Forough Farrokhzad
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Forough Farrokhzad (Persian: فروغ فرخزاد) (January 5, 1935 — February 13, 1967) was an Iranian poetess and film director.
Forough Farrokhzad, Parvin E'tesami and Simin Behbahani are usually considered the most famous modern female poets of Iran. Forough Farrokhzad was mainly under the influence of Ebrahim Golestan, a notable Iranian scholar.[1]
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 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. Forough 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 Kamjar (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 Golestan, 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 The 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 Persian.
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). A new English translation of a selection of her poems by Maryam Dilmaghani is published on-line by the name of Forough Farrokhzad: The Sad Little Fairy to commemorate the 40th anniversary of her death. Nasser Saffarian has directed three documentaries on her; The Mirror of the Soul (2000), The Green Cold (2003), and Summit of the Wave (2004).
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[edit] Translation of her works
- English: Maryam Dilmaghani
- Azeri: Samad Behrangi
- German: Annemarie Schimmel
- Turkish: Hashem Khosrow-Shahi, Jalal Khosrow-Shahi
- Arabic: Mohammad Al-Amin, Gassan Hamdan
[edit] Biography
- 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.
[edit] Reference
- 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.
[edit] Notes
[edit] External links
- NEW ENGLISH TRANSLATION!
- A Website Dedicated to Forough
- Iran Chamber's Article on Forough
- A Website Dedicated to Forough
- Farrukhzad, Forugh, a biography by Professor Iraj Bashiri, University of Minnesota
- Clips, Listen to some of her poems by her own voice
- "She loved as in our age people no longer do"
- Forough Farrokhzad's résumé. [2]
[edit] See also
 Cinema of Iran |
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Actors • Directors • Films A-Z • Chronology of films • Cinematographers • Iranian New Wave • Producers • Screenwriters • |
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