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Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season: Selected Poems Kindle Edition
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.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherNew Directions
- Publication dateApril 5, 2022
- File size4414 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
― World Socialist Web Site
"Full of wonderful imagery, heart-rending avowals, and cris de coeur."
― The Hudson Review
"Farrokhzad wrote poetry on the horizon of working for a civil society in which men’s freedom was not complete without women’s freedom, and for a life in which the soul’s freedom was not separate from the body’s―individually, socially, and culturally. Her poetry is a space that radiates aspiration and exaltation, a space ablaze with vitality, desire, and beauty."
― Adonis
"In every culture you have cultural icons, like Shakespeare in Britain. Farrokhzad was like that for contemporary Iran, someone who formed the identity of our contemporariness."
― Mehdi Jami, The Guardian
"Living through a period that promised more freedom than it offered, she found a literary form to register its contradictions. Her poetry embraces pleasure in the face of social censure, seeks a genuine spirituality while rebuking the cant of tradition."
― Ratik Asokan, 4Columns
"In her translation, Elizabeth T. Gray Jr. sought to capture “as much of the beauty, strangeness, ferocity, and stillness of the original.” She has done so, and more, bringing the best of Farrokhzad into the light, where she is easily recognized to be as relevant and fresh today as she was sixty years ago."
― World Literature Today
"Joy, rage, despair, transcendence―Farrokhzad's poems, like the life from which they were often drawn, contain multitudes. In Elizabeth T. Gray’s assured translations, each poem is tightly conceived and elegantly modulated, the language precise, the voice as fresh and vivid as Farrokhzad’s own. A vital contribution to Farrokhzad’s legacy."
― Jasmin Darznik, author of The Bohemians
"Iran’s leading literary journal, Sokhan, wrote after her funeral, ‘Forough is perhaps the first female writer in Persian literature to express the emotions and romantic feelings of the feminine gender in her verse with distinctive frankness and elegance, for which reason she has inaugurated a new chapter in Persian poetry."
― The New York Times
"Elizabeth T. Gray’s new literary translations offer the unstoppable voice of world-class poet Forough Farrokhzad to English speakers and broaden the horizon for comparative readings of the poet’s work, a treasured joy unto itself."
― Niloufar Talebi, author of Self-Portrait in Bloom
About the Author
Poet, filmmaker, screenwriter, and painter, Forough Farrokhzad (1934–1967) was born the third of seven children in Mazandaran, north of Tehran. Drawn to reading and writing poetry as a child, she dropped out of high school to study painting and dressmaking at a technical school. At age sixteen she fell in love with her mother’s cousin; they married, moved to a provincial town, and had a son. During her marriage she worked as a seamstress and wrote the poems of her first collection, The Captive (1955). In the fall of that year, she divorced her husband, relinquished all rights to her son, and moved to Tehran. Three more poetry collections followed: The Wall (1956), Rebellion (1958), and Another Birth (1964). She also translated the work of George Bernard Shaw and Henry Miller, and made a groundbreaking documentary, The House Is Black (1962), about a leper colony in northeastern Iran. Her posthumous collection of late poems Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season was published in 1974.
Product details
- ASIN : B09VQY6XY5
- Publisher : New Directions (April 5, 2022)
- Publication date : April 5, 2022
- Language : English
- File size : 4414 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Not Enabled
- Print length : 133 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,394,345 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #163 in Middle Eastern Poetry (Kindle Store)
- #674 in Middle Eastern Poetry (Books)
- #773 in Contemporary Poetry
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read book recommendations and more.
Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. is a poet, critic, translator, and corporate consultant. Poetry collections include After the Operation (Four Way Books 2025), the long poem Salient (New Directions 2020), and Series | India (Four Way Books 2015). Recent translations include Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season, selected poems of Iran’s iconic modern woman poet Forough Farrokhzad (New Directions 2022), a finalist for the 2023 PEN Prize for Poetry in Translation, and The Green Sea of Heaven: Eighty Ghazals from the Dwan of Hafiz, 30th Anniversary Edition (Monkfish 2024), translations of classical Persian poet Hafiz (d. 1389). She was the founder and CEO of consulting firms Conflict Management, Inc. and Alliance Management Partners LLC. She serves on the Boards of Kimbilio Fiction, Friends of Writers, The Beloit Poetry Journal Foundation, and of Human Rights and Democracy in Iran. She holds a BA and JD from Harvard University and lives in New York City.
Customer reviews
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonTop reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2023They didn’t name her by her first name, it was not very nice.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 23, 2023Non-poetic retranslations of an important Iranian poet by an American translator who learned Persian because she wanted to read Hafez. She misses many nuances of the language and kills the poems in English, poetically and musically.
Top reviews from other countries
- Sparrow KellyReviewed in the United Kingdom on March 6, 2023
5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding
A wonderful testament to a fearless poet.
- Sheri MangianiReviewed in the United Kingdom on May 20, 2022
5.0 out of 5 stars A much better translation that has previously existed
A much better translation that has previously existed... Elegant packaging and a good beginning for understanding more about Forough and her poetry.