12 The New York Reviewand Muslim activists. In the scathing
poem “O Jeweled Land” (the title of
what was then the national anthem),
she contrasts the superficial freedom of
the chattering classes with the political
violence that lies just beneath her coun-
try’s surface:I have stepped into the space of
existence where the creative
masses live
and although no bread can be
found there
it offers a field of wide- open
vision
its actual geography defined
to the north by the fresh green of
Bullet Square
to the south by Execution Square
and by Artillery Square in the
center of townAnd from dawn until sunset, in
the shelter of a shining and safe
sky
six hundred and seventy- eight
plaster swans
along with six hundred and
seventy- eight angels
—angels made of mixed dirt and
mud, by the way—
are busy proceeding with plans
for stillness and silenceFarrokhzad died a decade before the
Shah’s fall, but she lived long enough
to see many of her friends and family
members either driven out of Iran or
jailed there. According to the scholar
Nima Mina, her brother Amir was
in Munich not just to attend medical
school but because the city had become
a hub for left- wing Iranian students.
During her visit to Germany, Far-
rokhzad befriended a number of those
students, including Kurosh Lasha’i,
who went on to form a revolutionary
breakaway group from the communist
Tudeh party, and Mehdi Khanbaba
Tehrani, who became a Maoist com-
mentator for Radio Beijing; both spent
time incarcerated by the Iranian gov-
ernment. As for Amir, he was involved
in the anticolonial Iranian National
Front, a political party that sought to
nationalize Iran’s oil reserves and resist
the manipulation of its internal affairs
by Western powers.
Resistance was a family affair. In
time, four of Farrokhzad’s six siblings
relocated to Germany, including her
brother Fereydoun, a renowned singer-
songwriter and activist who publicly
criticized the Islamic Republic. In 1992
Fereydoun was stabbed to death—a
switchblade through his shoulder and
a kitchen knife through his mouth—in
his apartment in Bonn, during the pe-
riod of so- called chain murders carried
out by Iranian intelligence against pub-
lic intellectuals as well as ordinary cit-
izens. According to one report, shortly
before his death Fereydoun had asked
Iran’s ambassador to Germany for help
returning home: he wanted to see his
mother.Half of my family comes from Iran,
but I knew very little about Farrokhzad
until college, when I snuck into a
screening of The House Is Black for a
documentary film class in which I was
not enrolled. At first I tried to get by
without reading the English subtitles. It
was no good until a little under five min-
utes in, when Farrokhzad, who narrates
some of the film in her quiet, youthfulvoice, began reciting the days of the
week: “Šanbe, Yekšanbe, Došanbe”—
Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and so on.
I know these words because my grand-
mother, who was from Sari, in the prov-
ince of Mazandaran, would sometimes
use them interchangeably with “Shabat,
Kiraki, Yerkushabt’i,” which is how
you say Saturday, Sunday, Monday in
Armenian. Despite being born in Iran,
and despite having lived there until the
chaotic days just before the revolution
drove her abroad, my grandmother had
very limited Farsi, and she could never
read or write it. This in contrast to my
father, whose Persian is perfect even
though he has not been back to Tehran,
the city of his birth, since 1968 (not for
lack of trying).
For a long time my grandmother’s
shaky grasp of her national language
was a mystery to me. Like her depres-
sion, it shrouded her in a fog of social
as well as psychic isolation. Because
she could not speak Persian, she never
found a home with New York’s expa-
triate Iranian community; because she
could not speak English, she needed
help negotiating the supermarket, the
doctor’s office, the bus. The dual func-
tions of translator and comfort object
fell to me, which was difficult, but not
so difficult as the responsibility that
fell on her when she was eight and her
mother died following an illegal abor-
tion; such procedures still account for
13 percent of all maternal deaths in
Iran. Forced to leave school to care for
her three younger siblings, my grand-
mother gradually lost all but a few
words of her third- grade Persian, the
victim of a matrilineal dispossession
that skipped over my father and his
brother—boys of whom much was ex-
pected—to be passed on to me.
In “Do You Speak Persian?” the
poet Kaveh Akbar elegizes his own
vanishing intimacy with the language
of his childhood: “I have been so care-
less with the words I already have. / / I
don’t remember how to say home/in my
first language, or lonely, or light.” T h is
position, which is also mine, is a pecu-
liar one to occupy when reading work
in translation. It’s a position neither
of complete ignorance nor effortless
knowledge but is instead characterized
by a mood of reluctant, embarrassing
dependence on the expositions of oth-
ers. Meanwhile, because Farrokhzad’s
poetry has become so important in
the Iranian diaspora, among a com-
munity of people for whom (as Akbar
says) “every step... / has been from one
tongue to another,” its translators carry
an uncommon burden. They don’t just
have to make the poetry legible: they
have to make it sound like home even
to people who have never been there.
