LIFE, SICK LIFE
Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season by Forough Farrokhzad; translated by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.
New DirectionsApril 2022Selected by Barbara Epler
Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season is a career-spanning selection of work by trailblazing Persian feminist poet Forough Farrokhzad, in a ravishing translation by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. Here is Farrokhzad in all her freedom-demanding, taboo-smashing glory. What Akhmatova is to Russian poetry and Sappho is to ancient Greek, so Farrokhzad is to Iranian literature – both an icon and a groundbreaker. Even though she died aged just 33 in 1967, Farrokhzad’s huge impact continues to reverberate. – Barbara Epler
“In the Green Waters of Summer”
تابستان سبز آبهای در ar Āb-hā-ye Sabz-e Tābestān
Lonelier than a leaf
with my weight of vanished joys
in the green waters of summer
I sail peacefully
toward the realm of death
toward the shore of autumn griefs
I abandoned myself in a shadow
in the untrustworthy shadow of love
in the fleeting shadow of happiness
in the shadow of what cannot last
Nights when a dizzy breeze whirls
in the low sad sky
Nights when a bloody mist collects
in the blue alleyways of our veins
Nights when
my lonely loneliness –
with the trembling of our souls –
gushes in every pulse-beat
the feeling of life, sick life
“In the waiting of the valleys is a secret”
They carved this onto the face of the mountains
on the mighty rocks
Those who fell one night
filled the mountains’ silence
with a bitter plea
“In the agitation of full hands
there is not the peace of empty ones.
The silence of ruins is beautiful.”
This a woman sang in the waters
in the green waters of summer
as if she lived among ruins
With our breaths
we contaminate one another
Contaminated by the virtue of happiness
in the gardens of our kisses
we fear the sound of the wind
we pale at the influence of suspicion’s shadows
At every feast in the palace of light
we shudder, afraid it will crumble
Now you are here
spread out like the perfume of the acacias
in the morning’s alleyways
heavy on my chest
hot in my hands
lost in my hair, immolated, unconscious
Now you are here
Something vast and dark and thick
something disturbed like the sounds of far-off days
whirls and spreads itself
across my agitated pupils
Maybe they pull me from the cool spring
Maybe they pick me from the branch
Maybe they close me like a door to what comes next
Maybe . . .
Then I don’t see any more
We grew on a wasteland
We rain on a wasteland
We saw Nothing on the roads
On his winged yellow horse
he travelled the road like a king
Alas, we are happy and calm
Alas, we are sad and quiet
Happy, because we love
Sad, because love is a curse † ◉
Iran’s millenia-long poetic tradition is expressed by the number of tourist sites that are dedicated to the memory of medieval poets. The country also holds a number of neolithic petroglyphs (images chiselled into stone) that are around 7,000 years old, and pictographs (images painted on stone) that are around 40,000 years old.
† This final couplet describes the ambivalent promise of the couple form, and is an echo of a poem by Latin poet Catullus, who speaks too from a lost empire: “Ōdī et amō. Quārē id faciam fortasse requīris. / Nesciŏ, sed fierī sentiō et excrucior” (I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask. / I know not, but I feel it happening and I am tortured).