FOROUGH FARROKHZAD (1934-1967) is roughly contemporary with Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) and Anne Sexton (1928-1974), and like Plath and Sexton she is famous for pushing the envelope of the poetic tradition she inherited to make it better accommodate a candor about female experience that had not previously been visible in the tradition. As with Plath and Sexton, that gunpowder smell of transgression creates much of a reader's first impression, but if you stick around and keep reading you will start to hear the grain of a unique voice.
As I read, I found myself thinking most of all of Marina Tsvetaeva. Tsvetaeva, Plath, Sexton, and Farrokhzad have a kind of situation in common, composed of their candor, their boldness in giving the tradition something new to talk about, their flipping of the tables to turn abjection into exaltation, and the absence of anything that sounds like acquiescence. It's Tsvetaeva who seems like Farrokhzad's real kindred spirit, though, the one having least truck with how her culture wanted women to present themselves.
This volume's translator, Elizabeth Gray, mentions being less interested in the earlier work than in the later, and on the evidence here included, it's hard to disagree. The poems from the first three books have a lot of attitude but mainly recycled imagery; those from Another Birth, the last volume to appear in Farrokhzad's lifetime, and especially those from the posthumous collection also titled Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season are fresher, stranger, more audacious, closer to the bone.
I need to reread Solmaz Sharif's poem on not translating Farrokhzad. It's the right call, I'd say, in that Sharif is not daemonic in quite the way Farrokhzad is, but I'm not sure that's why Sharif declined the gambit. Maybe she declined it precisely because it seemed like a gambit?
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