Sin: Selected Poems

"Farrokhzad wrote five poetry books, and a sixth book of hers was published posthumously. There have been other translations into English, but this one by the Iranian-American poet Sholeh Wolpe is the best I have encountered. The translations are precise, but also fluid and quite beautiful. She pulls poems from all of Forugh’s work. The volume is a fantastic introduction to her work for a non-Iranian reader. Absolutely. I would say she is probably the ultimate icon for Iranian women in the 20th century. In her poems, women’s experiences of love, sensuality and sexuality are explored with daring and with beauty. Notorious in her lifetime, when she died at the age of 32 in a car accident she became a legend. Many people of her generation saw her as a symbol for all the possibilities and limitations under the Pahlavi dynasty, and she’s remained a singularly inspirational figure for successive generations of Iranians. And not just for women, but for many Iranian men too. Yes. Even as some idolised her, a good many others derided and ostracised her. I have been thinking about her a lot recently, because my own mother’s story embodies some of the same challenges and tragedies. I think, in particular, about how they were both forced to surrender their children when they divorced. Forugh was married quite young, at 15, and she divorced just a few years later. In those days a divorcee was regarded as no better than a prostitute. Even though Forugh created an independent life for herself after her divorce, she never fully recovered from giving up her child. And that is a story I’ve come to know well when writing my own book, The Good Daughter . My mother also married young. She was 13, younger even than Forugh, who was her contemporary. Her marriage was an abusive one, and her father would only petition for a divorce on her behalf on the condition that she never see her child again. And so she gave up her daughter. This was, sadly, a common story for women seeking divorce. In those days – the 1950s – just 2% of marriages ended in divorce. When couples divorced, the children almost always went to the father. In my mother’s circumstances, as in Forugh’s, she was not only forced to surrender her child but also urged to completely forget her. I think so, and yet my mother felt she had no alternative. Well, there are resemblances between the attitudes and legal procedures of my mother’s time and those in contemporary Iran. Under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi [the last shah] there was a period of time, the so-called White Revolution, when laws concerning divorce and custody were completely overhauled. For example, women were granted the right to divorce and to retain custody of their children upon divorce. Many of these laws were repealed in the 1980s. Although the laws are not as extreme as they were in my mother’s era, there were certainly similarities to the present system in Iran. I daresay the cultural attitudes toward divorced women have survived to some degree as well."