Title: Another Birth Author: Forugh Farrokhzad Creation Date: 1964 Location: Tehran, Iran Collection: Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To
Brief
Forugh Farrokhzad published Tavallodi Digar — Another Birth — in 1964, three years before her death in a car crash at the age of thirty-two. By then she had already become the most scandalous woman in modern Persian letters. Born in Tehran in 1934 to a middle-class military family, married at sixteen, divorced in her early twenties, and stripped of meaningful custody of her son, she had lived the biographical punishment Iranian society reserved for a woman who refused obedience and then dared to write about what refusal cost.
Her early collections, beginning with The Captive in 1955, shocked readers because they gave Persian poetry a specifically female erotic "I". Classical Persian verse had long contained desire, but its public voices were overwhelmingly male, abstract, or grammatically ambiguous. Farrokhzad wrote as a recognisable modern woman: desiring, ashamed, furious, lonely, maternal, sexual, and intellectually awake. Critics first treated this as confession rather than art.
Another Birth changed that judgement. The poems draw on Nimaic free verse, modern Tehran speech, cinema, documentary attention, and the experience of a woman who had been socially condemned but had not gone silent. The book announced not merely a personal rebirth but the arrival of a new poetic subject in Persian: a woman speaking in her own body, history, and time. It remains the work through which Iranian poetry had to recognise that the feminine voice was not an ornament to the tradition. It was capable of remaking the tradition's line, and of making private damage audible as public art.
The Prohibition
The prohibitions around Farrokhzad were legal, religious, social, and literary. Iranian family law in the 1950s gave husbands immense power. A husband could divorce by unilateral declaration; a wife had narrow legal routes to initiate divorce. Custody law automatically favoured fathers after early childhood, and a woman who left a marriage risked losing not only reputation but access to her children. A wife also needed her husband's permission for many forms of movement and public life. Freedom had legal costs.
The social code was harsher still. A respectable woman did not make her desire public, did not write poems in which the beloved's body was felt from a female point of view, did not turn marital unhappiness into literature, and did not insist that sexual, maternal, and intellectual life belonged in the same voice. Modernisation under the Pahlavi state had opened schools and public space to women, but respectability still demanded silence about the body.
The literary prohibition was subtler and more absolute. Persian poetry possessed an immense erotic and mystical tradition, but women poets were expected to write impersonally or morally. Rabi'a Balkhi and Mahsati Ganjavi were distant exceptions; Parvin E'tesami had achieved stature through ethical and didactic verse. Farrokhzad did something different. She made a young divorced woman's interior life the material of serious poetry, and she did it without asking the male tradition to translate her first. The outrage came because she did not merely enter the literary field. She altered what Persian poetry could admit as a speaking subject.
The Strategy
Farrokhzad's strategy was not concealment. She did not take a male name, retreat into allegory, or make her poems safe by denying their relation to her life. Her strategy was to outgrow the scandal by becoming artistically undeniable. The early poems gave her notoriety; the later poems turned that notoriety into authority through craft, formal control, and a widening of vision beyond self-exposure.
The decisive artistic relationship was with Ebrahim Golestan, the writer and filmmaker whose studio gave her access to cinema, editing, translation, and an intellectual circle prepared to take her seriously. Their relationship was emotionally and socially charged, but it also placed her inside a working artistic environment rather than merely a literary salon. Film sharpened her eye. Her 1962 documentary The House Is Black, made in a leper colony in Tabriz, won international recognition and taught her how to hold beauty and suffering in the same frame without sentimentality.
In the poems of Another Birth, that discipline is visible. The voice is no longer asking permission to be heard. It moves between love, body, urban loneliness, political disgust, motherhood, death, and metaphysical hunger with the confidence of someone creating her audience as she speaks. Younger Iranian readers, especially women, recognised her before many male critics did. She wrote past the gatekeepers to the future readers who needed her, refusing to confuse scandal with failure or loneliness with defeat. She also kept working across forms, refusing the reduced role of "confessional" curiosity. That was the strategy: not safety, but seriousness so complete that dismissal became impossible.
