“Forugh Farrokhzad was a poet who dared defy stupid attitudes towards women . . .” Watch translator Sholeh Wolpé and others discuss Farrozkhad’s short, rebellious life, during which, “with each ‘no’ she encountered, she responded with an even more furious ‘yes.'”

(Watch on YouTube.)

Then, read what scholar and author Amir Arian writes about this poem in his introduction to Iranian literature:

The poem “Connection,” included in this collection, contains the major elements that characterize her work. In her love poems like this one, she had a way of engaging all senses with words, creating an intense, sensuous experience that sometimes bypassed the mind and talked straight to her reader’s body.

You can find out more about the poet’s controversial life and tragic death in “Forough Farrokhzad, Iranian Poet Who Broke Barriers of Sex and Society,” one of a series of contemporary obituaries of “remarkable people whose deaths went unreported,” currently being published in the New York Times.

Forough Farrokhzad, 1960s. Public domain.

Finally, for a critical essay on her life and work, read scholar Farzaneh Milani’s article in the Encyclopedia Iranica, published out of Columbia University; or watch Milani’s lecture at the Library of Congress.

Sholeh Wolpé, by Bonnie Perkinson.

Sholeh Wolpé launched her career as a translator when she first began translating the “iconic rebel poet of Iran,” as she calls Farrokhzad. Find out which words are most difficult to translate, and read about a Christmas-Eve translation inspiration, in this interview with the magazine Words Without Borders.

A poet as well as a translator, Wolpé hates it when either she or Farrokhzad is referred to as a “poetess.” Read more of her thoughts on writing and gender in this write-up of a conversation with other women translators, also in Words Without Borders.

Finally, below, you can get a sense of the sound of Farrokhzad’s poems from this video of Wolpé performing them in English and Persian.

Listen to pronunciations of the names “Forugh Farrokhzad” and Sholeh Wolpé,” read aloud by Sholeh Wolpé.

Listen to translator Sholeh Wolpé’s reading of the beginning of the poem in Persian. She ends on the lines which she translated into English as:

I sensed that in the breeze
of his hands’ movements
the substance of my being
was disintegrating.

Finally, look at “Connection” in the original Persian.

Alleyway in Hamoomchaal, by Kamyar Adl. License: CC BY 2.0.

New to learning about Iran? Read the country’s profile on encylopedia.com.

Listen to and read other Farrokhzad poems translated
by Wolpé:

• Reborn
• In Night’s Cold Streets
• Sin, a collection of Farrokhzad’s poems  

Then, watch Farrokhzad tell the filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci what the word “intellectual” means to her.

(Watch on YouTube.)

Then, explore Wolpé’s website farrokhzadpoems.com, where you’ll find a handwritten poem, perspectives on the poet and her influence, videos, and, of course, poems, beginning with a selection from Wolpé’s translation of Sin.

Finally, read a New York Times review of a recent novel depicting Farrokhzad’s life: “She Dared to Write Poetry About Sex. Iranians Loved and Hated Her for It.”

Read an interview in which Sholeh Wolpé comments that: 

Persian and English are as different as sky and sea. The best I can do as a poet-translator is to create a reflection of one in the other.

Next, watch Wolpé perform her translation of a Persian woman poet from the nineteenth century named Tahirih. A respected scholar as well as a poet, Tahirih was also “the first woman to publicly unveil before a group of men.”

(Watch on YouTube)

Wolpé is also a poet. Read her biography and her poems Prisoner in a Hole and “I never seen such days as this” on the Poetry Foundation website.

Then, take a look at her latest collection of poems, Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths, “a surreal journey of sorrows and sins;” and find out about her play, Shame, about family secrets. 

You can browse through through all Wolpé’s projects and translations (including of Walt Whitman!) on Wolpé’s official website and YouTube channel.

Sholeh Wolpé commented in an interview that a rebellious poet named Nima Yushij “attracted the attention of a group of brilliant young poets, among them Forugh Farrokhzad and Ahmad Shamlou.”
Nima Yushij went on to found modern Iranian poetry; learn about him in Wolpé’s interview, then read translations by Kaveh Bassiri in The Sink Review and Two Lines Journal.

In his introduction to this unit, scholar Amir Arian writes of Yushij:

If one is to mark a symbolic turning point, a year that launched the modern era in Iran, 1921 is a compelling choice. This is the year Nima Yushij published his long poem Afsaneh, in which he opened Persian poetry to the contemporary world and bravely brought “unpoetic” language into his art.

Next, read a poem from Farrokhzad’s fellow poet Ahmad Shamlou on WWB Campus. The poem, “Elegy,” was written in response to Farrokhzad’s sudden death in a car crash at age 32.   

Iranian poet Ahmad Shamlou.

Charles Baudelaire, 1844. By Emile Deroy. Public Domain.

• The Flowers, by Stéphane Mallarmé
• “The Ruined Garden, by Charles Baudelaire (see lower half of page)
• “Genie,” by Arthury Rimbaud
• “Where did the handsome beloved go?”, “Out Beyond Ideas,” and “What Was Told, That” by the Sufi mystic Rumi

For another Middle Eastern woman poet influenced by Baudelaire, try Iman Mersal, author of “Things Elude Me” and other poems on this site.

Sylvia Plath, sitting sideways to the camera. Photo by Giovanni Giovannetti/Grazia Neri, CC by 3.0.

Read work from Farrokhzad’s American counterparts:

• Sylvia Plath (Farrokhzad was sometimes called “Iran’s Sylvia Plath”)
• Adrienne Rich, an American woman poet similarly “unhappy in her role as a homemaker” in the 1950s
• Anne Sexton, whose poem “From The Garden” is linked to here. 

