Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season: Selected Poems [Paperback]

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. 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. Irans leading literary journal, 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. Farrokhzad wrote poetry on the horizon of working for a civil society in which mens freedom was not complete without womens freedom, and for a life in which the souls freedom was not separate from the bodysindividually, socially, and culturally. Her poetry is a space that radiates aspiration and exaltation, a space ablaze with vitality, desire, and beauty. Elizabeth T. Grays 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 poets work, a treasured joy unto itself. Joy, rage, despair, transcendenceFarrokhzad's poems, like the life from which they were often drawn, contain multitudes. In Elizabeth T. Grays assured translations, each poem is tightly conceived and elegantly modulated, the language precise, the voice as fresh and vivid as Farrokhzads own. A vital contribution to Farrokhzads legacy. 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,lU