One of the leading modern poets of Iran, Forough Farrokhzad was born and brought up in a military family. She married Parviz Shapur, the well-known Iranian satirist at the age of 16. The following selection has been translated by Ali Salami.
Forough Farrokhzad learned painting and sewing and moved to Ahvaz with her husband. Thence she started corresponding with well-known magazines; her first volume of poetry “The Captive” came out in 1965. The Captive was a romantic collection widely influenced by Fereydoon Moshiri, Nader Naderpour, and Fereydoon Tavallali. Later on, her books “The Wall” and “The Rebellion” were published in the same poetic mood.
In 1962, Forough Farrokhzad went to Tabriz and made a film entitled “The House is Black” about the lepers’ colony which bagged numerous international awards. In 1963, she published her fourth volume of poetry “Another Birth” which was indeed another birth in the modern Persian poetry.
Her long poem “Let us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season” was published posthumously which is beyond doubt the best-structured modern poem in Persian. Her collected poems are a perfect prototype of modern Persian poetry.
Forough Farrokhzad died in a car accident at the age of 32 on February 14, 1967.
Forough Farrokhzad was a lonely woman as professor Hillman suggests. This sense of deep solitude and isolation was largely imposed by the society where she lived.
Forough accepted this bitter feeling of isolation as an essential part of her feminine being.
In my little night creeps an anguish of ruin.
Listen!
Do you hear Darkness blowing?
I view this felicity in the attitude of a stranger
I am addicted to my despair.
Despondent though she is, she is waiting for a messiah to come and liberate her from this sense of loneliness with the power of love.
O Green from sole to crown!
Place your hands in my loving hands
Like a blazing memory!
Deeply immersed in grief, Forough is like a drowning man clutching at any straw. Sometimes she takes on such a spiritual tone that you’d think she was a holy woman. But at other times she is so weary of waiting that she loses patience and lets out a loud cry of protest against heaven and earth, in the attitude of someone who has lost the solid ground of faith and can barely see a spark of hope from the divine source.
Forough excludes the possibility of true love and attacks the male-dominated society in which a woman is seen only as an object of sexual gratification and not as a being endowed with human feelings.
With a voice so false, so strange
One can cry:
“I love”
In the domineering arms of a man
One can be a pretty healthy female.
Forough defies social conventions and struggles to free herself from the so-called shackles that muzzle the free female voice in a traditional society. Her poetry exposes a voice trapped in a patriarchal society where women have little opportunity or freedom to express their innermost repressed feelings and desires. At the risk of being ostracized, she creates an unabashedly feminine poetry. Early critics reacted very differently to her poetry. For some, her poetry was an expression of a troubled soul, for others it was merely a bold attempt to rebel against social norms. After her tragic death, however, critics began to pay serious attention to the esthetic aspects of her work and her poetic courage.
Forough sees poetry as a mission for which she sacrifices her role as a mother and abandons her family and her only son. She feels that only through poetry can she live her life and give meaning to her existence.
Forough left a precious legacy of poetry though she lived only a brief life. Forough Farrokhzad is often compared with Sylvia Plath
Forough Farrokhzad: Selected Poems
Another Birth
My entire soul is a murky verse
Reiterating you within itself
Carrying you to the dawn of eternal burstings and blossomings
In this verse, I sighed you, AH!
In this verse,
I grafted you to trees, water and fire
Perhaps life is
A long street along which a woman
With a basket passes every day
Perhaps life
Is a rope with which a man hangs himself from a branch
Perhaps life is a child returning home from school
Perhaps life is the lighting of a cigarette
Between the lethargic intervals of two lovemakings
Or the puzzled passage of a passerby
Tipping his hat
Saying good morning
to another passerby with a vacant smile
Perhaps life is that blocked moment
When my look destroys itself in the pupils of your eyes
And in this there is a sense
Which I will mingle with the perception of the moon
And the reception of darkness
In a room the size of one solitude
My heart
The size of one love
Looks at the simple pretexts of its own happiness,
At the pretty withering of flowers in the flower pots
At the sapling you planted in our flowerbed
At the songs of the canaries
Who sing the size of one window.
