Forough FarokhzadNotes and Translation from the Farsi by Meetra A. Sofia
The controversial and revered poet Forough Farokhzad (1935-1967) is Iran's greatest contemporary poet, one of the most influential writers of the Middle East, and one of the world's best loved women poets of the twentieth century.
During her short lifetime Forough became a legend. Having sold over a million copies of her work, Forough holds a significant place in world history because she was the first woman in twenty-five hundred years to have a major body of work published in Iran and to emerge above all of Persia's contemporary poets as the greatest poet--a woman who in the land of heroes became a heroine.
Forough was not only a polemical figure during her lifetime, but since her death her poetry has come to be a powerful anthem for freedom. During the Iranian Revolution, for example, students would publicly recite her poem "My Heart Aches for the Garden" in protest to the tyrannical Khomeini regime. In fact, her work was considered such a threat to the dictatorial policies that when her publisher refused to stop printing her poems, he was put into jail and his factory was burned down to the ground.
With rare emotional depth, Forough's work is sincere, sensual, earthy, evocative, and an intriguing combination of love story, stormy passions, loss, betrayal, freedom, and most importantly, renewal. A poet of the 1960s, her poetry reverberates with issues of love and freedom and speaks to us as much today as when she first wrote them.
* The Middle East has always posed a perplexing riddle to us here in the West. It is a land that woos our imagination with its sweet, enchanting culture, as well as bringing to life our shadow self in the guise of tyrannical leaders who perform atrocious crimes that terrorize humanity.
Until we actually experienced this terrorism in our own backyard in New York, even though it has cost the people of the Middle East millions of lives from its inception decades ago, this oppression was knowledge we preferred not to dwell on and liked to keep properly muffled in the closet.
But during the past several years we have all been catapulted into the lap of this paradox and have peered together through the same magnifying glass. We have watched in close-up, zoom, and slow motion and witnessed what happens when the Middle East, provoked by Western governments to display its machismo, publicly acts out its shadow self. Our consciousness becomes swollen with a deluge of appalling images, while the media broadcasts the nightmare.
On the home front in the Middle East, however, terrorism has been a part of everyday life for many decades, especially for women. The large number of those remaining who were not able to join in the mass exodus out of these countries have had to take up the illusory act of being silent and dumb, while dutifully abiding by a set of laws plastered with human rights violations and forged into being by a group of fundamentalist Islamic men only for the benefit of a group of fundamentalist Islamic men. This canon of laws alone has been enough to amply fill reels of horror footage as rape, plunder, and looting of the female body and psyche takes place in the cradle of civilization as routinely as afternoon tea. But add to the Islamic Republic's "quirks" a religious heritage that amplifies the subordination of women and constructs its Heaven primarily for the benefit of its male citizens, and we're left with a myopic image of a woman who is forced to transform herself into a voiceless, thick-skinned pachyderm in order to survive.
What happens then to a country that is unwilling to affirm the integral equality of its female population and treats a woman as a man's property? Is this a cultural enigma that affects women only or does it also affect men? Could this be what creates the dark side of the Middle East?
This is a complex dilemma the world at large has been dealing with for millennia, and its roots can more often than not be found embedded in the ideologies of patriarchal narcissism.
Since historically, however, it is the artists and not the politicians who record a culture's identity and who through their creative expression agitate, reject, and rebel against the status quo to change government, conceivably there is a poet or bard in Iran who could serve as our guide and help us understand the political dilemma in the Middle East.
All That Is Left Behind . . .