The Price and the Legacy
The central price was Kamyar, her son. After her divorce from Parviz Shapour in 1955, Farrokhzad lost custody under Iranian law and was largely cut off from him by his father's family. She saw him only rarely during the remaining years of her life. That loss entered the poems not as anecdote but as structure. The severed mother becomes one of the hidden engines of the voice: love made impossible by law, guilt converted into song, grief that cannot be repaired by artistic success.
Other prices accumulated. She was mocked as immoral, reduced to biography, treated as a public sexual object, and punished by rumours that followed every friendship and collaboration. The mental strain was real; she endured psychiatric crisis and a suicide attempt in the 1950s. Her later authority did not erase the wound of having been made exemplary in the wrong way: the woman against whom respectable families warned their daughters.
Her legacy is therefore double. She made Iranian women poets possible in a new register, but she did so by paying a cost no later celebration can redeem. Simin Behbahani, Tahereh Saffarzadeh, and generations of Iranian women writers worked in a space enlarged by Farrokhzad's defiance. Abbas Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us carried one of her lines into global cinema. Her grave became a pilgrimage site. The Islamic Republic could never make her unread. She proved that a woman's life, written without apology, could become a permanent force in Persian literature, not a footnote to it.
The Reading
A note before the reading. The lines that follow are a critical impression of how the book sounds and what it does, not a translation of any individual poem. Where Farrokhzad's own poems are quoted, readers should turn to Sholeh Wolpé's Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad or to the Hasan Javadi and Susan Sallée translation published by Mage; both are widely available and considered standard.
Birth
The title poem is the architectural centre of the collection, and the whole book is organised around the figure it announces. Tavallod, in Persian, is the ordinary word for birth — the physical event, with its blood and its cry. Digar — another, second, again — is the small word that turns the ordinary into a metaphysical claim. A second birth is not a religious rebirth in the Christian sense and not the spring-rebirth of classical Persian lyric; it is the rebirth of a person who has already been a person once, who has been wife, daughter, mother, scandal, and patient, and who returns to her own life from inside that wreckage. The voice that speaks across the book is born from what could not be repaired, not from what was forgiven.
Farrokhzad approaches the figure obliquely. The poems do not stage the moment of rebirth as drama; they record what is possible to say once the rebirth has happened. The line lengthens and contracts according to the breath of a thinking woman, not according to the templates of classical metre. The first-person pronoun — man, I — sits at the centre of nearly every poem and refuses to dissolve into the grammatical impersonality the tradition had used to make female desire respectable. The lyric I of Tavallodi Digar is unmistakably a specific woman in mid-twentieth-century Tehran, with a body, a history, a divorce, a child she cannot see, and a mind capable of holding all of that without sentimentality.
The reader who comes to the book expecting confession is met with something stricter. Confession assumes a confessor and a forgiveness. These poems assume neither. They speak in the open, to no priest, and they do not ask to be absolved. What they ask is to be heard at the same level of literary attention that Persian readers had been giving to Nima Yushij, to Shamlou, to Akhavan-Sales — the male poets of the Nimaic generation whose innovations had reshaped Persian verse without admitting that a woman might do the same work from the inside of a female life.
The Window
The window is one of the book's recurring structures, and it deserves attention because of how it differs from the casement of European Romanticism. In Farrokhzad's poems the window is the architectural marker of a woman's position in mid-century Tehran: the place from which she sees the city she is not free to walk in unaccompanied, the frame through which modernity arrives without taking her with it. The poems make the window a working figure rather than a symbol. It is the surface against which the breath fogs, the rectangle that holds back the wind, the thing that has to be opened before any of the rest is possible.
Around the window the book gathers its inventory of mid-century urban life — taxis, street vendors, schoolyards, the sounds from a neighbour's radio, the dust of a city expanding faster than its civic life can keep up. Farrokhzad's eye for this material was sharpened by her work with Ebrahim Golestan's film studio and by the year she spent in Tabriz making The House Is Black. The poems are full of the kind of seeing a documentarist learns: refusal to look away, refusal to add music too soon, refusal to convert the difficult image into something easier to carry.
