Mini biography

Forugh Farrokhzad (January 5, 1935 — February 13, 1967)

Forugh Farrokhzād (b. January 5, 1935, Tehran, Iran — February 13, 1967) 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.

Forugh (also spelled Forough) was born in Tehran to career military officer Colonel Mohammad Bagher Farrokhzad and his wife Touran Vaziri-Tabar in 1935.

“Sound, sound, sound. Only sound remains.”

The third of seven children (Amir, Massoud, Mehrdad, Fereydoun Farrokhzad, Pouran 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.

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).



Radio Tehran Sessions (1962-1964)

An extremely small number of Iranian women have achieved anything in Iran outside of the home without dependence upon a relationship with a man or male patronage. The best known among them is the poet Forugh Farrokhzad (1935-1967), the most famous woman in the history of Persian literature.

As a divorcee poet in Tehran, Farrokhzad attracted much attention and considerable disapproval. She had several short lived relationships with men-"The Sin" describes one of them,--, found some respite in a nine-month trip to Europe, and in 1958 met Ebrahim Golesta (b. 1922), a controversial film-maker and writer with whom she established a relationship that lasted until her death in an automobile accident at thirty-two years of age in February 1967.

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 and 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.

Her poem Let us believe in the beginning of the cold season was published posthumously, and is considered by some to be the best-structured modern poem in Persian.

Farrokhzad's poetry was banned for more than a decade after the Islamic Revolution. 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? murdered? 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).

Forugh's graveside, Zahir o-dowleh cemetery, Darband, Shemiran, Teheran.
 

Translations of Farrokhzad's works

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 1557288615 Wolpe reads from the collection on the radio show, "Voices of the Middle East and North Africa," available here: https://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.
French: Mahshid Moshiri, Sylvie M. Miller,
German: Annemarie Schimmel
Italian: Domenico Ingenito,
Turkish: Hashem Khosrow-Shahi, Jalal Khosrow-Shahi
Farzaneh Milani, Veils and words: the emerging voices of Iranian women writers (Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, N.Y., 1992). ISBN 0-815-62557-X, ISBN 978-1-85043-574-7.
Interview with Simin Behbahani on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of Forugh Farrokhzad's death on Thursday 13 February 2007 (BBC Persian).
Urdu: Fehmida Riaz published by 'Sheherzade Publications' Karachi.
 

Bibliography

Michael Craig Hillmann, A lonely woman: Forough Farrokhzad and her poetry (Three Continents Press, Washington, D.C., 1987). ISBN 0-934-2111-16, ISBN 978-093-42111-16.
 

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 (Cambridge [Massachusetts]: Harvard University Press, 1990). ISBN 0932885055. This essay can be read here: .

Sholeh Wolpe, Sin: Selected poems of Forugh Farrokhzad, (Fayetteville [Arkansas]: University of Arkansas Press, 2007). ISBN 1557288615
Ezzat Goushegir, The Bride of Acacias, (a play about Forough Farrokhzad).
 

Documentaries and other works

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 -- Wikipedia

Director - Selected filmography

1. The House Is Black | Khaneh siah ast (1962)