Ah
This is my lot
This is my lot
My lot
Is a sky, which the dropping of a curtain seizes from me
My lot is going down an abandoned stairway
And joining with something in decay and nostalgia
My lot is a cheerless walk in the garden of memories
And dying in the sorrow of a voice that tells me:
“I love
Your hands”
I will plant my hands in the flowerbed
I will sprout, I know, I know, I know
And the sparrows will lay eggs
In the hollows of my inky fingers
I will hang a pair of earrings of red twin cherries
Round my ears
I will put dahlia petals on my nails
There is an alley
Where the boys who were once in love with me,
With those disheveled hairs, thin necks and gaunt legs
Still think of the innocent smiles of a little girl
Who was one night blown away by the wind
There is an alley which my heart
Has stolen from places of my childhood
The journey of a volume along the line of time
And impregnating the barren line of time with a volume
A volume conscious of an image
Returning from the feast of a mirror
This is the way
Someone dies
And someone remains
No fisherman will catch pearls
From a little stream flowing into a ditch
I
Know a sad little mermaid
Dwelling in the ocean
Softly, gently blowing
Her heart into a wooden flute
A sad little mermaid
Who dies with a kiss at night
And is born again with another kiss at dawn
Those Days
Those days are gone
Those darling days
Those vigorous verdant days
Those sequin-studded skies
Those branches bearing cherries
Those houses leaning on each other
Within the green hedges of ivies
Those rooftops of playful kites
Those alleys stupefied by the scent of acacias
Those days are gone
Those days when from the slits of my eyes
My songs boiled out like air bubbles
Whatever my eye settled on
It drank up like fresh milk
As if in the pupils of my eyes
Dwelled a restless merry rabbit
Each morning together with the ancient Sun
It went hunting in unknown pastures of discovery
At nights it sank into deep dark jungles
Those days are gone
Those snowy silent days
When from behind the windows in the warm room
I stared out
My pure snow
Gently fell like soft cotton
On the old wooden ladder
On the slack clothes-line
On the tresses of aged pine-trees
And I thought of tomorrow, ah
Tomorrow-
That slippery white mass
Began with the rustle of grandma’s chador
A large veil worn by women in some Muslim countries
And her shadow fluttering at the threshold
-Suddenly left in the cold sense of light-
And the confused pattern of the birds’ flight
Within the colored cups of glass
Tomorrow…
The warmth of the korsi induced sleep
A heater-like object formerly used in winter
Quickly and boldly
Far from grandma’s eye, I erased
Checkmarks from my old notebooks
When snow settled
I rambled in the garden, woeful
Beside vases of dry jasmine
I buried my dead sparrows
Those days are gone
Those days of ecstasy and wonder
Those days of sleep and wakefulness
Those days each shadow contained a secret
Each closed box held a treasure
In the silence of noon, every corner of the storeroom
Seemed to be a world
Anyone who knew no dread of the dark
Was a hero in my eyes
Those days are gone
Those New Year days
Those cravings for sunshine and flowers
Those vibrations of scent
In the silent coy company of wild narcissuses
Visiting town
In the last morning of winter
The cries of venders in the long green-flecked streets
The bazaar was afloat in wandering odors,
In the astringent smells of coffee and fish
The bazaar stretched out, elongating and mingling
With all the moments along the way
And turned in the depths of the dolls’ eyes
The bazaar was Mother rushing
Towards green fluid volumes
Then returning
With boxes of gifts, with full baskets
The bazaar was rain, which was falling, falling, falling
Those days are gone
Those days of gazing into the secrets of body
Those days of cautious familiarity
With the beauty of blue colors
A hand holding a flower
Calling from behind a wall
Another hand
And little stains of ink on this terrified, tormented,
Trembling hand
And love
Manifesting itself in a bashful greeting
In the sweltering smoky noons
We chanted our love in the alley’s dust
We perceived the simple language of dandelions
We took our hearts to the garden of innocent kindnesses
And lent them to trees
And the ball passed from hand to hand, conveying a kiss
And love was a baffled meaning
In the darkness of passageway
Suddenly,
It encompassed us;
And drew us in the burning gust of breaths, beatings,
And secret smiles
Those days are gone
Those days like vegetation rotting in the sun
Rotted in the sun
And those alleys stupefied by the scent of acacias got lost
In the clamor of streets of no return
And the girl who colored her cheeks
With cranesbills petals, ah!
