Forugh Farrokhzad was the most significant female Iranian poet of the twentieth century, as revolutionary as Russia’s Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva and America’s Plath and Sexton. She wrote with a sensuality and burgeoning political consciousness that pressed against the boundaries of what could be expressed by a woman in 1950s and 1960s Iran. She paid a high price for her art, shouldering the disapproval of society and her family, having her only child taken away, and spending time in mental institutions. Farrokhzad died in a car accident in 1967 at the age of thirty-two.

Sholeh Wolpé is the author of The Scar Saloon and Rooftops of Tehran. Her poems, translations, essays, and reviews have appeared in many publications. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

Books by Sholeh Wolpé: Sin, The Scar Saloon

Forugh Farrokhzad according to Wikipedia.

Sholeh Wolpé's Home Page.

About Sin:

"Maligned and admired in her all-too-brief life, demonized and eventually banned soon after the Islamic Revolution, Forugh Farrokhzad is a literary icon and guru in Iran today. Her poetry, like the response it elicited, is a perfect metaphor for a society in transition. Sholeh Wolpé’s selection of poems and the lush lucidity of her translation convey the quickly evolving and the richly paradoxical nature of Farrokhzad's poetry. It is a welcome addition to the slim body of literary translations available in the U.S."
—Farzaneh Milani

"Forugh is a dynamic inventor in life and poem, risking all to create a role for women's place, art, spirit. Her poetry has a Houdini slight-of-hand perfection of the impossible, each word poised, of raw reality and acrobatic beauty, yielding unparalleled verse. Compact, extravagantly imagistic, she left a complete corpus, but her heart-breaking early death, like that of Miguel Hernandez and Garcia Lorca to war's brutality, has deprived the world of this genial magus. Her Persian voice survives. Sholeh Wolpe's translations, meeting the rigor and esthetic of her compatriot, flow and carry us into rare catharsis. They resurrect Forugh."
—Willis Barnstone