Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season: Selected Poems
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