The New York Times reports that Farrokhzad’s poetry was banned for almost 10 years after the Iranian Revolution, “But that censorship only elevated her appeal to new generations of Iranians, who saw Farrokhzad as a symbol of artistic, personal and sexual freedom.” Find out about other cases of censorship, and their effects, below.

To learn more about government control over media in Iran, read:

• “An Iranian Metamorphosis,” in which a single word in a children’s cartoon gets a man thrown in prison
• Amir Arian’s essay “Staring at a Digital Black Hole,” about a 2019 blackout of all social media in Iran (Arian wrote the introduction to our collection of Iranian literature)
• “What Iran did not want you to see,” in which a human rights researcher sifts through clues during the same 2019 blackout
• A New York Times article about the Iranian’s government’s previous attempts to censor social media, which may have been influenced by a similar effort in Russia
• The Committee to Protect Journalists’ page for Iran, where you can find out how many journalists are currently in prison for their writing. (The Committee to Protect Journalists is an independent not-for-profit human rights organization.)

Censorship happens worldwide. To learn more:

• Follow a 2020 story of attempted censorship in Missouri, where State Representative Ben Baker has introduced the Parental Oversight of Public Libraries Act, aimed at “drag queen story hours.” Read Baker’s interview with NBC News and the American Library Association’s response
• Browse the stories about U.S. censorship at Columbia University’s Knight Institute (newest stories at the bottom)
• Find out which young adult and children’s books are most often challenged or banned in the U.S. in these lists from the American Library Association
• Learn how the U.S. may be enabling censorship in other parts of the world in this Washington Post editorial
• Visit the Taboo Topics section of our collection of literature from China
• Read “My Grandmother, The Censor,” a personal essay by Masha Gessen
• Watch protests against social media censorship in Russia

• Read about the censorship of so-called “Fake News” in today’s Egypt

To find out about the state of free speech all over the world, visit the home page of the Committee to Protect Journalists and Freedom House.

• Perspectives on Farrokhzad and on translations of her poems into English, from Sholeh Wolpé and others
• “Poem to the Tune ‘Pure Peace‘” and translator’s note
• “How to Read a Translation,” from professor Lawrence Venuti, published in the magazine Words Without Borders.
• Translators’ essays on the website Words Without Borders

Other Love Poems in Translation:

• “The Fish,” by Ahmad Shamlou, a contemporary of Farrokhzad’s
• “To kiss a forehead is to erase worry” by the Russian woman poet Marina Tsvetaeva–who was as famous and controversial as Farrokhzad
• “Poem to the Tune ‘Pure Peace'” and Poems for Parting, written during the Tang Dynasty era in China
• Rumi’s “Out Beyond Ideas,” “What Was Told, That” (Rumi was an important influence on Farrokhzad)

Tang dynasty-era statue of a woman. CC BY-SA 2.0

*For Teaching Idea 1

Women Poets

On WWB Campus

• “I Pity the Garden,” also by Forugh Farrokhzad
• Iman Mersal’s poems “Things Elude Me,” “Amina,” and “Sometimes Wisdom Possesses Me“
• “Do Not Tremble” by Hirata Toshiko
• “Unity of Form” by Regina Derieva and “An Uncoincidence, a Noncoincidence” by Larissa Miller 
• Poems by Tunisian poet Amina Saïd

Elsewhere

• The Library of Congress Exhibition “A Thousand Years of the Persian Book: Women Writers.”
• Five video readings from “The Women Poets Taking Over the World,” published on bbc.com.

On Gender and Writing

On WWB:

• Tipping the Scales: WWB’s Conversation on Women in Translation at AWP, the conversation in which Sholeh Wolpé commented on the distinction between a poet and “poetess.”
• How to Be a Woman in Tehran, in which journalist Habibe Jafarian takes on the challenges of practicing her profession in Iran.

Elsewhere:

• “Finding the Hammam,” a 2019 essay whose author asks, “What’s the cost of a Muslim girl writing poems the way I do?”
• “The male glance: how we fail to take women’s stories seriously,” an essay published in the British newspaper The Guardian. “Male art is epic, universal, and profoundly meaningful. Women’s creations are domestic, emotional and trivial. How did we learn to misread stories so badly?”
• “Inventing Michael Field: Can two women write like one man?”, the story of a nineteenth century collaboration between women using a male pseudonym.
• “Exchange: Meghan O’Rourke, J. Allyn Rosser & Eleanor Wilner on ‘Women’s Poetry,'” a panel discussion.
• “What Does a Woman Need to Know?” by Adrienne Rich. In Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry. Of women seeking only inclusion, not fundamental change, in fields dominated by men, Rich writes: “For no woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.”
• Obituary of Adrienne Rich, Baltimore Sun
• Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde.
• The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

Poet, essayist, and activist Audre Lorde.

On Twitter:
#LiftingWomensVoices, #Vida_lit, #WomenWrite, and #womenintranslation 

On Love and Gender

On WWB Campus:

• Cavities and Kindness: A Japanese story from the perspective of a trans woman going through a breakup
• Love’s Labor: Gender stereotypes and expectations among street vendors in China
• The Wondrous Deer of the Eternal Hunt: An oral history of the life of a Russian gulag survivor; the interviewee says that Russian women “are prepared to suffer . . . but we’re terrible dreamers.”

Elsewhere:

• Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night, all featuring women characters who disguise themselves as men
• Orlando, a novel by Virginia Woolf
• “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” a short story by I.B. Singer later made into a film (and discussed in relation to trans identity in this article from the Huffington Post).

*For Teaching Idea 2