Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season: Selected Poems

by Forough Farrokhzad, Elizabeth T. Gray Jr (Translator)

Overview

A ravishing new translation of Iran’s trailblazing, feminist poet in an indispensable collection

In the years since her tragic death in a car accident at age thirty-two in 1967, Forough Farrokhzad has become a poet as iconic and influential as Lorca or Akhmatova, celebrated as a pioneer of modernist Iranian literature and as a leading figure of contemporary world literature. Farrokhzad, as Elizabeth Gray writes in the preface, “remains a beacon to artists, especially women and marginalized artists, who seek freedom in all its forms.”

This thoughtfully curated, deftly translated selection of Farrokhzad’s poems includes work from her whole writing life, early to late. Readers will thoroughly treasure this expansive poet of the quotidian; of longing, loss, and desire; of classical reinvention; of lexical variation and sonic beauty; of terrifying wisdom, hope, and grief.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811231657
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	04/05/2022
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	195,276
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Poet, filmmaker, screenwriter, and painter, Forough Farrokhzad (1934–1967) was born the third of seven children in Mazandaran, north of Tehran. Drawn to reading and writing poetry as a child, she dropped out of high school to study painting and dressmaking at a technical school. At age sixteen she fell in love with her mother’s cousin; they married, moved to a provincial town, and had a son. During her marriage she worked as a seamstress and wrote the poems of her first collection, The Captive (1955). In the fall of that year, she divorced her husband, relinquished all rights to her son, and moved to Tehran. Three more poetry collections followed: The Wall (1956), Rebellion (1958), and Another Birth (1964). She also translated the work of George Bernard Shaw and Henry Miller, and made a groundbreaking documentary, The House Is Black (1962), about a leper colony in northeastern Iran. Her posthumous collection of late poems Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season was published in 1974.

Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. is the author of the poetry collections Salient and Series | India, and the translator of Wine and Prayer: Eighty Ghazals from the Diwan of Hafiz and Iran: Poems of Dissent.

Table of Contents

Note on Transliteration vii

Translator's Introduction ix

From Captive (1955)

Captive 3

From Wall (1956)

Sin 5

Lost 6

Grief-Worshipper 8

Wall 9

From Rebellion (1958)

God's Rebellion 11

Knot 13

Return 15

From Far Away 17

Much Later 19

From Another Birth (1964)

Those Days 21

The Sun Comes Out 25

On the Soil 27

The Wind Will Carry Us 29

In the Green Waters of Summer 30

Realizing 33

Love Poem 35

Border Walls 38

Friday 41

Wind-Up Doll 42

My Lover 44

In the Cold Streets of Night 46

In a Never-Ending Twilight 48

Earthly Verses 52

Gift 56

Green Illusion 57

Pair 60

The Victory of the Garden 61

Rose 63

The Bird Was Just a Bird 64

O Jeweled Land 65

I Will Greet the Sun Again 70

Another Birth 71

Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season (1974)

Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season 74

After You 83

Window 86

I Pity the Garden 89

Someone Who Is Like No One 93

Only the Sound Remains 96

The Bird Is Mortal 98

Notes 99

Selected Bibliography 105

Acknowledgments 107

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/23/2022

This excellent assemblage of the late Farrokhzad’s selected work brings the yearning and sensual lyricism of the modernist Iranian poet to a contemporary audience. Gray’s introduction provides useful context on Farrokhzad’s tragically short life, while her curation captures much of the arc and scope of Farrokhzad’s poetic imagination over the course of the poet’s prolific writing career. Early poems announce Farrokhzad’s dissatisfaction with repressive mid-20th-century Iranian culture: “Weary of zealous restraint, at midnight, in Satan’s bed/ I would seek shelter in the descent to a fresh sin.” Insistence on her own mortality runs through her oeuvre, “I kissed the cross of my fate/ on the hills of my execution,” while she continues to chafe under the strictures of society, “My body no longer fit the cocoon of my loneliness.” Full of powerful and often revolutionary feminist spirit, Farrokhzad’s bold verse should find new readers thanks to this skillful translation. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"Full of wonderful imagery, heart-rending avowals, and cris de coeur."

The Hudson Review

"Living through a period that promised more freedom than it offered, she found a literary form to register its contradictions. Her poetry embraces pleasure in the face of social censure, seeks a genuine spirituality while rebuking the cant of tradition."

4Columns - Ratik Asokan

"Farrokhzad wrote poetry on the horizon of working for a civil society in which men’s freedom was not complete without women’s freedom, and for a life in which the soul’s freedom was not separate from the body’s—individually, socially, and culturally. Her poetry is a space that radiates aspiration and exaltation, a space ablaze with vitality, desire, and beauty."

Adonis

"Iran’s leading literary journal, Sokhan, wrote after her funeral, ‘Forough is perhaps the first female writer in Persian literature to express the emotions and romantic feelings of the feminine gender in her verse with distinctive frankness and elegance, for which reason she has inaugurated a new chapter in Persian poetry."

The New York Times

"In every culture you have cultural icons, like Shakespeare in Britain. Farrokhzad was like that for contemporary Iran, someone who formed the identity of our contemporariness."

The Guardian - Mehdi Jami

"In her translation, Elizabeth T. Gray Jr. sought to capture “as much of the beauty, strangeness, ferocity, and stillness of the original.” She has done so, and more, bringing the best of Farrokhzad into the light, where she is easily recognized to be as relevant and fresh today as she was sixty years ago."

World Literature Today

"Innocence has given way to experience. The poet commands her emotions rather than surrendering to them."

World Socialist Web Site

"Elizabeth T. Gray’s new literary translations offer the unstoppable voice of world-class poet Forough Farrokhzad to English speakers and broaden the horizon for comparative readings of the poet’s work, a treasured joy unto itself."

Niloufar Talebi

"Joy, rage, despair, transcendence—Farrokhzad's poems, like the life from which they were often drawn, contain multitudes. In Elizabeth T. Gray’s assured translations, each poem is tightly conceived and elegantly modulated, the language precise, the voice as fresh and vivid as Farrokhzad’s own. A vital contribution to Farrokhzad’s legacy."

Jasmin Darznik