Translation brings to life poetry of courageous Iranian woman

Robert Covelli | For The New Mexican

12/2/2007 -

SIN

By Forugh Farrohkzad

University of Arkansas Press
160 pages, $22.95

In the Western debate over whether Islam is by nature oppressive, what's clear is how much Islamic oppression falls on Islamic women.

Against that oppression emerged the poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad, translated into vivid English by Sholeh Wolpe in Sin, who has added a biographical essay, and published by the University of Arkansas Press. Born in Iran in 1935, Farrokhzad died there in an automobile accident in 1967.

In Iran, women were subservient; her family was typical. Her father was a rigid patriarch who disciplined harshly; her mother dwelled in her own imagination, bullying the children, denying them autonomy. Both favored their sons. The child Forugh defied their conventions.

Always beautiful, her poetry voiced rebellion as she confronted cruelty, suffered, endured and matured. From Grief, an early poem:


Like the disheveled locks of a woman

the Karun river spreads itself

on the naked shoulders of the shore.


The metaphor is rich and precise, its content forbidden. For her sexual freedoms and her free expression of them, she suffered condemnation immediately, which she must have anticipated. Whence comes such courage?

Her courage was her talent. In the same poem, she evokes passion thus:


On the river's skin, palm shadows

tremble at the sensual touch of the breeze.


This is Eve in the Garden, delighting in life; and, indeed, this poem recounts banishment. Farrokhzad speaks of "a million brilliant bloodshot eyes" that "spy on beds of innocent lovers," a shrieking bird and moonbeams rushing "to see what fear has driven it to such despair."

That fear is of sin, the book's title, this sin from the eponymous poem:


I have sinned a rapturous sin

beside a body quivering and spent.

I do not know what I did O God

in that quiet vacant dark.


But her poetry demanded the true nature of that sin, because sexuality in Farrokhzad was creative power that were cries for life fulfilled.

In A Rebellious God, she contemplates this theology:


If I were God, I'd call on the angels one night

to boil the water of eternal life in Hell's cauldron,


so that

Tired of being a prude, I'd seek Satan's bed at midnight

and find refuge in the declivity of breaking laws.


But why dare such provocation, which she surely knew that clerical hierarchy would damn as sacrilege? Here is her logic:


I'd open the graves so that myriad wandering souls

could once again seek life in the confines of bodies.


In fact, in that time, the Shah constrained clerical powers. Perhaps she felt safe. She went to Europe, returned to Iran, made films, took lovers, married; but civil and clerical powers took her son from her on grounds of immorality. She became Akhmatova's sister, as here from The Return:


My eyes questioned

'In which corner should I seek him?'

But I quickly saw my room

was empty of his childish clamor.


In 1964, Farrokhzad published her most popular book, Reborn, much of which is included here. Still loving sound and image, she developed a canny worldliness. New powers appeared of satire, observation and sabotage. In Wind-Up Doll, she writes from her pain to her countrywomen.


One can spend a lifetime kneeling

head bowed

before the cold altar of the Imams,

find God inside an anymous grave ...

One can evaporate like water from one's own gutter.


Farrokhzad developed an inspiring poetry of politics. She claims in The Wind Will Blow Us Away that she "watches this prosperity through alien eyes," implying the affluence of the elect under the Shah, confessing, "I am addicted to my despair." She was becoming a prophet.

She internalized the agonies of her age and sang them. The Shah was in part an instrument of the West, armed and provided with a brutal secret service.

To appease discontents, he initiated a liberalizing White Revolution. Political opposition responded, but Farrokhzad felt the limitation of "independence" that was "permitted" by power, invoking it in extraordinary tropes.

In Insight, she rendered a microcosm of free but alienated consciousness.


Light was exhausting itself

inside the small bubble.

Night suddenly flooded the window

with darkness, brimming vacant voices.

Night, infecting with venomous breaths.


Incisively lyrical, this is the most persuasive political verse, precisely because it's personal. She heard voices and judged them, based on the truth of her experience. They were duplicitous. She knew the venom in those breaths, and she conceived all of this pondering a bubble!

In Inaugurating The Garden, Farrokhzad invoked the phoenix, a mythic bird that burns and rises from ashes, because for her Iran was in ashes. In A Visitation At Night, she conjured a ghost of herself who assures her, "Believe me, I am not alive," asking, "Is there anyone left in this land/who does not fear meeting his own decayed face?"

Farrokhzad never acquiesced or conformed. "I don't repent," she declared in the poem In Night's Cold Streets, and went on, "It's as if my heart flows/on the other side of time," finishing with this exquisite plaint:


Darling, speak to me of another me

with the same lovesick eyes

whom you'll find again in the cold streets of night.

And think of me in her sad kiss

on the sweet lines beneath your eyes .



Whence comes such courage, simply in the name of love and life? Farrokhzad is compared to Akhmatova and Plath. She's their peer, and this is a magnificent book of beautifully wrought, distinctly modern poems.


Covelli lives with his wife and daughter in Santa Fe. He has published poems, stories and excerpts in several journals. His last piece of long fiction, Tom Fool & Three More, was selected as a finalist in competition for the Ulysses Award, a national contest from the Institute of Independent Literature.