Forugh Farrokhzad (1935-1967): 40-year anniversary conference

Abstracts of papers and biographies of speakers sorted alphabetically by last name of speaker

'The "fiery pleasure of desire" or the text-ure of love in Farrokhzad's poetry'
Leili Anvar Chenderoff, INALCO, Paris

In many ways, Forugh Farrokhzad was a unique woman in the history of Persian literature: not only because of the way she decided to live in a particular historical context, not only because she was a woman who dared to become a poet, but most of all because her poetic work is in many ways revolutionary. It is revolutionary because it is personal. Remembering the forms, themes and metaphors of classical Persian poetry, she has yet managed to find a voice of her own, very far from the usual clichés. This voice is not only formally new: her originality stands in the way she speaks of herself and of her emotional and sexual desires, achievements and frustrations without the archetypal distanciation that is so characteristic of classical Persian love poetry. In her poetry the poet/lover is not an abstract representation of a function but a woman of flesh and blood who expresses union and desire, who remembers the pleasures of presence and mourns the suffering of absence, who evokes in sensual and provocative ways the body of the beloved, its warmth and perfumes but also at times, the frozen emptiness of her bed and life or her sense of guilt for being what she is under the gaze of a still traditional society. The sincerity of her tone and her personal touch contribute to the creation of a style of her own: A kind of poetic 'sensualism' that is definitely new in the Persian tradition and even though it has indeed inspired many poets, it still remains rather unique in its blend of sensuality and dream-like quality.

Leili Anvar Chenderoff, a graduate of the Ecole Normale Superieure, studied Persian and English literature and civilization at the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris). Dr Anvar received her PhD in Persian literature with a thesis entitled 'From Paradox to Unity: A Study of the Divan-e Shams' in 1998. She was Lecturer at the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle in English and American civilization (1992-2001) and currently is assistant-professor in Persian language and literature at INALCO, Paris. She is also attached researcher to the CNRS (UMR Monde Iranien et Indien). Dr. Anvar is Head of the Iranian Languages Department (Institut des Langues et Civilisations Orientales) and member of the scientific board of IISMM (Institute for the Study of Islam and the Islamic Societies, attached to the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris). Her publications include Le genre hagiographique a travers le 'Tadhkirat al-awliya' de Farid al-Din Attar (in Saints Orientaux, 1995), Noms de personnes en Islam, translation from English into French of A. Schimmel's Islamic names (1996), « Attar », « Rumi », « Vin » (in Le dictionnaire critique de l'ésotérisme, 1998), Orient, mille ans de poésie et de peinture (2004), Rumi (2004), « L'amour de Majnun pour Leyli: Folie ou sagesse? » (in Les fous d'amour dans les litteratures mediévales orientale et occidentale, 2007) « Nouvelles persanes » (in Les arts de l'Islam, 2006), Malek Jân Ne'mati : a vie n'est pas court mais le temps est compté (biography and anthology of a contemporary mystic woman poet), « La figure de l'échanson dans l'æuvre de Hâfez de Chiraz », (in Ganymède ou l'échanson -rapt, ravissement et ivresse poétique, 2008).

 

'The Home and the Garden in the Poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad'
Dominic Parviz Brookshaw, University of Manchester

This paper seeks to explore the spatial dynamics of Forugh's poetry in particular in relation to the 'home' and the 'garden'. The 'home' (or perhaps more specifically the 'house') as depicted in much of Forugh's poetry is a place of confinement, silence and boredom. In her earlier poetry, Forugh's 'garden' is a source of hope and life; a venue shielded from much of the negativity that surrounds her. In her later poetry, though, and specifically in her celebrated poem, 'Delam bara-ye baghcheh mi-suzad' ('I Feel Sorry for the Garden'), the garden itself becomes a source of putridity, death and suppressed emotions of anger and frustration. This paper will examine the ways in which Forugh evokes the 'house' and the 'garden' in her poetry, how her understanding of these spaces and their associations change with time, and to what extent the poet's vision of the 'garden' is in conflict with that found in classical Persian poetry.

