Forough Farrokhzad
| Forugh Farrokhzād فروغ فرخزاد |
|
|---|---|
 Forugh Farrokhzād |
|
| Born | January 5th, 1935 Tehran , Iran |
| Died | February 13, 1967 (aged 32) (buried Zahir o-dowleh cemetery, Darband, Shemiran, Tehran) |
| Nationality | Iranian |
| Occupation | Poet |
Forugh Farrokhzād (Persian: فروغ فرخزاد) (b. January 5, 1935, Tehran, Iran — February 13, 1967)[1] was an Iranian poet and film director. Forugh Farrokhzad is arguably one of Iran's most influential female poets of the twentieth century. She was a controversial modernist poet and an iconoclast.[2]
Contents |
Biography[edit]
Forugh (also spelled Forough) was born in Tehran to career military officer Colonel Mohammad Bagher Farrokhzad (originaly from Tafresh city) and his wife Touran Vaziri-Tabar in 1935. The third of seven children (Amir, Massoud, Mehrdad, Fereydoun Farrokhzad, Pooran Farrokhzad, Gloria), she attended school until the ninth grade, then was taught painting and sewing at a girl's school for the manual arts. At age sixteen she was married to Parviz Shapour, an acclaimed satirist.[2] Farrokhzad continued her education with classes in painting and sewing and moved with her husband to Ahvaz. A year later, she bore her only child, a son named Kāmyār (subject of A Poem for You).
Within two years, in 1954, Farrokhzad 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.
Farrokhzad, 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. After returning to Iran, in search for a job she met film-maker and writer Ebrahim Golestan, who reinforced her own inclinations to express herself and live independently. She published two more volumes, The Wall and The Rebellion before traveling to Tabriz to make a film about Iranians affected by leprosy. This 1962 documentary film titled The House is Black won several international awards. During the twelve days of shooting, she became attached to Hossein Mansouri, the child of two lepers. She adopted the boy and brought him to live at her mother's house.
In 1963 she published Another Birth. Her poetry was now mature and sophisticated, and a profound change from previous modern Iranian poetic conventions.
At 4:30PM on February 13, 1967, Farrokhzad 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.[3] Her poem Let us believe in the beginning of the cold season was published posthumously, and is considered by some to be one of the best-structured modern poems in Persian.
Farrokhzad's poetry was banned for more than a decade after the Islamic Revolution.[2] 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; killed in Bonn, Germany). Translations into English include those by Sholeh Wolpe, The Sad Little Fairy Maryam Dilmaghani, Sin: Selected poems of Forough Farrokhzad. Nasser Saffarian has directed three documentaries on her; The Mirror of the Soul (2000), The Green Cold (2003), and Summit of the Wave (2004).
Translations of Farrokhzad's works[edit]
- Arabic: Mohammad Al-Amin, Gassan Hamdan
- Azeri: Samad Behrangi
- English:
- Ismail Salami;
- Maryam Dilmaghani,
- Sholeh Wolpe. Sholeh Wolpe edited the collection titled Sin: Selected poems of Forugh Farrokhzad, (Fayetteville [Arkansas]: University of Arkansas Press, 2007). ISBN 1-55728-861-5 Wolpe reads from the collection on the radio show, "Voices of the Middle East and North Africa," available here: http://kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=25725.
- Hasan Javadi and Susan Sallee translated Another Birth:Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad with her letters and interviews in 1981. A revised edition of the same volume is published by Mage Publishers (Washington, DC) in 2010 as a bilingual edition.
- Jascha Kessler with Amin Banani, "Bride of Acacias: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad" (Caravan Books, Delmar, N.Y., 1982) ISBN 0-88206-050-3
- Farzaneh Milani, Veils and words: the emerging voices of Iranian women writers (Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, N.Y., 1992). ISBN 0-8156-2557-X, ISBN 978-1-85043-574-7.
- French: Mahshid Moshiri, Sylvie M. Miller,
- German: Annemarie Schimmel
- Italian: Domenico Ingenito, [1]
- Russian: Viktor Poleshchuk.[4]
- Turkish: Hashem Khosrow-Shahi, Jalal Khosrow-Shahi
- Urdu: Fehmida Riaz published by 'Sheherzade Publications' Karachi.
Bibliography[edit]
- Michael Craig Hillmann, A lonely woman: Forough Farrokhzad and her poetry (Three Continents Press, Washington, D.C., 1987). ISBN 0-934211-11-6, ISBN 978-0-934211-11-6.
Further reading[edit]
- 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 (Cambridge [Massachusetts]: Harvard University Press, 1990). ISBN 0-932885-05-5. This essay can be read here: [2].
- Sholeh Wolpe, Sin: Selected poems of Forugh Farrokhzad, (Fayetteville [Arkansas]: University of Arkansas Press, 2007). ISBN 1-55728-861-5
- Ezzat Goushegir, The Bride of Acacias, (a play about Forough Farrokhzad).[5]
Documentaries and other works[edit]
- Moon Sun Flower Game, German Documentary about Forough Farrokhzad’s adopted son Hossein Mansouri, by Claus Strigel, Denkmal-Film 2007, film resume at producer’s website
- The Bride of Acacias, a play about Forough Farrokhzad by Ezzat Goushegir [3]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ IMDb bio
- ^ a b c *Daniel, Elton L.; Mahdi, Ali Akbar (2006). Culture and Customs of Iran. Greenwood Press. pp. 81–82. ISBN 978-0-313-32053-8.
- ^ "Forough Farrokhzad". Iran Chamber Society. Retrieved 21 December 2012.
- ^ Полещук, Виктор (2002). "Форуг Фаррохзад, Стихи из книги «Новое рождение»". Inostrannaya Literatura (in Russian) (Moscow) (8).
- ^ http://www.ezzatgoushegir.com/Writingscontents/Plays/thebrideofacacias.html
External links[edit]
 |
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Forugh Farrokhzad |
- A Website Dedicated to Forough
- Another website containing her poems in English
- Iran Chamber's Article on Forugh
- A website dedicated to Forough
- Farrukhzad, Forugh, a biography by Professor Iraj Bashiri, University of Minnesota
- Another Birth Forough's poem translated by A.Z. Foreman.
- Terrestrial Verses Forough's poem translated by Mohammad Rajabpur
- Iranian.com audio archive of her poems, Listen to some of her poems by her own voice
- "She loved as in our age; people no longer do"
- Forough Farrokhzad's Resume
- Biography and poems
- A Flash motion picture by Kianoosh Ramezani (of Zahir-od-Dowleh cemetery in Tehran)
- Interview with Simin Behbahani on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of Forugh Farrokhzad's death on Thursday 13 February 2007 (BBC Persian).
|
