Sin : selected poems of Forugh Farrokhzad /

This volume presents an appealing selection of Farrokhzad's poems and includes some that are seldom translated along with some of her most famous work. Probably the leading modernist Iranian poet in the 1950s and 1960s, Farrokhzad broke many social barriers as a woman writing with honesty and frankness about love, sex, and deep personal feelings. During her most productive years, mirrors and windows were almost controlling metaphors in modernist poetry, and they are abundantly represented here. The translations vary in quality from fresh and lively to somewhat strained. Wolpe allows certain familiar Persian syntactical and grammatical structures to show through her English, and on occasion these interrupt the flow. These along with a few missing definite articles and some odd-sounding sequences of adjectives are the only language problems, but they are few and of little importance. In general the English is imaginative but sometimes daring, with frequent assonance and short stretches of rhyme in unexpected places. Indeed, the language is fresher and tighter than that in Hasan Javadi and Susan Salleee's rendering of Farrokhzad's Another Birth (1981) or Michael Hillmann's in his book about the poet, A Lonely Woman: Forugh Farrokhzad and Her Poetry (CH, May'88). Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. W. L. Hanaway emeritus, University of Pennsylvania

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).--Olson, Ray Copyright 2007 Booklist

In her foreword, Alicia Ostriker compares the late Iranian poet Farrokhzad's work to that of tortured geniuses Anna Akhmatova, Sylvia Plath, and Dahlia Ravikovitch. There's only one problem: the poems actually earning this comparison don't emerge until the book's last third, which totally confuses the reader. As they are here translated, the early poems contain very little energy. Instead, they present a modesty, or passivity, that one often finds in traditional Arabic poetry and that at times borders on cliche: e.g., "O kind friend, if you visit my house/ bring me a lamp, cut me a window,/ so I can gaze at the swarming alley of the fortunate." By contrast, in the posthumous poems, the window "plunges to the heart of the earth/ and opens to the vast unceasing love in blue." Slim though it is, this volume makes every attempt to be thorough: it includes a lengthy biographical essay, a translator's note, an overview of Iran's political poetry scene, and a vocabulary list. Published on the 40th anniversary of Farrokhzad's death and translated for the first time into English, this work is essential for academic and feminist collections. Still, one hopes for a better future translation.--Rochelle Ratner, formerly with Soho Weekly News, New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.