“I respect poetry in the very same way that religious people respect religion.” (from an interview with Forugh Farrokhzad, quoted in A lonely Woman by Michael C. Hillman)
Forugh Farrokhzad (December 29, 1934 – February 14, 1967) was an Iranian poet (and filmmaker and actress) who remade the Persian poetic tradition from her position as a woman outsider to that tradition. Poetry has a very important place in Iranian culture, and its importance cuts across classes. In her poems Forugh was frank about sexual love, but this was not unusual in the Persian tradition. What was unusual was that she wrote from a woman’s point of view and as a particular person, not an anonymous self. She lived her life in an unusual way for her place and time. She married an older man when she was quite young, but this was at her own insistence. (It was common to marry young but the age difference was objectionable to her family.) She divorced her husband when she realized that as a housewife she could not devote her life to poetry—that poetry was her life—and she wanted to live as a self-defined person, and experience life as much as she could outside the constraints imposed on women. She was transgressive and unapologetic. “Why should I stop?’ she writes in Only the Sound Remains, one of her best poems. Her approach to life and poetry was personal and individualistic, and thus modernist, and her feminist effect was through the example of her life and work and not through joining in a social movement herself. Her radical work shows an idea of what Iran might have become, and her death is seen as a rupture in the development of freedom in Iran. She participated in the intellectual foment of her times, as Iran was “Westernizing” under the repressive regime of the Shah. She had several lovers over time and a longer relationship with a married filmmaker and intellectual. Her work was often discounted because of her scandalous life but time has proven the importance and beauty of her works. After she died in a car accident at 32 years old, her poetic achievements were more widely acknowledged by her contemporaries, although they tended to give outsized importance to the influence of her intellectual lover. Even though interrupted, her later work is seen as the fulfillment of modernism in Persian poetry. She takes a tradition that was tied to formal structures and teases it apart and uses that de-structured tradition to make something radically new and multi-layered, but still recognizably of the tradition. I find her poetry beautiful and powerful even in translation. But I know her command of rhythm, sound, and form must be just stunning in the original “mother tongue”. Forugh led a life of risk and sacrifice in service to her art. She felt that she was discovering herself or inventing herself through her poetry. She was forthright and often combative in conversation and would say what she truly thought, regardless of consequences. She would also go about with unkempt hair. So I like to think that Forugh was punk. If anyone could exemplify ”woman life freedom,” the cry of the feminist revolution in Iran now, it is Forugh Farrokhzad.
(Written March 9, 2023)
SOURCES
Michael C. Hillman’s biography with translations is very good: A Lonely Woman, Forough Farrokhzad and Her Poetry
Another Birth and other poems by Forugh Farrokhzad translated with an introduction by Hasan Javadi and Susan Sallée.
Farrokhzad’s groundbreaking documentary film, “The House Is Black,” can be viewed here: https://archive.org/details/vimeo-136522352
Interview with translator, Sholeh Wolpé, novelist, Jasmin Darznik, and scholar of Persian literature, Levi Thompson: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct38tj
A talk by scholar and Forough biographer Farzaneh Milani: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lN1_mjWxO0A
image is based on a photo found at https://sinarium.com/forough-farrokhzad/
You must be logged in to post a comment.