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Another Birth: Selected Poems by Forough Farrokhzad (Bilingual Edition

Book · July 2002

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Ali Salami
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 Forugh Farrokhzad (1935-1967)

One of the leading modern poets of Iran, Forugh

Farrokhzad was born and brought up in a military family.
She married Parviz Shapur, the well-known Iranian satirist
at the age of 16. She 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 Fereydun Moshiri,
Nader Naderpur, and Fereydun Tavallali. Later on, her books
“The Wall” and “The Rebellion” were published in the same
poetic mood. In 1962, she 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.
Forugh died in a car accident at the age of 32 on
February 14, 1967.
Forugh was a lonely woman as professor Hillman
suggests. This sense of deep solitude and isolation was
largely imposed by the society where she lived. She accepted
this bitter feeling of isolation as an essential part of her
feminine being.

~ 225 ~
 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.

Deeply plunged in sorrow, Forugh is like a drowning

person who clutches at every straw. Sometimes she assumes
such a spiritual tone that one feels she is a holy woman. Yet
at other times, she is so wearied with waiting that she loses
patience and lets out a loud cry of protest against the heaven
and earth in the attitude of one who has lost the firm ground
of faith and barely at all sees any flicker of hope form the
Divine source.
Forugh rules out the possibility of true love and attacks
the male-dominated society, arguing that a woman is seen
only as an object of sexual gratification rather than as a
being endowed with human feelings.

Forugh goes beyond the social conventions and struggles

to emancipate herself from the so-called bonds which
muzzle the free feminine voice in a traditional society. Her
poetry lays bare a voice imprisoned in a patriarchic society
where women find little chance or freedom to give
expression to their innermost repressed feelings and
desires. Risking the possibility of being ostracized, she
creates candidly feminine poetry. Early critics showed a
diverse range of reactions to her poetry. To some, her poetry
was a manifestation of a trouble soul and to some others, it
was just an audacious effort to fly against the social norms.
However, after her tragic death, critics came to accord

~ 226 ~
serious attention to the aesthetic aspects of her works and
her poetic courage.
Forugh sees poetry as a mission for which she sacrifices
her motherly role and leaves her family and her only son.
She feels that only through poetry she can live her life and
give meaning to her existence.
Forugh left a precious legacy of poetry though she lived
only a brief life.

~ 227 ~
Another Birth

~ 228 ~
~ 229 ~
Those Days

~ 230 ~
~ 231 ~
~ 232 ~
The Sun Will Rise

~ 233 ~
~ 234 ~
Love Song

~ 235 ~
~ 236 ~
 The Wind-Up Doll

~ 237 ~

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