Dominic Parviz Brookshaw is Lecturer in Persian Studies and Iranian Literature at the University of Manchester. Before coming to Manchester, he taught Persian language and literature at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, and at the Oriental Institute, Oxford, from where he also received a DPhil in medieval Persian and Arabic poetry. He has published on medieval and modern Persian literature in Encyclopaedia Iranica, Iranian Studies, Middle Eastern Literatures, IJMES and Iran (Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies). Dr. Brookshaw is Assistant Editor of Iranian Studies, and his monograph, Hafiz and his Contemporaries: a Study of Fourteenth-Century Persian Love Poetry will be published shortly by IB Tauris.

 

'Reminiscences of Forugh Farrokhzad'
Pouran Farrokhzad, poet and writer, Tehran

Pouran has unique and precious insights into the life and poetry of her sister, both from their childhood together, and from their youth and early adulthood which she has generously agreed to share with us. Pouran witnessed first hand her sister's emergence and then blossoming on the literary stage of 1950s and 1960s Iran.

A poet and writer in her own right, Pouran Farrokhzad (like her sister Forugh) began composing poetry from an early age. She lives in Tehran and has written extensively on contemporary Persian poets and their poetry. In recent years she has also developed a keen interest in the history and mythology of pre-Islamic Iran and has published a number of books in this field.

 

'Alien Rebirths of 'Another Birth''
M.R. Ghanoonparvar, University of Texas at Austin

Dozens of translations of Forugh Farrokhzad's 'Tavallodi Digar' have appeared in English since the poem was published in a volume with the same title in 1964. The translators of the poem include professional translators, academics, literary scholars and critics, and even social scientists, as well as general Farrokhzad enthusiasts. There are translations by native speakers of either Persian or English, and even those whose mother tongue is neither. And of course, inevitably, there are also collaborative renditions by teams of native speakers of both languages. With a review of a number of these translations from a comparative perspective, this paper examines the pitfalls of the seemingly easy task of rendering modern poetry in general and the poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad in particular.

M.R. Ghanoonparvar is Professor of Persian and Comparative Literature and Persian Language at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Prophets of Doom: Literature as a Socio-Political Phenomenon in Modern Iran, In a Persian Mirror: Images of the West and Westerners in Iranian Fiction, Translating the Garden, and Reading Chubak. His translations include Jalal Al-e Ahmad's By the Pen, Sadeq Chubak's The Patient Stone, Simin Daneshvar's Savushun, and Sadeq Hedayat's The Myth of Creation and his edited volumes include Iranian Drama: An Anthology, Gholamhoseyn Sa'edi's Othello in Wonderland and Mirror-Polishing Storytellers, and Moniru Ravanipur's Satan Stones and Kanizu.

 

'The House is Black: a Timeless Visual Essay'

Maryam Ghorbankarimi, University of Edinburgh Although Forugh Farrokhzad has only one film to her credit as a director, The House is Black was one of the most influential and controversial films of its time in Iran. The editing and visual composition of this documentary, which very much resembles Forugh's poetry, is the focus of this paper. Comparing her poetry and her film this paper will explore the ways in which she uses visual imagery to move beyond visual impressions. She has broken clichés and the norm not just by showing the darkness and horrifying reality of leprosy, but by looking past the ugly and finding the beauty, love and hope for the future - everything that has given meaning to the lives of those infected. In her poetry, relating words and arranging them in different ways conveys deeper meaning, just as Forugh's use of different techniques of montage to bring together different images conveys a meaning deeper than what each image is simply depicting. She explains that cinema is an idea which comes to life by thinking and speaking through images. The House is Black is a timeless film not only because it is a reportage of life at the leper colony in the northwest of Iran, but also because it is based on a thought: life in the leper colony as a metaphor for life in general. People don't need to have leprosy to be trapped; people live in the traps they have built with their own hands.

Born and raised in Iran, Maryam Ghorbankarimi moved to Canada in 2001 to continue her education in film at Toronto's Ryerson University. She is currently studying for a PhD in film studies at the University of Edinburgh and her research is focused on women in Iranian Cinema. Maryam is also a filmmaker and has made a number of short films, both fiction and documentary, which have been shown at festivals such as the Montreal International Film Festival, the Beijing International Short Film Festival, and the Tehran International Short Film Festival. Her research interests include women, gender, and the cinema of developing countries.

