14 The New York Reviewindividual is clearer in the Persian text,
since Farsi makes no grammatical dis-
tinction among the genders and uses
the same pronoun for all of them.As Gray says in her introduction, Far-
rokhzad’s early, erotic work shocked
readers partly because so few women
had written as she had, at least pub-
licly. However, it’s also true that what
the novelist Shahrnush Parsipur called
Iran’s “limited ancestry” of female au-
thors is dominated by the authors of
love lyrics, especially in the premodern
period when longer narrative poetry
was considered an exclusively male
genre. Reading some of those earlier
writers—Rabe’eh, Mahsati, Jahan
Malek Khatun, and Mehri along with
the usual (male) suspects Rumi and
Hafiz—one can trace the same ser-
pentine structure of passive aggression
Farrokhzad masters in “Sin.” “How
long will you roll me around myself like
a scroll?” asks Jahan Khatun. “How
long will you twirl me in your hand like
a pen?... I became the dust of the roads
to sit on your robe. /When will you stop
shaking me off your lap?”
This juxtaposition of emotional tur-
moil and quotidian detail is likewise
one of Farrokhzad’s favored tech-
niques, as in “Knot,” from her 1958
book Rebellion:I saw the room confused, in
disarray
your book fallen at my feet
my hairpins fallen
there on your bedNo more sound of bubbling water
from the fish tank
What worries
kept your old cat awake?Or take these lines from “Rose,”
which invokes only to disassemble the
eighteenth- century Scottish poet Rob-
ert Burns’s famous lyric “A Red, Red
Rose”:Red rose
Red rose
Red rose...O paralyzed pigeons
O inexperienced menopausal
trees, O blind windows
a red rose is growing
red rose
red
like a flag in
an uprisingHere, the focal image of the rose is
scattered among figures of everyday
distress and futility, which are unex-
pectedly usurped by the identification
of the rose with a flag, and of romantic
love with social unrest. Suddenly, the
air of stasis and rigidity—paralyzed
pigeons, menopausal trees, blind win-
dows—is dispersed and something new
breaks free. It is as if the speaker of
this poem were walking through a gray,
lifeless city only to turn the corner and
run smack into a political demonstra-
tion, with all its irresistible ambience
of forward momentum and hope. “Ah,
I am pregnant,” the poem ends, “preg-
nant, pregnant.”
These are, as Farrokhzad wanted
them to be, anxious, angular poems,
as unorthodox when composed in tra-
ditional forms as when they skitter
across the page in free verse. “I am asimple person,” she once said, “and
since a poem comes [to me] so natu-
rally, as naturally as my conversation,
this simplicity is reflected in the poem.”
By this she meant that, on the page, her
language and her sentiments possess
an authenticity and directness that is
served rather than diminished by for-
mal constraint. Gray’s translations are
accordingly honest and unassuming:
they never rhyme, are rarely alliter-
ative, and generally opt for the most
straightforward phrasing available.
Instead of dialing up the drama, they
allow Farrokhzad’s own uneasy tones
to be heard with new clarity, strength,
and a ferocious self- possession. This is
the voice of a person and a poet, not an
icon or ghost.It’s not surprising that Farrokhzad’s
best- known poems are her sexiest, her
edgiest, her most doomed. These are
the poems that made her, and they’ll al-
ways appeal to those who can’t help but
imagine happiness as a zero- sum game:
it’s your well- being or mine, the cozy
nest or the wide- open sky. In the 1960s,
however, Farrokhzad became inter-
ested in finding other possibilities for
the clamorous subjectivity that dom-
inates her more popular earlier work.
The virtuosic, deeply strange “Some-
one Who Is Like No One” engages a
different poetic tradition, one that is
impersonal, prophetic, and subversive.
“I dreamed that someone is coming,”
she begins, someone who “can’t be ar-
rested/and handcuffed and thrown in
prison.” It turns out to be a messiah
suited uniquely to the present:Someone is coming from
TnjpkhƗneh’s sky on the night of
the fireworks
and spreads out the picnic cloth
and distributes the bread
and distributes the Pepsis
and distributes MellƯ Park
and distributes the syrup for
whooping cough
and distributes the registration
days for school
and distributes the hospital
priority numbers
and distributes the rubber boots
and distributes tickets to FardƯn’s
movies
He distributes the dresses of
Seyyed JavƗd’s daughter
and distributes everything that is
left over
and also gives us our share
I dreamed...This is a picture of revolution as an
affirmation of the ordinary, pinned
to the indefinite but wildly optimistic
notion of someone, a hypothesis who
nonetheless materializes in the incan-
tatory rhythms of the poem. Every-
day objects—cough medicine, movie
tickets, bread and boots and cans of
Pepsi—no longer carry the weight of
our resentments. Instead they become
the accessible enchantments of a just
world. Here, then, Farrokhzad begins
to imagine an existence in which our
needs and desires are not tragically at
cross- purposes, where love does not
threaten some inevitable amputation of
our capacities. The poem, in that sense,
raises an old question, perhaps the old-
est question there is for people who
want to live together: What can we do
so that we can do what we want? Hard
to say but not impossible. QWITH A NEW
INTRODUCTION
BY THEAUTHOR
OTHER PRESS OTHERPRESS.COM
From Booker Prize winner
Ben Okri
ASTONISHING
THE GODS
ONE OF THE BBC’S
“100 NOVELS“100 NOVELS
THAT SHAPEDTHAT SHAPED
OUR WORLD”OUR WORLD”
“A modern-day classic.”“A modern-day classic.”
—Evening Standard
“Amazing“Amazing...
I think this is as close as you can get to reliving
the experience of a bedtime story.” —Th e Guardian
“Beautiful. “Beautiful.
A new creation myth.”A new creation myth.”
—Daily Telegraph
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