Forough Farrokhzad

Forough Farrokhzad Poems

Forough Farrokhzad Biography

Forugh Farrokhzād was an Iranian poet and film director. Forugh Farrokhzad is arguably one of Iran's most influential female poets of the twentieth century. She was a controversial modernist poet and an iconoclast. Biography Forugh (also spelled Forough) was born in Tehran to career military officer Colonel Mohammad Bagher Farrokhzad and his wife Touran Vaziri-Tabar in 1935. The third of seven children (Amir, Massoud, Mehrdad, Fereydoun Farrokhzad, Pouran Farrokhzad, Gloria), she attended school until the ninth grade, then was taught painting and sewing at a girl's school for the manual arts. At age sixteen she was married to Parviz Shapour, an acclaimed satirist. Farrokhzad continued her education with classes in painting and sewing and moved with her husband to Ahvaz. A year later, she bore her only child, a son named Kāmyār (subject of A Poem for You). Within two years, in 1954, Farrokhzad and her husband divorced; Parviz won custody of the child. She moved back to Tehran to write poetry and published her first volume, entitled The Captive, in 1955. Farrokhzad, a female divorcée writing controversial poetry with a strong feminine voice, became the focus of much negative attention and open disapproval. In 1958 she spent nine months in Europe and met film-maker and writer Ebrahim Golestan, who reinforced her own inclinations to express herself and live independently. She published two more volumes, The Wall and The Rebellion before traveling to Tabriz to make a film about Iranians affected by leprosy. This 1962 documentary film titled The House is Black won several international awards. During the twelve days of shooting, she became attached to Hossein Mansouri, the child of two lepers. She adopted the boy and brought him to live at her mother's house. In 1963 she published Another Birth. Her poetry was now mature and sophisticated, and a profound change from previous modern Iranian poetic conventions. At 4:30PM on February 13, 1967, Farrokhzad died in a car accident at age thirty-two. In order to avoid hitting a school bus, she swerved her Jeep, which hit a stone wall; she died before reaching the hospital. Her poem Let us believe in the beginning of the cold season was published posthumously, and is considered by some to be the best-structured modern poem in Persian. Farrokhzad's poetry was banned for more than a decade after the Islamic Revolution. A brief literary biography of Forough, Michael Hillmann's A lonely woman: Forough Farrokhzad and her poetry, was published in 1987. Also about her is a chapter in Farzaneh Milani's work Veils and words: the emerging voices of Iranian women writers (1992). She is the sister of the singer, poet and political activist Fereydoon Farrokhzad (1936 — 1992; assassinated? murdered? in Bonn, Germany). Translations into English include those by Sholeh Wolpe, The Sad Little Fairy Maryam Dilmaghani, Sin: Selected poems of Forough Farrokhzad. Nasser Saffarian has directed three documentaries on her; The Mirror of the Soul (2000), The Green Cold (2003), and Summit of the Wave (2004).)

The Best Poem Of Forough Farrokhzad

The Wave

To me you are a wave;
never here, never there!
You are –still- nowhere!

Grabbing,
dragging, then fleeing away,
you swiftly spread- like a deadly plague,
on the run for the Other Soil, your destination's vague!

Watching you-
from far and wide,
in my seized eye,
you’re a rebellious tide-
in an eternal glide.

Insistent, impatient, then a restless errant,
you must be calm in heart, fretful just in act!
And I now know, the sea of regret- is your native land.

Yes, you are an unruly tide!
So always on the ride,
in an eternal glide!

But one night,
I will wear a mask-
made of the thirst-
of the remotest shores,
and their desert islands.
And I’ll capture you- in my absorbing sands,
forever far away- from your naval natal lands.


Translation: Maryam Dilmaghani, July 2006, Montreal

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