 

'Forugh as Iranian-American Diasporic Muse'
Persis Karim, San Jose State University

While Forugh's legacy in Iran continues to reverberate with 21st century poets and writers in Iran, her life and poetic legacy has also provided the impetus and inspiration for a number of Iranian writers living in the United States as well as those born after the revolution and with Iranian heritage. This paper investigates the way the renowned 20th century Iranian poet, Forugh Farrokhzad has been adopted as a kind of muse figure for many writers of the Iranian-American diaspora and the ways that her work either directly or indirectly serves as a kind of emblem of resistance to the homogenized and often over-simplified images of Iran in the US media as well as an articulation of a unique poetic sensibility that breaks from a traditional genealogy of Iranian poetics. In particular, this paper will explore the multiple manifestations and re-articulations of Forugh's life and poetic legacy in the work of a number of writers including a playwright, several poets, and a number of online publications.

Persis M. Karim is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Jose State University. She has written numerous articles about the emergence of Iranian American literature and recently co-edited a special issue of MELUS (the Journal of Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States) with Nasrin Rahimieh (forthcoming Summer 2008). She is editor and contributing author to two anthologies: Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora (2006) and A World Between: Poems, Short Stories and Essays by Iranian-Americans (1999) (co-edited with M. M. Khorrami).

 

'Of the Sins of Forugh Farrokhzad'
Homa Katouzian, Middle East Centre, St Antony's College, Oxford

'Sin' is probably the most well-known of Forugh Farrokhzad's poems, though it is not one of her best, even in comparison with most of the poems before the period of Rebirth. Apparently a defiant declaration of feminist independence, a closer examination of that and some other earlier poems betrays a sense of guilt, bewilderment, and remorse. It is in the later poems, and especially those of the period of Rebirth, that 'pleasure' gives way to acceptance, and 'sin', to real self-assertion and self-confidence. Analyzing her published letters, and especially the two long letters to her father, it will be argued that, in spite of the upward journey both in love and poetry, the poet's longing for deep fulfilment remained frustrated until the very end.

Homa Katouzian is a social scientist, historian, literary critic and poet. He is the Iran Heritage Research Fellow, St. Antony's College, Oxford, a member of the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, and editor of Iranian Studies. He has published widely in English, Persian and other languages. His most recent books in English include, Iran in the 21st Century (co-edited with Hossein Shahidi, 2008), Sadeq Hedayat: His Work and His Wondrous World (ed., 2008), Iranian History and Politics, the Dialectic of State and Society (2007), Sa'di, the Poet of Life, Love and Compassion (2006), and State and Society in Iran: The Eclipse of the Qajars and the Rise of the Pahlavis (2006).

 

'Notes about the Anthology One Day My Death...'
Nima Mina, SOAS

In 2000 a translated collection of German poetry with the title One Day My Death... was published in Tehran. The subtitle of the book identifies it as an unpublished work by the late Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad. The fact that more than 30 years after Forugh's passing there could still be substantial unpublished works by her seems surprising. The preface to the book - written by Forugh's sister Pouran - explains the story behind the book and the cause for delay. The texts were translated by Forugh, who was in her early 20s at that time. She had already published two collections of poetry (The Captive and The Wall) before leaving Iran on a research trip to Italy. During a longer visit with her brother Amir Masoud in Munich she benefited from his expertise as a German language instructor and connoisseur of contemporary German poetry. Over the course of several months Forugh and Amir translated texts by 29 German poets and saved them in a booklet which was subsequently lost, only to be found again in early 2000. The Persian texts in the printed version of the anthology are edited by Pouran, however, there is no indication of the German source texts. This paper will introduce the actual German source of the translations (Singer, Eric: Spiegel des Unvergäßlichen. M�nchen 1955: Paul List Verlag) and furthermore discuss the young Forugh's concept of poetic translation. In a specific case study, the intertextual relations between one of Forugh's best known poems named 'One Day My Death' (as engraved on her tomb stone) and the text 'Wenn Mich der Tod Ereilt' by the exiled German poet Osip Kalenter (a.k.a. Johannes Burckhardt, 1900-1976) will be discussed.

Nima Mina is a member of academic staff at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He received his academic training in Marburg, Germany and Montréal, Québec. His research interests include contemporary Iranian Diaspora Studies, Persian prison memoire writing and more recently the impact of new media on the progress of Iranian civil society. His latest works on Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall's contributions to early 19th century European Studies of Iran were published by the University of Graz in Hammer's home province of Steiermark in Austria and by the University of London's School of Advanced Study / Institute of Germanic Studies. Nima Mina has been a visiting faculty member at Ohio State University, and the Universities of Utah and Michigan in the United States and the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO) in Paris.

