Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad - Softcover

Farrokhzad, Forugh

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1557289484 ISBN 13: 9781557289483

Publisher: University of Arkansas Press, 2010

Synopsis

For the first time, the work of Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad is being brought to English-speaking readers through the perspective of a translator who is a poet in her own right, fluent in both Persian and English and intimately familiar with each culture. Sin includes the entirety of Farrokhzad's last book, numerous selections from her fourth and most enduring book, Reborn, and selections from her earlier work and creates a collection that is true to the meaning, the intention, and the music of the original poems. Farrokhzad was the most significant female Iranian poet of the twentieth century, as revolutionary as Russia's Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva and America's Plath and Sexton. She wrote with a sensuality and burgeoning political consciousness that pressed against the boundaries of what could be expressed by a woman in 1950s and 1960s Iran. She paid a high price for her art, shouldering the disapproval of society and her family, having her only child taken away, and spending time in mental institutions. Farrokhzad died in a car accident in 1967 at the age of thirty-two. Sin is a tribute to the work and life of this remarkable poet.

About this title

From the Publisher:

A new collection from Iran's rebel woman poet, with a foreword by Alicia Ostriker, to be published on the 40th anniversary of Forugh Farrokhzad's death

From the Back Cover:

"Maligned and admired in her all-too-brief life, demonized and eventually banned soon after the Islamic Revolution, Forugh Farrokhzad is a literary icon and guru in Iran today. Her poetry, like the response it elicited, is a perfect metaphor for a society in transition. Sholeh Wolpe's selection of poems and the lush lucidity of her translation convey the quickly evolving and the richly paradoxical nature of Farrokhzad's poetry. It is a welcome addition to the slim body of literary translations available in the U.S."
--Farzaneh Milani, author of Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers

The literary secret in the twentieth century is the short full life of the poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad (1935-67), whose brief life in Iran coincides almost to the year with Sylvia Plath's tumultuous visit on earth. Plath took her life. Absurd accident took Farrokhzad's blood and pen. Both artists were at their peak. Forugh is a dynamic inventor in life and poem, risking all to create a role for women's place, art, spirit. Her poetry has a Houdini sleight-of-hand perfection of the impossible, each word poised, of raw reality and acrobatic beauty, yielding unparalleled verse. Compact, extravagantly imagistic, she left a complete corpus, but her heart-breaking early death, like that of Miguel Hernandez and Garcia Lorca to war's brutality, has deprived the world of this genial magus. Her Persian voice survives. Sholeh Wolpé's translations, meeting the rigor and esthetic of her compatriot, flow and carry us into rare catharsis. They resurrect Forugh.
--Willis Barnstone, author of Sweetbitter Love: Poems of Sappho;Border of a Dream: Poems of Antonio Machado; and Life Watch

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1557289484
• ISBN 13: 9781557289483
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 166