Sin
Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad
Translated by Sholeh Wolpé
Foreword by Alicia Ostriker

REVIEWS:

Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad:
Poetic modernism came to Iran as late as the 1960s, when Farrokhzad
(1935-67) streaked across the literary horizon. Rebellious from
childhood, Farrokhzad entered young womanhood as many more were to do in
the West a decade later. She insisted on her sexuality and wrote of it
rapturously in her earliest poems, which immediately appeal in their
celebration of lovemaking, including sexual objectification of the male.
Of course, she became a scandal, one that endures to this day. A family
member of Wolpé's, when told that she was translating Farrokhzad,
responded,'Why are you wasting your time on that whore?' The answer
is obvious in the poems, which become more powerfully compelling as they
take up the issues of life as a woman in modern Iran, issues that are
realized through feelings and predicaments with which any Western reader
can sympathize. Meanwhile, the poems' long lines and musical
repetitions sweep the reader away as effectively as any American
projective verse (the Whitman to Hart Crane to Ginsberg tradition) or
Vicente Huidobro's Chilean modernist classic Altazor (1931).
–Booklist