 

'Bewildered Mirror': The Reciprocity of the Self and the Mirror in the Works of Forugh Farrokhzad'
Leila Rahimi Bahmany, Free University of Berlin

In classical Persian literature the image of the mirror is often used to symbolize the heart or soul, which in its purified state reflects the divine light. Forugh is certainly aware of this symbolic meaning of the mirror and employs it at least once herself. But in her poetry we find a multifarious use of mirror imagery that shows her moving beyond the symbolism of classical Persian literature and establishing herself as a modern, non-mystical and anti-transcendentalist writer. Through these various usages of the image of the mirror in her work, she reveals a profound understanding of the psychology of mirroring and the mirror's complex reciprocity with self, identity and the worldview. Countering the widely-held view that women turn to the mirror merely out of solipsistic self-love and vanity, Forugh uses the mirror in her poetry to convey her anxiety, pain, shock and terror. Through her mirror imagery, she expresses the problematics relating to her female subjectivity, her identity crisis, and her lack of a secure, stable, and acknowledged subjectivity. She turns to the mirror for an answer at times of psycho-emotional crisis, when she finds no other proof of her subjectivity and her true identity within society. In her quest for self, she hopes that the mirror will relieve her painful inner conflicts and give her an existential proof of her being. Her non-recognition of her own mirror-image, her inability to bring her self and her mirror-image together and also her fragmented body image (Lacanian corps morcelé) are indicative of a split personality, a highly disturbed and alienated self. This paper will present an overview of Forugh's use of mirror imagery in her work, and will show how a study of this imagery in the whole body of her poetry enables us to trace her feminine history of disturbed ego-formation and artistic development in a highly patriarchal context. It shows that for her, the only other means of proving and sustaining her existence appears to have been her art. Writing and mirroring remain her two semiotic modes of self-realization and self-presentation. Producing an artistic work, especially in a highly personal and subjective nature, becomes for her, like her reflection in the mirror, an existential necessity.

Leila Rahimi Bahmany obtained her BA in English Literature and Language from Tehran University in 1997, and her MA in English Literature from Shiraz University in 2002. She is currently in receipt of a scholarship from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and is working on completing her PhD dissertation at the Free University of Berlin. The subject of her PhD is a comparative study of the mirror and the phenomenon of mirroring in the works of Sylvia Plath and Forugh Farrokhzad.

 

'The Metaphysics of Sound in Forugh Farrokhzad's Poetry'
Nasrin Rahimieh, UC Irvine

Forugh Farrokhzad's poetry has been read frequently in light of her biography, neglecting elements of her poetic vision that do not fit within the context of a rebellious speaking subject. Yet her poetry transcends her persona and encompasses the partiality and insubstantiality of human perception. Her poem 'Only Sound Remains' offers a particularly rich arena for the study of her metaphysics. Sound (seda), rather than merely human voice, captures traces of life marked by silences and absences as suggested by her poem. In this presentation I would like to analyze the juxtaposition of sound and image to arrive at an understanding of her metaphysics of sound.

Nasrin Rahimieh is Maseeh Chair and Director of the Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture at UC Irvine, where she also holds an appointment as a Professor of Comparative Literature. Her research has been focused on modern Persian literature, Iranian women's writing, and post-revolutionary cinema. Among her publications are Oriental Responses to the West (Brill 1990) and Missing Persians: Discovering Voices in Iranian Cultural History (Syracuse 2001).

 

'Romancing the Muse'
Rivanne Sandler, University of Toronto

"Poetry for me is like a friend to whom I open my heart. It's a mate who makes me feel complete and satisfied, without harming me" (Farrokhzad in: Az Nima ta ba'd).

Pronouns of unspecified gender appear often in the poems of Forugh Farrokhzad (1935-1967). While it may be tempting to assign a gender to the pronouns, they may designate not a male lover or a 'mate' but the muse of poetry itself. The object of poetic passion may be the poet's own verse, the ultimate expression of self.

