Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season
SynopsisPlot
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. 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.
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About this book
Forough Farrokhzad was an Iranian poet who died in a car accident in 1967 at the age of thirty-two. In the decades since, her work has gained wide recognition, and she is now considered a pioneer of modernist Persian poetry. Her name is often placed alongside figures such as Federico García Lorca and Anna Akhmatova for the scale of her influence on literary culture beyond her own country.
This English-language selection, titled Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season, draws from across Farrokhzad's writing life, including both early and late poems. The collection aims to show the full range of her concerns: everyday life, longing, loss, desire, grief, and hope. Her poetry is also known for its attention to sound and for reworking classical Persian forms in a contemporary voice. Elizabeth Gray, who wrote the preface, describes Farrokhzad as a figure of particular importance to women and marginalized artists seeking freedom in its many forms.
Farrokhzad wrote during a period of significant social and political change in Iran. Her willingness to address personal experience openly, including subjects considered private or transgressive for a woman poet at the time, set her apart from many of her contemporaries.
