Sunday, January 20, 2008

فروغ فرخزاد

Forough Farrokhzad

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Forough Farrokhzad
Forough Farrokhzad

Forough Farrokhzad (Persian: فروغ فرخزاد) (January 5, 1935 — February 13, 1967) was an Iranian poetess and film director. Forough Farrokhzad, Parvin E'tesami and Simin Behbahani are usually considered the most famous modern female poets of Iran. Forough Farrokhzad was mainly under the influence of Ebrahim Golestan, a notable Iranian scholar.[1]

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[edit] Biography

Forough was born in Tehran to career military officer Colonel Mohammad Bagher Farrokhzad and his wife Touran Vaziri-Tabar in 1935. She was the third of seven children and attended school until the ninth grade, then learning painting and sewing at a girl's school for the manual arts. At age sixteen or seventeen she was married to Parviz Shapour, an acclaimed satirist. Forough continued her education with classes in painting and sewing and moved with her husband to Ahvaz. A year later, she had her only child, a son named Kāmyār (subject of A Poem for You).

Within two years, in 1954, Forough and her husband divorced. Parviz won custody of the child. She moved back to Tehran to write poetry and published her first volume, entitled The Captive, in 1955.

Forough, as a female divorcée writing controversial poetry with a strong feminine voice, became the focus of much negative attention and open disapproval. In 1958 she spent nine months in Europe and met film-maker/writer Ebrahim Golestan, who inspired her to express herself and live independently. She published two more volumes, The Wall and The Rebellion before going to Tabriz to make a film about Iranians affected by leprosy. This 1962 film was called The House is Black and won awards world-wide. During 12 days of shooting, she became attached to Hossein Mansouri, the child of two lepers, whom she adopted and had live in her mother's house.

In 1963 she published the volume Another Birth and by now her poetry was mature and sophisticated, also being a profound change from previous modern Iranian poetic conventions.

On February 13, 1967, at 4:30 pm, Forough died in a car accident at age thirty-two. In order to avoid hitting a school bus, she swerved her Jeep, which hit a stone wall; she died before reaching the hospital. Her poem Let us believe in the beginning of the cold season was published posthumously and is considered the best-structured modern poem in Persian.

A brief literary biography of Forough, Michael Hillmann's A lonely woman: Forough Farrokhzad and her poetry, was published in 1987. Also about her is a chapter in Farzaneh Milani's work Veils and words: the emerging voices of Iranian women writers (1992).

She is the sister of the singer, poet and political activist Fereydoon Farrokhzad (1936 — 1992; assassinated in Bonn, Germany). A new English translation of a selection of her poems by Maryam Dilmaghani is published on-line by the name of Forough Farrokhzad: The Sad Little Fairy to commemorate the 40th anniversary of her death. Nasser Saffarian has directed three documentaries on her; The Mirror of the Soul (2000), The Green Cold (2003), and Summit of the Wave (2004). [See discussion.]

Foroogh's tomb is located in Zahir o-dowleh cemetery, Darband, Shemiran, Tehran.
Foroogh's tomb is located in Zahir o-dowleh cemetery, Darband, Shemiran, Tehran.

[edit] Two poems by Forough

The Gift
I speak of the end of night
I speak
of the end of darkness
And of the end of night.
O kind one,
If you come to my home,
Bring me a light
And a nook
From which I may watch the crowding of the glad lane.
Translator of the above poem is unknown.
Frontier Walls
Return with me to that star,
Return with me
To that star far away
from the frozen seasons of the earth and its
ways to measure and understand
Where no one fears light.
Return with me
To the start of creation
To the fragrant core of a fertilized egg
To the moment I was born from you
Return with me, you have left me incomplete.
Translated by Fatemeh Keshavarz [2]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Interview with Simin Behbahani on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of Forough Farrokhzad's death on Thursday 13 February 2007 (BBC Persian).
  2. ^ Fatemeh Keshavarz, Banishing the Ghosts of Iran, The Chronicle Review of Higher Education, Vol. 53, No. 45, p. B6 (13 July 2007). [1]

[edit] Translations of Forough's works

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

  • Manijeh Mannani, The Reader's Experience and Forough Farrokhzad's Poetry, Crossing Boundaries - an interdiciplinary journal, Vol. 1, pp. 49-65 (2001). PDF
  • Michael Craig Hillmann, An Autobiographical Voice: Forough Farrokhzad, in Women's Autobiographies in Contemporary Iran, edited by Afsaneh Najmabadi (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1990). ISBN 0932885055. This essay can be read here: [2].

[edit] Movies

[edit] External links

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[edit] See also

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1 comment:

Pierre Radulescu said...

Thanks for this page!

I tried a translation of the two little poems in Romanian and have linked my post to yours.

http://updateslive.blogspot.com/2008/10/forough-farrokhzad-darul.html

I am now trying to render into Romanian The Cold Season.

It's very difficult because I am using English translations and I think the richness of her verses is lost somehow in English (as Persian and English cultures are very different).

I wander how it would look a direct translation in Romanian. Unfortunately I do not know at all your language.

I know that some of her verses were translated directly by someone who knows Persian very well.

2:59 PM

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