"I shut my blazing eyes...[and] turn to solitude that my hushed heart may not cry out" (Farrokhzad, Sho'leh-ye ramideh / The Dispirited Flame). The longing to create is ardent and constant. The muse is never summoned with ease, nor is she a docile companion; there are far too many obstacles along the path of poetic creation for women. When 'you' brings the poet a sense of refreshment and clarity, the inability to create is painful. Farrokhzad is hard on herself, bemoaning the small volume of poems in Tavollodi Digar which took four years of her life to produce (in: Gozideh-ye Ash'ar-e Forugh Farrokhzad). 'Romancing the Muse', argues that 'you' is not a male lover, or even an object outside the poet, but the verse she struggles to create; her words of seduction addressed to a power inside. The lament, the frustration, the longing seem to apply to a love relationship devoted to the tortuous, yet vital birth of poetry. It is in this respect that the poetry of Farrokhzad indicates a shared poetic vision with other female poets.

Rivanne Sandler holds a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Toronto, where she also taught courses on modern Iranian literature. Her scholarly works deal with Iranian writers and poets of the 1950s-1970s and women's writing. She has edited works by Iranian women writers living in Canada. Presently a Professor Emerita in the Department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto, she teaches courses on Twentieth Century Iranian Literature, Women's Writing and Persian Literature in the Diaspora. A recent article is 'Simin Behbahani's Poetic Conversations', Iranian Studies (2008).

 

'Forugh Farrokhzad's Apocalyptic Prophecies'
Sirous Shamisa, 'Allameh Tabataba'i University, Tehran

Forugh, in some of her poems, seems to speak as a prophetess who prophesies an apocalyptic era. Poignant examples of this can readily be found in her remarkable poem "Earthly verses". Apocalyptic themes are also found scattered in many of her other poems. This paper will investigate the origins of Forugh's inspiration for these images and themes. What were her stimuli? The apocalyptic scenes depicted in her poetry are similar to those awaited by the devout at the many on the dark Day of Resurrection (Yawm al-Qiyama), when the world will be filled with chaos and tyranny, and when the Messiah will appear to dispel all evil and suffering. But, Forugh was not a religious woman with traditional beliefs, so the question is, what motivated her to employ such images in her poetry and what was her source of inspiration? When did Forugh believe these apocalyptic prophecies would be realized? One possible answer is that Forugh sensed that she was living during the last years of an era in which the chapter of traditional Iranian society was coming to a close. It seems that she was consciously awaiting some form of doomsday, which would come about because of what she felt was an unbridgeable gap between two opposing segments of Iranian society, a division that would ultimately lead to the societal instability witnessed in 1970s Iran. Forugh seems to have been prophesying an age of chaos and confusion, not unlike that expected at the End of Time (Akhir al-Zaman).

Sirous Shamisa was born in the northern Iranian city of Rasht in 1948. He holds a PhD in Persian Literature and he is a full professor of Persian Literature at Allameh Tabataba'i University in Tehran, where he teaches postgraduate courses. Prof Shamisa is a prolific writer and has published some forty books and fifty articles. In addition to these academic studies, he has also published a number of novels and a collection of poetry. His recent publications include studies of the poetry of Sohrab Sepehri and Forugh Farrokhzad, as well as an in-depth analysis of Sadeq Hedayat's Blind Owl.

 

'Men and Women Together: Love, Family and Gender in the Works of Forugh Farrokhzad'
Marta Simidchieva, York University, Toronto

The popularity of Forugh Farrokhzad's poetry is due in no small measure to the unprecedented candour with which she portrays women's emotional responses to the men in their lives. For many of her readers her poetry signalled the arrival of the new liberated woman, who boldly followed the dictates of her heart, and did not hesitate to cast aside traditional societal norms, if they stifled her individuality. This paper explores the construct of gender in the intimate relationships of women and men in the poetry of Forugh. Focusing on poems in which the dramatis persona reveals her sense of self in relation to a significant male figure-father, husband, son, or lover-it explores the parameters of the roles in which female and male characters are cast, and the tensions between social expectations, romantic ideals, and mundane realities, which the poet chooses to address. Although some personal letters, interviews, and reminiscences of relatives and friends are taken into account, this is not a study of Forugh's own family relationships, lives, and loves as reflected in her poetry, but rather an attempt to see her work in the context of its time-and in relation to the shift in gender norms, gathering momentum in industrial (and industrializing) societies in the mid 20th century.

Marta Simidchieva holds a PhD in Iranian Studies from the Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow; and a BA in English Literature from Tehran University, Iran. She teaches courses on Islamic religion, history, culture, and civilization at York University, and at the University of Toronto. She has worked as an Assistant Professor of Persian literature and culture at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria, and as a translator and staff editor with Encyclopaedia Iranica. Her research interests focus on issues of continuity and change, modernity and tradition, literary reception, and East-West cultural interaction.