The political climate is implicit rather than declared. The book appears in 1964, the year after the Shah's White Revolution and the year of Khomeini's arrest and exile. Farrokhzad does not write political poetry in the slogan sense, but the poems contain a sustained critique of the official version of modernity, in which an unveiled woman on a poster is treated as proof that the country has progressed while the actual lives of women remain hostage to family law, custody decisions, and the gossip of neighbours. The window is the figure through which she registers this gap between the ideological image of the modern woman and the conditions in which a real woman lives.
The Severed Child
Kamyar, her son by Parviz Shapour, is the book's most painful absent presence. Farrokhzad lost custody at the divorce, as Iranian law all but guaranteed, and she saw him only intermittently in the remaining years of her life. The wound enters the poems without becoming their advertised subject. It surfaces as a structure of address — a voice speaking past a closed door, a sentence interrupted by what cannot be said to a child who is not there to hear it — more than as direct lament.
The book is unusual in the Persian tradition for taking the experience of severed motherhood seriously as a subject for serious art. Earlier Persian women poets had written about love, about religious devotion, about the soul; the everyday catastrophe of losing a child to family law had been treated as a private misfortune rather than as material for the lyric. Farrokhzad insists that it is material, and she insists without asking permission. The maternal voice that runs through the book is neither idealised nor self-pitying. It is the voice of a woman who has been removed from one of the central relations of her life and is trying to understand what kind of speaking is still possible from the position she has been forced into.
The decision not to dramatise the loss directly is itself a literary decision. The poems trust the reader to register what is structurally absent. A line that breaks off, a name that does not appear where the syntax would expect it, a tenderness directed at the wrong addressee — these are the formal markers of a grief that the book refuses to monumentalise. The refusal is part of the achievement.
Eros Without Apology
The erotic poems are what scandalised the first readers, and they remain the part of the book through which Farrokhzad most clearly enlarges what Persian poetry can do. Persian classical verse contains some of the most accomplished erotic writing in any literary tradition, but its grammar is overwhelmingly that of a male speaker addressing an idealised — often gender-ambiguous — beloved. Farrokhzad reverses the grammar. The speaker is a woman; the desire is hers; the body that knows hunger and shame is the one writing the poem.
What makes the eroticism literary rather than merely transgressive is the refusal to separate desire from the conditions in which a woman has to live with it. The poems do not abstract sex into the timeless space of the ghazal. They place it in rooms with shoes in the hallway, in mornings after, in the social weight of being a divorced woman whose every friendship is read as evidence. The body in these poems is not a metaphor for the soul. It is the actual body, with its memory, its risk, its capacity to be diminished by other people's interpretations of what it has done.
There is, in this honesty, a quality that recalls Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva — other women working in patriarchal high cultures who insisted on the legitimacy of a specifically female speaking position without making any concession to the registers their traditions had reserved for them. Farrokhzad belongs in that comparison without being derivative of it; the Persian context, the Pahlavi modernisation, the specific shape of Iranian patriarchy, give her poems a texture that is entirely her own.
Tehran and Modernity Without Mercy
The city is the book's third great subject, after the self and the severed relations. Farrokhzad's Tehran is the Tehran of the early sixties — expanding northward into the foothills, leaving the old southern neighbourhoods to their poverty, building cinemas and ministries and boulevards faster than it is building the moral resources to live in them. The poems register the city's polished surfaces and its older cruelties at the same time, without resolving the contradiction into either celebration or denunciation.
The critique of state modernisation that runs through the book is precise. Farrokhzad does not oppose modernisation as such; she opposes the version of it in which women are recruited as symbols of national progress while remaining hostage to the legal structures that had always controlled them. The unveiled woman in the official photograph is not free; she is being used to advertise a freedom that has not been delivered. Few writers anywhere in the period made this critique as cleanly.
