Rooftops of Tehran
Sholeh Wolpe’s Rooftops of Tehran is that truly rare event: an important book of poetry. Brushing against the grain of Persian-Islamic culture, she sings a deep affection for what she ruffles. Her righteous aversion to male oppression is as broad as the span from Tehran to LA, as deep as a wise woman’s heart. This is a powerful, elegant book.
—Richard Katrovas, author of The Years of Smashing Bricks and Prague Winters
In Sholeh Wolpe’s Rooftops of Tehran, an unforgettable cast of characters emerges, from the morality policeman with the poison razor blade to the crow-girls flapping their black garments, from the woman with the bee-swarm tattoo emerging from her crotch to the author as a young girl on a Tehran rooftop with a God’s eye view “hovering above a city / where beatings, cheating, prayers, songs, / and kindness are all one color’s shades.” Here is a delicious book of poems, redolent of saffron and stained with pomegranate in its vision of Iran and of the immigrant life in California. Wolpe’s poems are at once humorous, sad and sexy, which is to say that they are capriciously human, human even in that they dream of wings and are always threatening to take flight.
-- Tony Barnstone, award winning poet and translator, author of The Golem of Los Angeles
“A stark and wondrous journey through and beyond the worlds looming on top of the aching roofs of Tehran, the poems in this collection are as vibrant as they are brave. Sholeh Wolpé poetry proves to be rumination, prayer, song. This book is an irresistible unrest. "
--Nathalie Handal, author of The Lives of Rain and co-editor of Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond |
Sin --Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad
"A poet of sensuous extremes, Farrokhzad at times fuses with the living natural world. ...She is either feverishly alive or hopelessly dead. But part of her immediacy is that she always writes as if she were speaking—to herself, or a lover, or the reader. Perhaps to all three at once.
Sholeh Wolpé, a poet and artist in her own right, Iranian-born and cosmopolitan, is a daughter of the freedom made possible by poets like Farrokhzad. Her translations are hypnotic in their beauty and force. This book will be treasured by readers who crave not a clash of cultures but a connection."
— Alicia Ostriker,
Professor Emerita of Rutgers University, author of eleven volumes of poetry, and twice nominated for a National Book Award
Sholeh Wolpé’s exquisite poetic voice and her superb command of the art of translation meld together in translations that exude the passion, defiance, and crackling wit that mark Forugh Farrokhzad’s poetry.
Capturing her alternating mood, cascading images, and rippling emotions, Wolpé’s translations make Farrokhzad’s poetry burst into life in English. Wolpé is the best imaginable guide to this gifted Iranian woman’s poetic universe.
— Nasrin Rahimieh
Director of Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies at UCI, and author of "Missing Persons: Discovering Voices Iranian Cultural History"
Maligned and admired in her all-too-brief life, demonized and eventually banned soon after the Islamic Revolution, Forugh Farrokhzad is a literary icon and guru in Iran today. Her poetry, like the response it elicited, is a perfect metaphor for a society in transition.
Sholeh Wolpé’s selection of poems and the lush lucidity of her translation convey the quickly evolving and the richly paradoxical nature of Farrokhzad's poetry. It is a welcome addition to the slim body of literary translations available in the U.S.
— Farzaneh Milani
Director of Studies in Women and Gender and Professor of Persian and Women Studies at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and author of "Veils and Words: The Emerging Voice of Iranian Women Writers"
Forugh is a dynamic inventor in life and poem, risking all to create a role for women's place, art, spirit. Her poetry has a Houdini slight-of-hand perfection of the impossible, each word poised, of raw reality and acrobatic beauty, yielding unparalleled verse. Compact, extravagantly imagistic, she left a complete corpus, but her heart-breaking early death, like that of Miguel Hernandez and Garcia Lorca to war's brutality, has deprived the world of this genial magus. Her Persian voice survives.
Sholeh Wolpe's translations, meeting the rigor and esthetic of her compatriot, flow and carry us into rare catharsis. They resurrect Forugh.
— Willis Barnstone
Author of Sweetbitter Love: Poems of Sappho,
Border of a Dream: Poems of Antonio Machado, and Life Watch |
