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Forough Farrokhzad, the forerunner of Iranian feminist poets, was
born in 1935 in Tehran. She was married off to her cousin when she was only sixteen. A year later she published her first book of poetry, Asir (The Captive). She was then separated from her husband and in 1956 left Iran on a trip to Europe. She ended up in England, studying film production. Farrokhzad’s second book of poems, Divaar (The Wall), appeared in 1956. After the publication of her third collection of poems, Esyaan (Rebellion) in 1958, Farrokhzad embarked on a career in film-making. Her first film, ‘The House Is Black’ (1962), a documentary on an Iranian leprosarium, won the highest documentary movie award of the Uberhausen Film festival in Germany. In 1963 UNESCO produced a 15-minute film documentary based on Farrokhzad’s life. Farrokhzad’s fourth book of poems, Tavallodi Digar (Another Birth) was published in 1964. She died in a car accident in 1967 and her fifth collection, Imaan biyaavarim be aaghaaze fasle sard (Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season), came out posthumously in 1975.

   In a patriarchal society in which women are ‘drowned in innocent
youth’ and are created to satisfy men’s desires (The Captive), Farrokhzad dared to express her controversial and ‘heretical’ views about the limitations on and aspirations of Iranian women. She described herself as the ‘bird who for long / has been planning to fly’ (Let Us Believe). She attacked the tyrannical attitudes of men toward women and questioned the issue of conventional marriage, denouncing it as a ‘habitual tranquiliser’ that drags our pure instincts into the abyss of ‘degeneration’ and splices two names and pairs them ‘in the putrid pages of some register’ (The Captive). She believed that the union of opposite sexes is the ‘secret loyalty of our bodies / and the glinting of our nakedness / like the scales of fish in water’ (Conquest of the Garden).

   Farrokhzad adopted an anti-conformist lifestyle that challenged the
traditional ideas held about women. Her love of freedom and the
attainment of self-awareness and her desire for a fulfilling life made her, to use Virginia Woolf ’s words, kill ‘the angel in the house’ and give up the pursuit of the ideal, charming, unselfish and accomplished Lady. She abandoned her husband and son and flew away from the ‘dark prison’ of family life (The Captive). She realized that without first finding responsibility toward her own individuality, she could not be responsible for others. She despised social and moral conventions and regarded them as destroyers of individual capabilities.

   Farrokhzad liberated herself through poetry. She believed that
writing, more than anything else, involves constant toil and requires peace of mind; therefore, she devoted her whole existence to writing and, in the process, relinquished the chores of motherhood and family ties. Her true love was poetry and she regarded her relationship with poetry as a responsibility toward her individuality. In her modernist and experimental poems Farrokhzad celebrated women’s emancipation. She wrote about her lover who took her to ‘the rose garden’ and slept with her ‘on a rose leaf ’ (Another Birth). In another poem, she, tired of ‘divine asceticism’, sleeps with Satan and ‘seeks refuge in the downward slopes / of a fresh sin’  (Rebellion). Farrokhzad was also an ouspoken defender of social justice. In her poem, ‘Someone Who Is Not Like Anyone’, she creates a dream vision of a saviour and a liberator who is coming ‘to spread out the table cloth / and divide up the bread / and pass the Pepsi / and divide up the Melli park’.

   Farrokhzad’s poems have been gathered and published in Divaane ashaare Forough Farrokhzad (Complete Collection of Forough Farrokhzad’s Poetry) (7th ed., Tehran: Morvarid, 2000) and that is the text used for the following translations.