Why should I stand still? Why? The birds have gone looking for water The horizon has been turned upside down And motion spills out like a fountain As far as the eye can see Radiant planets are spinning Earth reaches its apogee and repeats its orbit And the blackholes in the atmosphere Turn into tunnels that are connected to each other While daytime occupies such space That in the small mind of a newspaper Not even an earthworm can fit Why should I stand still? The road passes from in between the tiny capillaries of life and continues The climate: the atmosphere surrounding the uterine ship of the moon Destroys any rotten cells And in the chemically charged air after sunrise All that is left behind is sound A sound which will become one with the particles of time Why should I stand still? What can a swamp be? What can it be other than a place where degenerate insects lay their eggs The thoughts of a morgue counting swollen corpses A coward hides his lack of manhood in the darkness And a cockroach . . . ah When a cockroach speaks Why should I stand still? The marriage of newspaper and ink is useless The marriage of newspaper and ink will not save a small mind I am an offspring of the trees Breathing stale air is oppressive (A bird that died told me to learn its flight) The ultimate end of all forces is unification To unite with the source of the sun And to disperse into rays of light It is only natural For windmills to dry out and crumble Why should I stand still? I will take the unripe sheaves of wheat to my breast And give them milk Sound, sound, sound The pleading sound of clear running water The sound of light pouring down from the stars Over the feminine body of the earth The sound of the union of egg and sperm The unbound thoughts of consummated love Sound, sound, sound, all that is left behind is sound In the land of dwarves The standard of measurement always orbits around zero Why should I stand still? I abide by the laws of the four elements And the task of writing out the constitution of my heart Is not the work of the blind local government What do the long savage howls Of the reproductive organs of animals have to do with me? What do the infinitesimal movements of a maggot In decaying flesh have to do with me? My life is bound up with the bloodline of flowers Do you understand the bloodline of flowers?
Victory in the GardenThe crow flew over our heads And disappeared into the drifting confusion of the clouds With a shrill cry Like a short spear The crow soared through the open horizon It will spread gossip of us through the city Everyone knows Everyone knows From that dark bleak window We have seen the garden And from that mischievous hard to reach branch We have picked the apple Everyone is scared Everyone is scared Except for you and me Who have joined hands before the wedding table The gossip is not about the embrace of a couple And the linking of two names Registered in an old tattered record book The gossip is about my blissful hair That has been ignited with the burning opium of your kisses The closeness of our bodies And the happiness we feel in the shimmering glow of our nakedness Like scales of fish in water The gossip is about the silvery life of a song That at sunrise sings the song of a streaming fountain At night from the wild rabbits In the green nocturnal jungle And in the terrifying cold-blooded ocean From the oyster shells filled with pearls And on that strange magnificent mountain From the young eagles We asked What should we do? Everyone knows Everyone knows We have fallen into the cold quiet slumber of the phoenix We have found truth in the garden And in the shameless look of a nameless flower We have found life in an eternal moment Where two suns orbit around each other The gossip is not of scary whispers in the dark The gossip is about fresh air, open windows, and daylight The gossip is about a woodstove that burns and consumes useless things About the earth that yields another abundant harvest And about beginnings, completion, and fulfillment The gossip is about our hands intertwined in love Which build a bridge across the night With messages of light, perfume, and gentle winds Come to the meadow Come to the wide open meadow and call me From behind the warm breath of the acacias Call me like a deer calling to its mate The curtains are bursting open with Concealed hatred While the innocent doves Look down at the ground From the top of their white castle
BathingI took my clothes off in the delicious air So that I could bathe my body in the running stream But the stillness of the night seduced me Into confessing my heartache to its waters The water was cool and moved in dazzling waves In whispered moans, it circled around me, crawling with desire With soft glass hands It was pulling my body and soul into itself Suddenly from around it a wind rose Showering my hair with a sheet of mud And with its breath Pouring the pungent sweet smell of wild pennyroyal Into my mouth Fulfilled and rocking with joy I closed my eyes and pressed my body into its soft young wild grasses Like a woman beside her lover I surrendered myself to the stream Restless, thirsty, fevered, and overflowing with kisses The water's trembling lips rushed upon my legs And all at once we were inside of each other . . . Satisfied and intoxicated My body and the soul of the stream had become sinners
Meetra A. Sofia is an artist, poet, writer, translator, human rights activist and filmmaker, who makes her home in the Pacific Northwest. She has co-written a film based on the life of the Biblical Eve titled "Suppose Truth Was a Woman?!," which will showcase two of her translations of Forough's poems on the big screen.
