Forough Farrokhzad
فروغ فرخزادThe boldest voice of her generation, who wrote a woman's inner life with a frankness Persian poetry had not heard.
- Known for
- Another Birth (Tavallodi Digar), 1964
- Forms
- New poetry (she'r-e now)
- Places
- Tehranتهران
- Collection
- Contemporary
Forough published her first collection, The Captive, in 1955. Another Birth (1964) and the posthumous Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season established her among the great modern Persian poets.
She was also a filmmaker: The House Is Black (1962), her documentary about a leper colony near Tabriz, is counted among the landmarks of Iranian cinema. She died in a car accident in Tehran in 1967, at the age of 32.
Forough's poems are in copyright. We will publish translations only with permission from the rights holders; until then we write about the work.
Booksکتابها
The principal works of Forough Farrokhzad.
The Captive
اسیرForough’s first book, published when she was about twenty. Written in regular rhyming quatrains, its poems spoke of a woman’s desire, marriage and confinement with a frankness that Persian poetry had rarely heard from a woman. It caused a scandal in Tehran and made her name almost overnight.
The Wall
دیوارHer second collection, published a year after The Captive and still written in traditional forms. It continues the themes of love, loneliness and the walls that society builds around a woman, and shows her growing restless with conventional language and with the limits of the rhymed quatrain.
Rebellion
عصیانHer third collection, in which longer poems question God, fate and the place of the individual in the world. Its religious and philosophical doubt, voiced in a series of bold monologues, marks a turn away from the purely personal towards the larger subjects of her later, greater work.
Another Birth
تولدی دیگرThe book in which Forough found her mature voice, in Nima’s free form and the rhythms of everyday speech. Poems such as ‘Another Birth’ and ‘The Wind Will Carry Us’ made it one of the landmarks of modern Persian poetry.
Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season
ایمان بیاوریم به آغاز فصل سردThe poems of Forough’s last years, published several years after her death in a car accident in 1967. The long title poem is a dark, prophetic meditation on solitude, time and loss, and is often counted among the greatest poems written in modern Persian.
Forough Farrokhzad in Iranian history
Iranian historyThe Pahlavi century and afterدوران پهلوی و پس از آن
Two Pahlavi shahs built railways, universities and a centralised state, while poets, novelists and film-makers created a new Persian culture. The era ended with the revolution of 1979.