian nouveau riche (the ‘petro-bourgeoisie’ that Richard Kapuscinski excoriated in Shah of Shahs), who were dazzled and made arrogant by oil windfalls. The first three collections are placed together in one chapter, pointing to their common rhetoric of defiance, imprisonment, shame, and frustrated desire. This aspect does not always come through in Darznik’s biography. Her poetry books became my instruction manual, her life story, a constant source of inspiration. This was exactly 10 days before his assassination in Germany on August 6th 1992. It was winter, and the snow was falling fast that night in Tehran. In her tenderly crafted ghazal, ‘Things to Say’, Shams intertextually alludes to both Forugh and Hafez, especially the famous Hafezian ghazal that ends in the refrain keh mapors, ‘that…don’t ask’, as in ‘I’ve suffered love’s pain so much that…don’t ask!’ Each couplet in Shams’ poem ends with the refrain goftan nadārad keh which Davis translates as the emotionally much flatter, ‘there’s nothing to say’. The gravesite of Forugh in Tehran features in a brief yet important scene in the Iranian-Australian co-production My Tehran for Sale, made by the poet and writer-director Granaz Moussavi, who lives between Iran and Australia. The chapter on Forugh Farrokhzad is illuminating and sharp. From the summer of 1964 through December 1966, Forugh published five poems, each more discerning and inventive than anything she had previously written. I keep wondering, are they howling like that just to earn a day’s plate of basmati rice? It creates an allusion to traditional Persian poetry not brought over into English. Hillmann, Michael. Abbasi, Hasti. Scholars agree there is a ‘biographical problem’ in Forugh’s legacy. Home; News. When Hussain’s small son, Abdullah, cries out for water, an arrow is shot into his throat. Pishbin, Shaahin. The third of seven children (Amir, Massoud, Mehrdad, Fereydoun, Pooran, Gloria), she attended school until the ninth grade, then was taught painting and sewing at a girls' school for the manual arts. Another limitation is frequent narrative foreshadowing that creates a smoothness not appropriate to the fractious excesses and fervency of Forugh’s romantic and creative impulses. Further, they were “modern” as opposed to “traditional,” a form rejected by Iran’s academic community at the time and not considered poetry at all. When I left home, her book of Forugh’s poems was one of the few things I took with me. Read her poems and you’ll find the very forces that shape our moment: misogyny, censorship, nativism, consumerism, the annihilating violence of war. No one dreamed of beginnings. While Forugh’s broken relationship with her father has been incorporated into psychoanalytic interpretations of her romantic poems and to account for her recurrent concern with falling in love, the wider ambit of erotics in Persian poetry is an important contextual element, where love means the power of transformation. Because the role of eros in Persian culture and writing is not explained, readers are apt to view Forugh’s closely-detailed love life as a matter of romantic obsession or dependency. The grass withered in the meadows and the fish withered in the sea and the earth no longer welcomed the dead. It was through her verse that I found the courage to stand up to anyone and anything that would deny me the way I wanted to be: God, religion, political establishment, unjust social conventions, imposed gender roles, and categories that were constantly at work to prevent me from being ‘myself’. .I am cold and I knowthere’s nothing left of the wild poppy’s dreamsbut a few drops of blood. Amitis Publishers, Tehran, Iran. [6] Although the exact circumstances of her demise have been the subject of much debate, the official story is that she swerved her jeep to avoid an oncoming school bus and was thrown out of her car, hitting her head against the curb. Synonyms for the word ‘throat’ appear throughout: We kept lifting the dagger and alas, we gagged!We kept drawing kohl and Ya Hu! Karim, Persis M. Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora. She reminds a lover of “our nudity’s sheen like fish scales in water.” Doves fly from the peaks of her breasts. Translations consistently fail to carry over this effect. Forugh’s poetry is dropped in from chapter to chapter, at times unfortunately giving the impression that the poems are written by someone other than the first-person narrator, the ‘Forugh’ of the text. Forough-Ozzaman Farrokhzad, the 3 rd of 7 children of Mohammad Farrokhzad, an army officer, and Batul Vaziry-Tabar, a housewife, was born on December 28 th, 1934 in Tehran. She identifies with “the earth’s ferocious lust/ sucking all the waters in/ to impregnate the fields.” A child in her womb is a ”red red rose. Enjoy and share. From Song of a Captive Bird (Ballantine Books 2018), available for order here , or on Amazon here . In 1955 Forough's first collection, titled Asir (The Captive), contains forty-four poems was published. Another Birth: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad. In addition to nuances in tone and meaning, one clear issue in translation is the elegiac sound that mark Forugh’s poetry, a key part of her personal style.