Poems and Translations
Translations by Sholeh Wolpé <Back To Poems Home Page
Forugh Farrokhzad
Forugh Farrokhzad is, without a doubt, one of the most significant female Iranian poets of the twentieth century. She was born in 1935 to a middle-class family in Tehran, Iran. She married at seventeen and divorced within three years. In a society where women historically have few rights, she was forced to relinquish her only son to her husband and his family. She never remarried. Instead Farrokhzad turned to poetry and film and led an independent life.
She was a poet of great audacity and extraordinary talent. Her poetry was the poetry of protest-- protest through revelation-- revelation of the innermost world of women (a taboo subject until then), their intimate secrets and desires, their sorrows, longings, aspirations and at times even their articulation through silence. Her expressions of physical and emotional intimacy, much lacking in Persian women’s poetry up to that point, placed her at the center of controversy, even among the intellectuals of the time. She was subjected to tabloid gossip and portrayed as a woman of loose morals. On February 14, 1967 she died in a car crash. She was 32 years old.
According the Iranian Scholar, Farzaneh Milani: “What sets (Farrokhzad) apart from her predecessors and even from her contemporary women writers, is her rendering of quotidian experience with no intention to guide, to educate, to lead….(her) poetry is an accurate portrayal of the pain and pleasure of a whole generation undergoing radical change.”
To this day, Farrokhzad is loved and revered by many Iranians, young and old, and her poems have inspired music, drama and paintings. Sin-- Selected poems of Forugh Farrokhzad was released by the University of Arkansas Press in October 2007.
— Sholeh Wolpé