The documentary discipline learned at Golestan's studio shows in how the city is composed. There are no establishing shots, no overviews. The city arrives in fragments, at the level of the street and the room: a vendor's call, a taxi door closing, the dust on a windowsill, the particular quality of light at the hour when a woman is alone in her flat. The cumulative effect is a portrait of a specific urban life at a specific historical moment, registered with the eye of a poet who is also a filmmaker and who has learned to mistrust the easy panoramic image.
The Black House Behind the Book
The House Is Black, Farrokhzad's 1962 documentary made in the Bababaghi leper colony outside Tabriz, sits behind the poems like a second formal training. The film is forty minutes long, was awarded the Grand Prize at Oberhausen in 1963, and contains some of the most morally serious image-making in the history of Iranian cinema. It taught her, on the evidence of the poems written after it, how to hold disfigurement and dignity in the same frame without resolving the tension between them.
The lesson appears in Tavallodi Digar as a discipline of attention. The poems do not aestheticise the difficult — neither the broken body, nor the lost child, nor the city's poor, nor the woman's own social exposure. They look long enough at each subject to register what cannot be metabolised, and then they make a sentence around the residue. The voice that performs this work is not therapeutic. It does not promise consolation. It promises only that the looking will continue.
This is one of the reasons the book has not aged. Many Persian lyrics of the same period now read as period pieces; Tavallodi Digar reads as if its discoveries had been made yesterday. The discipline of attention does not date, because the things requiring attention have not gone away.
The Line
The formal achievement of the book is its handling of the line. Farrokhzad inherited from Nima Yushij the permission to break with classical metre, but Nima's reform had remained, in the hands of most of his followers, a male and somewhat austere innovation. Farrokhzad's line is different. It is shaped by the rhythms of a woman thinking aloud — interrupted by domestic sound, recovering itself, lengthening when the breath allows, contracting when the emotion arrives faster than the syntax.
The line is also shaped by what she had learned from translation, from cinema, from the voice of modern Tehran speech as it had begun to be admitted into serious writing. There is, in the best of these poems, an alternation between long sentences that hold a whole thought across multiple breath-units and short, severed lines in which a single word — man, ay, bia — bears the weight of an entire emotional turn. The result is a music that the older Persian poetry, with its perfect proportions, had not made room for. The cracks in the music are part of the music. The breath that fails halfway through the sentence is part of what the sentence says.
The Wind That Carries
The book closes — and the trajectory of her later work continues — under the figure of wind. The wind in Persian poetry is an old image, associated with messenger function, with the breath of the beloved, with the dispersal of the soul at death. Farrokhzad's wind is closer to weather. It is the actual wind that moves through Tehran's plane trees at dusk, that carries dust and pollen and the smell of petrol, that lifts the unfinished page from the table and reminds the writer that nothing she makes will be permanent.
The acceptance of impermanence in these poems is neither resignation nor mystical transport. It is a kind of clarified attention to the moment that knows it is a moment. Love is more urgent because it is passing; the line is more careful because the page is not eternal; the relation to the child, the lover, the city, is held with a tenderness sharpened by the awareness that none of it will hold. This is the temper of late Farrokhzad, and Tavallodi Digar is where it first becomes fully audible.
She would write only a handful of further poems before the car crash on 13 February 1967. The slim posthumous volume Iman Biavarim be Aghaze Fasle Sard — Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season — gathered those late pieces, including the title poem and "I Pity the Garden", which are often discussed in the same breath as the work in Tavallodi Digar and which extend its discoveries. But Another Birth is the book in which the voice arrives whole, the first volume in modern Persian poetry through which a woman speaks at full literary authority in her own body and her own century. Everything written by women in Persian since has had to acknowledge that this had been done.
This post is part of Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To, a series on women writing against the constraints of their time. See the full collection →
For English-language readers, the most accessible single-volume edition is Mage Publishers' bilingual-adjacent selection, translated by Hasan Javadi and Susan Sallée. It gives the major poems from Farrokhzad's mature period, including the work gathered around the 1964 breakthrough.
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