 

'The Poetry of Life in Farrokhzad's Poems: Personal Rebellion and Social Revolt'
Kamran Talattof, University of Arizona

A number of scholars have written in detail on Forugh Farrokhzad's life and works (Milani, Hillmann, Jafari). Others have written on how Farrokhzad's poems represent two different periods in her poetic career (Hoquqi, Talattof, Dastghayb). Yet others have argued that Farrokhzad contributed to the dominant committed literature of her time (Talattof). This paper will study Farrokhzad's poetry to establish a closer link between her life, her aesthetic philosophy in different periods of her work, and the ideology of representation that contributed to her poetic changes as she moved from a personal approach to poetry toward the espousal of a committed viewpoint. Drawing such a parallel between the poet's life story and her poetic production may indeed foster a better understanding of the process through which Farrokhzad wrote her final works such as Born Again, which is highly concerned with the construction of a new identity. Through textual and discursive analyses of a select number of Farrokhzad's poems (from all of her collections), the paper will also drawn on the existing analytical, critical and documentary works produced about her life and poetry.

Kamran Talattof is Professor of Persian and Iranian studies at the University of Arizona and author, co-author, or co-editor of The Politics of Writing in Iran: A History of Modern Persian Literature; Modern Persian: Spoken and Written with D. Stilo and J. Clinton; Essays on Nima Yushij: Animating Modernism in Persian Poetry with A. Karimi-Hakkak; The Poetry of Nizami Ganjavi: Knowledge, Love, and Rhetoric with J. Clinton; and Contemporary Debates in Islam: An Anthology of Modernist and Fundamentalist Thought with M. Moaddel. He is the co-translator of Shahrnush Parsipur's Women without Men (with J. Sharlet) and her Touba and the Meaning of Night (with H. Houshmand). Kamran Talattof has published widely on gender, ideology, culture, and language.

 

'Black Slate and Chalk: The interplay of text and image in Farrokhzad's 'The House is Black''
Roxanne Varzi, UC Irvine

Forugh Farrokhzad's film 'The House is Black' was shot in 1962 on location in a leper colony outside of Tabriz. The idea was to make a documentary about the everyday life of lepers. What results is a film that uses leprosy as a metaphor for the disease of stagnation, inertia and religious emptiness that eat away at the core of Iranian society in the sixties. This paper will explore Farrokhzad's film in its original social context in Iran and in the context of experimental films in the larger global context of the sixties and seventies.

Roxanne Varzi was awarded the first Fulbright fellowship after the Revolution for research in Iran (2000). She has a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University and has taught at New York University, the School of Oriental and African Studies, and was a senior visiting fellow at St Antony's College Oxford. She is currently assistant professor of Anthropology and Film and Media Studies at the UC Irvine and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies and the Centre for Culture and Literature in Berlin. She is the author of Warring Souls, Media, Martyrdom and Youth in post-Revolution Iran (2006), and she has published widely on Iranian popular culture, the culture of the Iran-Iraq war and Iranian cinema. Her work has appeared in the London Review of Books, The New York Press, Eastern Art Report, American Anthropologist, Feminist Review and Public Culture Journal. Her first ethnographic experimental film on mourning and martyrdom in Iran, Plastic Flowers Never Die, premiered in 2008.

 

'Translating Forugh Farrokhzad'
Sholeh Wolpé, poet and translator, Los Angeles

This presentation will focus on the process of translating Forugh Farrokhzad's poems from the perspective of a poet who writes in English and is fluent is both Persian and English, and is intimately familiar with both cultures. In the process of translation, the original poems are often 'murdered'. What is presented in English is often the corpse of the original poem. To avoid this, a translator must pay great attention to the music of the language employed by the poet and, without compromising meaning, endeavour to re-create those poems in English. In translating Forugh, I wanted her poems to live as poems in English.

Sholeh Wolpé published a selection of English translations of Forugh Farrokhzad's poems in 2007 under the title, Sin-Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad. Sholeh has also published her own poetry in The Scar Saloon and Rooftops of Tehran, and is also the author of Shame (a play in three acts), and associate editor of The Norton Anthology of Modern Literature from the Muslim World (forthcoming 2010.) Her poems, translations, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications worldwide. Sholeh was born in Iran and now lives in Los Angeles.