Was now a lonely woman
Was now a lonely woman
The Sun Will Rise
Behold! Deep in my eyes
Sorrow melts drip drip drip
Behold! My dark rebellious shadow
Falls captive to the Sun
Behold!
My entire being collapses;
A spark envelops me
Lifts me up to the peaks
Entraps me
Behold!
My entire sky
Overflows with falling stars
From a distance so far away, you emerged
From the land of perfumes and lights
You have now let me into a bark
Of ivory, of clouds, of crystals
Carry me, O Soothing Hope!
Carry me to the town of lays and desires
You direct me along a starry path
You place me above the stars
Behold!
I am burning in stars
I am feverishly filled with stars
Like simple-hearted red fishes
I came to pluck stars in the pool of night
Far and away was our land
Far from this azure-hued vaulted sky
Now the sound of your voice
Falls upon my ears
And the sound of the snowy wings of angels as well
Behold where I have reached
I have reached the galaxy, eternity, immortality
Now that we have soared up to the peaks
Lave me in the wine of the waves
Wrap me into the silk of your kisses
Wish me into long deep nights
Never leave me
Never separate me from these stars
Behold! Night, like wax
Melts drip drip drip along our path
The black chalice of my eyes
Warmed by your lullaby
Overflows with the wine of slumber
Upon the cradle of my lays
Behold!
You breathe; and the sun will rise!
Love Song
The night is painted by your dream
Your perfume fills my lungs to extreme
You are a feast for my eye!
All shapes of woe you belie
As the body of earth is washed by rain
From my soul you cleanse all stain!
In my burning body you are a turning gyre
In the shade of my eyelashes you are a blazing fire.
You are more verdant than a wheat field!
More fruit than golden boughs you yield!
To the suns you open the gate
To counteract dark doubt’s spate
With you there is no reason for fears
But the pain of joyful tears
This sad heart of mine and profuse light?
This din of life in the abyss of blight?
The glance in your eyes is my field
And with it my eyes are sealed
Before this I had no other image
Or I would not but you envisage
The pain of love is a dark pain
Going and demeaning oneself in vain
Leaning against people with black sight
Defiling oneself with the filth of spite
Finding in caresses venom of wile
Finding villainy in friend’s smile
Handing gold coins to the marauding band
Getting lost in the midst of the bazaar land
With my soul united you will be
From grave you will raise me
Like a star on wings decked with gold
You come from a land untold.
You alleviate sorrow’s pang
Flooding my body with embrace’s tang
You are a stream flowing onto my dry breast
My bed of my veins with your water is blest
Within a world which on darkness does feed
With every step you take I proceed
Underneath my skin you go!
There like blood you flow
Burning my tresses with a fondling hand
Flushing my cheeks with an urging demand
You are a stranger to my gown
An acquaintance with my body’s lawn
You are a shining sun that never dies
A sun that rises in Southern skies
You are fresher than first light
Fresher than spring, a lusher sight
This is no longer love; this is pride
A chandelier that in silence and darkness died
When Love did my heart entice
I was filled with a sense of sacrifice
This is no longer me, this is no longer me
My life with my ego amounted to a null degree
My lips your kisses prize
Your lips are the temple of my eyes
In me you stir a great rhapsody
Your curves are an attire on my body
O how I crave to sprout
And my joy with sorrow shout
O how I wish to rise
And my eyes with tears baptize
This forlorn heart of mine and incense perfume?
The music of harp and lyre in a prayer room?
This void and these flights?
These songs and these silent nights?
Your glance is a wondrous lullaby
Cradling restless babes thereby
Your breath is a trancing breeze
Washing off me tremors of unease
Finding in my morrows a place to sleep
Permeating my world deep and deep
In me the passion for poetry you inspire
Over my lays you cast instant fire
You kindled my passionate desire
Thus setting my poems afire.
© Ali Salami 2023