The name of redeemer from mirrors

Forough Farrokhzad

Forugh Farrokhzād (Persian: فروغ فرخزاد) (January,1935-February 13,1967 was an Iranian poet and film director. Forugh Farrokhzad is arguably Iran's most significant female poet of the twentieth century. She was a brilliant modernist poet and an iconoclast.

Forugh (also spelled as 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 (Amir, Massoud, Mehrdad, Fereydon, Pouran, Gloria) 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. Forugh 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 Golstan, 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 This 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 poetry.

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. Translations into English include those by Sholeh Wolpe, The Sad Little Fairy Maryam Dilmagahani , 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).


Some of her poems

Another Birth
My entire soul is a murky verse
Reiterating you within itself
Carrying you to the dawn of eternal burstings and blossomings
In this verse, I sighed you, AH!
In this verse,
I grafted you to trees, water and fire
Perhaps life is
A long street along which a woman
With a basket passes every day
Perhaps life
Is a rope with which a man hangs himself from a branch
Perhaps life is a child returning home from school
Perhaps life is the lighting of a cigarette
Between the lethargic intervals of two lovemakings
Or the puzzled passage of a passerby
Tipping his hat
Saying good morning to another passerby with a vacant smile

Perhaps life is that blocked moment
When my look destroys itself in the pupils of your eyes
And in this there is a sense
Which I will mingle with the perception of the moon
And the reception of darkness
In a room the size of one solitude
My heart
The size of one love
Looks at the simple pretexts of its own happiness,

At the pretty withering of flowers in the flower pots
At the sapling you planted in our flowerbed
At the songs of the canaries
Who sing the size of one window.

Ah
This is my lot
This is my lot
My lot
Is a sky, which the dropping of a curtain seizes from me
My lot is going down an abandoned stairway
And joining with something in decay and nostalgia
My lot is a cheerless walk in the garden of memories
And dying in the sorrow of a voice that tells me:
"I love
Your hands"

I will plant my hands in the flowerbed
I will sprout, I know, I know, I know
And the sparrows will lay eggs
In the hollows of my inky fingers
I will hang a pair of earrings of red twin cherries
Round my ears
I will put dahlia petals on my nails
There is an alley
Where the boys who were once in love with me,
With those disheveled hairs, thin necks and gaunt legs
Still think of the innocent smiles of a little girl
Who was one night blown away by the wind
There is an alley which my heart
Has stolen from places of my childhood
The journey of a volume along the line of time
And impregnating the barren line of time with a volume
A volume conscious of an image
Returning from the feast of a mirror

This is the way
Someone dies
And someone remains
No fisherman will catch pearls
From a little stream flowing into a ditch

I
Know a sad little mermaid
Dwelling in the ocean
Softly, gently blowing
Her heart into a wooden flute
A sad little mermaid
Who dies with a kiss at night
And is born again with another kiss at dawn

Window

A window to see,

A window to hear,

A round window like an unending well:

It should reach to the core of the earth.

And should release into that kind, blue, even air.

A window that loads lonely little hands

by the nocturnal scent of the generous stars.

A window that invites the sun

to the glacial exile of blooms.

A window is enough for me.

I am coming from the land of puppets

And from the shade of painted trees

in the printed gardens of the fiction books.

And from the arid season of thrills of romance,

From deserted lanes of innocence,

From the years of pastel faced letters.


I am coming from behind bench of a tired class.

And from that confusing time

whilst I wrote the spell of “stone” on the board

and terrified birds fled from the cracking branches of the trees.


I arrive from beneath roots of the carnivorous trees,

And my mind is still filled by the fearful calls

of dried butterflies,

under heavy volume of blank, aged books.

When my trust was hung from the frail justice line of the town,

And in the roads, they were cutting the head of my torch,

When they had blind folded innocent eyes of my love,

When fresh blood erupted from all veins of my shaking dreams,

And when my life was nothing but the regular song of the grandfather clock,

I realized that I had to love,

I had to love madly.

A window is enough for me.

A window to the instance of insight, sight and peace,

Now that little walnut tree is so grown, grown, so grown,

that it can narrate the tale of wall

to its young leaves.



Ask the name of redeemer from mirrors:

You see,

This trembling ground underneath your feet

is lonelier than you.


The verdict of ruin arrived in prophetic, sealed notes,

And those infected clouds and incessant blasts perhaps,

flow from those sacred words.



My friend!

Don’t forget,

When you land on the moon,

engrave the date of the carnage of the blooms

on its sad, pale, wrinkled face.


Dreams always fall from their naive heights and die,

And on the soil, where old beliefs silently rest,

a little plant, with four tiny leaves, constantly grows.

I smell this plant.


A woman was buried in the chaste coffin of her hope.

Is she my young days?

A gentle god was taking nightly walks,

in the fresh air of the roofs.

Will I climb again, climb again

the curious steepness of the stairs

to greet him?


I feel that the time had left.

I feel that my share of instant is planted in the past.

I feel that this stand is just a virtual room between my hairs

and the hands of this sad, strange guest.


Talk to me,

I donate you all that kindness of streaming life

I expect you nothing but the reflection of its truth.

Talk to me,

You see,

In the shelter of my window,

I am attached to the sun.


Regret
Note : It is from her first published book.

Thou left me, Ô still naïve me,

I don’t believe this spite of thee.

I had faith in thy love like a prayer

Now I can not trust any other lover.


Thou left and gone with thee, my hope and bliss

Why would I yearn yet rapture of thy kiss?

Sure, I still long for thy love, by patience

In this bitter darkness, callous silence.

Remember that mad woman who rest

One long night, on thy shielding chest?

Engulfed by love, her trembling lips heaved a sigh

Desire laughed in her glistening eye.

“She was thirsty, dampened by thy burning lip,

She recited then her plea, her sheer worship.

Coiled around thy waist like twines of vines,

Ô those shimmering arms, in the moon light lines.”

“All tales of love, whispered to her

In her lone soul, they will linger,

But what remained from that wondrous night?

The strings of vines, dried; the moon light, died.”


Alas, thou left with haste and disregard!

I adored thee, how could thou depart?

Hey Judas! Return, I will hold thee tight

I want to lodge thee in my blazing heart!


The Gift

I am talking about the extremes of darkness

and from the edge of night.

I am talking about the thickness of absolute shade.


My darling!

If you are coming to my place

Bring me a torch

and put up for me

a little window

I will then watch

the noisy crowd of the happy lane.


Friday


My silent Friday,

My deserted Friday,

My Friday: sad, like old abandoned lanes.


My Friday:

The cold day of ailing, idle thoughts,

Moist day of long, evil bore,

loaded with grief,

grief for my faith, for my hope,

Oh, my Friday, this renouncing day…


Oh, this empty room,

Oh, this gloomy house…


These isolating walls from attacks of youth,

These collapsing roofs on my slight daydream of light,

In this place of lone, reflection and doubt,

In this space of shade, text, image and sign.


My life, like a mysterious river,

streamed into those silent, deserted days,

so calmly with a lot of pride.


My life, like a mysterious river,

Streamed into those empty, gloomy rooms,

so calmly with a lot of pride.


The Wave


To me you are a wave

never here, never there,

you are nowhere!

hurling, dragging, diffuse like a plague,

You're on the go for somewhere vague.


To me you are a revolting tide in an eternal glide:

Persistent, impatient, though restless and confused

silent in your heart, fretful in your acts.

The sea of regret is your native land.


Yes, you are a revolting tide!

So always on the ride,

in an eternal glide...


One night

I will wear a mask

made of the thirst of remote shores

And I’ll capture you in my absorbing sands,

eternally away from your naval native lands