Gray is very clear on what she takes
to be the power of Farrokhzad’s work.
“In a country where for centuries
women have lived silent, diminished,
and in the shadow of their men,” she
writes in her introduction, Farrokhzad
“broke all the rules.” For Gray, Far-
rokhzad’s politics are more expansively
humanist than specifically progressive;
at the same time, they are also more
narrowly trained on the pressures to
which women were and remain subject.
If this account leaves much unsaid, it
also reflects the heroic role Farrokhzad
has come to play in the diaspora follow-
ing the crackdown on women’s rights at
home, from a 1979 edict that made the
hijab compulsory to a recent law that
floats the possibility of turning abor-tion into a capital offense. Without
having suffered under these exact cir-
cumstances, Farrokhzad has nonethe-
less become a symbol of resistance to
them.
As for the language, Gray—who has
also translated the fourteenth- century
poet Hafiz and the anthology Iran:
Poems of Dissent, featuring Iranian
writers from the Middle Ages to the
present day—has successfully resisted
the impulse to play up Farrokhzad’s
high- octane affect. The poetry is in-
tense, no doubt, and its passions are
real. Still, many of Farrokhzad’s En-
glish translators have hystericized
the verse, using words like “fevered”
where the less pathological “burning”
would do, or by trying to reproduce
the rhymes of Farrokhzad’s earlier
metrical poems and thus making her
sexual frankness seem at once naive
and contrived. The result is that many
translations have lost what Farrokhzad
described as the intention behind her
poetry, particularly her erotic poetry,
which she wrote not just to express
herself but also to match the complexi-
ties of twentieth- century life. “Modern
Persian poetry,” she said, presents love
as “so magnified, so plaintive, and so
anguished that it does not match the
nervous and hasty lines of today’s life.
Or else,” she added roguishly, it is “so
full of the pain of celibacy that it auto-
matically reminds one of male cats in
season on sunny roofs.”
It was important to Farrokhzad
that her poetry did not appear to be
in heat—that it convey desperation
without delirium and capture the am-
bivalence that suffuses even the most
heartfelt attachments. Even “Sin,” her
most famous poem, introduces a note
of hostility into what might otherwise
read as a simple ode to a good lay:I sinned a sin full of pleasure
in an embrace that was warm and
fiery
I sinned in arms that were hot
and vindictive and made of
iron...I sinned a sin full of pleasure
beside a dazed and trembling
body
O Lord, what do I know about
what I did
in that dark and silent sanctuaryThe word Gray translates as “vindic-
tive” comes from the noun kine, mean-
ing hatred, spite, malevolence, or, most
suggestively, grudge, as in kine shotori,
used in the Persian expression “to hold
a grudge like a camel,” or the 2004
horror movie The Grudge, whose title
in Farsi is Kine. “Grudging” suggests
delay or demurral and wouldn’t work
here—these lovers are exceptionally
enthusiastic—but “vindictive” cap-
tures the abjection that accompanies
a desire to punish, the vulnerability of
the person who needs, very badly, to
get back at the person who’s wronged
him and whom he also loves. Similarly,
the dissolution of the first stanza’s arms
of iron into the unguarded body of the
final lines unsettles the poem’s decep-
tive conventionality. This is not, as it
may first appear, an account of mascu-
line aggression and feminine surrender
but rather an almost abstract render-
ing of the psychic rhythms of push and
pull. For what it’s worth, this sense that
we are dealing with emotions that are
at once embodied and in excess of any“Younger
writers
were freed to
think about
specifi cally
Jewish
questions.
[Their] work
has a narrower
appeal. Only
time will tell
if it is also
a deeper one.”
—Adam Kirsch
After the
Golden Age:
American Jewish writing
in the twenty-first
century
Adam KirschOn the invention of a new Jewish America
Kaya GençAntisemitism and paranoia in Erdoğan’s Turkey
Patrick MackieThe double life of Mozart’s great collaborator
Jo GlanvilleThe Jews of Dublin
Sarah KrasnosteinThe exiles who avenged the Nazis
George ProchnikW.G. Sebald and narratives of lossMay 2022JQ
Aft er The Golden
Age: American
Jewish Writing in
the Twenty-First
Century
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