10 The New York ReviewCatastrophic Desires
Anahid NersessianLet Us Believe in the
Beginning of the Cold
Season: Selected Poems
by Forough Farrokhzad,
translated from the Persian
by Elizabeth T. Gray Jr.
New Directions, 107 pp.,
$16.95 (paper)The title poem of Forough
Farrokhzad’s first collec-
tion, Captive, was written
in 1954, when Farrokhzad
was nineteen and her son
Kamyar was a toddler. Far-
rokhzad had been married
for two years, having left
high school to wed a distant
relative and well- respected
writer named Parviz Shapur.
Married life did not agree
with her; she had fallen for
someone else. Still, Far-
rokhzad understood very
well what leaving would
mean. For her, it would be
both tangible—as a divorced
woman, she would lose all
legal rights to her child—and
psychological. For Kamyar,
or so his mother suspected,
the disintegration of his
family would mean the col-
lapse of his entire world.
Addressed to the lover she
longs for but refuses to join,
“Captive” rearranges the
love triangle of a husband, a
wife, and her paramour into
a tug- of- war between erotic
longing and maternal obliga-
tion, between freedom and
its collateral damage:I want you, and I know that never
will I hold you as my heart desires
You are that clear bright sky
I am a captive bird in the corner
of this cage...I am thinking and I know that
never
will I have the resolve to leave this
cage
Even if it were the jailor’s wish
I have no strength left for flightFrom beyond the bars each bright
morning
A child’s gaze smiles in my face
When I begin a joyous song
his lips come to me with a kissO sky, if I wish one day
to fly from this silent prison
what will I say to the eyes of the
crying child?
Leave me be, I am a captive birdI am the candle whose burning
heart
lights up a ruin
If I choose silence
I will shred a nest“Captive”—included in Elizabeth
T. Gray Jr.’s luminous new translation
of Farrokhzad’s Let Us Believe in the
Beginning of the Cold Season, a post-
humous selection first published in
1974— may trade in familiar tropes
of bondage and imprisonment, but
its speaker’s grievances are surpris-ingly complex. She does not resent
her spouse, nor does she ask her lover
to come to her rescue. She is afraid of
the consequences for someone who
can neither choose nor refuse them.
The poem ends with images that sug-
gest a total dereliction of parental duty:
a child left alone in the dark, in the
rubble of a home made uninhabitable
by his mother’s absence. In another
poem on the same theme, Farrokhzad
searches an abandoned room for any
trace of her son only to find it “empty
of his childish voice,” nothing “left but
a name.”
For Farrokhzad, all desire is cata-
strophic. In her poetry, love promises
loss, sex promises despair, and moth-
erhood—which seems to demand a
total renunciation of one’s own needs
and ambitions—defeats the spirit. The
tropes of imprisonment and captivity
are uniquely driven by Farrokhzad’s
experiences as a woman in Iran in
the decades before the Islamic Revo-
lution of 1979. As lyric statements of
emotional anguish and existential un-
rest, these poems actively court the
description “universal”: they seem,
sometimes, as though they could have
been written by anyone, at any time,
in any place. And yet in their empha-
sis on freedom’s ethical contradictions
and costs, they belong irreducibly to
a particular moment in time. In the
words of Farzaneh Milani, whose
2017 biography of Farrokhzad has yet
to be translated, her poetry speaks “of
a confusion that in many of her read-ers remains unarticulated,” and of
the trials of “a whole generation” un-
dergoing traumas both intimate and
historical.In reality Farrokhzad flew the coop.
She left her husband and child and
threw herself into a life that would have
been impossible within the boundaries
of a traditional marriage. As a single
woman, she was able to write, paint,
pursue the relationships that interested
her, and weave her erotic encounters
into poems whose candor is still unset-
tling. And yet, she could not escape her
yearning for Kamyar, whom she was
not allowed to see without his father’s
permission. Following her divorce in
1955, she had a nervous breakdown and
spent a month in a psychiatric clinic,
where—like Sylvia Plath, the poet to
whom she is most often compared in
the English- speaking world—she un-
derwent electroconvulsive therapy.
“My arms and legs get tied up with my
own bleak imaginings,” she wrote, “and
then I see that I can no longer have the
power to resist, that I am done with this
life, and that everyone is looking at me
with condescension.”
Nonetheless, Farrokhzad did not
return to her husband and did not
remarry. Instead, she kept writing,
eventually abandoning the traditional
forms of her earlier work to become a
staunch partisan of free verse. She also
began making films, including the as-
tonishing documentary The House IsBlack, released in 1963. Set
at a leper colony near Tabriz,
in the northwestern part of
the country, it is now consid-
ered an important precur-
sor to Iran’s cinematic New
Wave. In 1956 Farrokhzad
spent several months in Eu-
rope, learned Italian and
some German, and with her
brother Amir—then living
in Munich—translated an
anthology of twenty- nine
German poets, with an em-
phasis on Jewish and anti-
fascist writers. Working on
her own, she also translated
George Bernard Shaw and
Henry Miller. In the 1960s,
Bernardo Bertolucci went to
Iran to make a movie about
Farrokhzad. In it, she ap-
pears at once commanding
and fragile, huge dark eyes
glowing as she holds forth
on the social role of the art-
ist. When she died in a car
accident at the age of thirty-
two in 1967, it was front- page
news. As for the accident,
there is a persistent rumor
that she swerved to avoid a
school bus.
The Plath comparison is
unavoidable but provincial.
Though Farrokhzad has
been widely translated into
English, audiences outside
the Iranian diaspora have
found it difficult to grasp
her work on its own terms.
It is true that, like Plath, she
had a career bound by the
very public convergence of
the personal and the political, and that
she suffered mightily under the spoken
and unspoken rules of a patriarchal so-
ciety. Stylistically, however, there is very
little overlap. Plath is stealthy, stern,
hard- boiled. Farrokhzad, whose po-
etry is self- consciously entwined with
a long tradition of Persian erotic verse,
presents herself as a force of nature who
thrives in the clash of elemental oppo-
sites: hot and cold, water and iron. She
is, she says, a shoreline, a tarantula, a
fish, the stem of a plant “sucking in air
and sun and water/in order to live.”
There is another difference, as abso-
lute as style. Unlike Plath, Farrokhzad
was a dissident, albeit a slightly under-
cover one. Despite her reputation as a
poet of private life and sexual scandal,
she was a fierce critic of the Pahlavi
regime, which ended when Shah Mu-
hammad Reza Pahlavi fled Iran on Jan-
uary 16, 1979, and Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini announced the formation of
a provisional government. Although
she benefited directly from the Shah’s
emphasis on social liberalization, she
openly derided his attempt to modern-
ize the country at warp speed and its
immiserating effect on Iran’s poor.
More to the point, Farrokhzad writes
vividly about the widespread civil and
religious repression that characterized
the regime, a risky choice given that
SAVAK—the Shah’s infamous secret
police force, trained in methods of
torture by the CIA and Mossad—rou-
tinely rounded up, imprisoned, and ex-
ecuted artists, intellectuals, Marxists,Forough Farrokhzad; illustration by Juman MaloufNersessian 10 15 .indd 10 4 / 14 / 22 4 : 57 PM