Poem by Forough Farrokhzad

Alireza Ghorbani

One of the famous voices of Iran, the classical Persian vocalist Alireza Ghorbani, sings a poem by Iranian poet and filmmaker Forough Farrokhzad, herself an iconic figure of art, freedom, and feminism in the 20th century. Despite her short life—she died at age 32 in a car accident—Forough was one of the most influential figures of modern Iranian literature. She is also famous for her documentary film about leprosy, The House is Black (available on Wikipedia).

Iran was and is a highly civilized and developed society and culture, building upon thousands of years of intellectual, musical, and literary history.

The kind of Persian vocal technique that we hear implemented by Alireza Ghorbani in this piece is learned by heart and received from a teacher, passed down from generation to generation. One of the characteristic styles involved here is called tahrir, a melismatic trill (singing of several notes over one syllable) for ornamentation. The technique employs rapid glottal strokes and may include rapid jumps into a higher pitch, called tekye (a word similar to the Hebrew tekiah, the long sacred note played on the shofar on holy days). Musicologists have compared tahrir to Swiss yodeling and Japanese and Korean vocal music.

The poem by Forough Farrokhzad that builds the lyrics of this song composed by Saman Samimi seems to be “Much Later” from her 1958 collection of poems Esyan (Rebellion). It is a poem about her own death.

We recommend you switch on subtitles in English.

Much Later

My death will arrive one day,
It may be a bright, spring dawn,
It may be a distant winter dusk,
Or perhaps a silent night-
of a foggy, frozen fall.

That day,
gloomy, bright or cloudy, yet,
it will be an empty day-
like all the rest:
a figment of the future,
a picture of the past.

That day,
My eyes like dark holes,
My face like cold marbles;
I’ll be taken away in a swift sleep,
leaving behind my colorful dreams.

My hands will fall on the pallor of a page,
My rhyming thoughts will flee from their cage,
My mind losing to the vibration of this last verse;
And then, there will be no sorrow, no pain-
no rage.

The Earth,
incessantly calling my name,
so they will arrive to place me inside the grave.
Oh, perhaps my lovers, at all midnights-
will put some flowers on my lone place.

Then,
the thick shades of my world-
will be suddenly pulled away:
In the full moon-light, one night-
strangers will read on my rhymes…

They will step in my little room,
a sunny day, in my memory.
Next to my mirror yet, they will find
a lock of my hair,
the signs of life-
my fingerprints.

My soul,
like a sailboat,
It will escape,
free of myself and missing from my corpse.
I will fade away at the borders of sight,
like a vagabond kite,
in an endless flight.

Days so quickly get to weeks,
And weeks become months as fast;
You’ll stare into eyes of the clock,
waiting in vain my letters, my calls.

But then,
My lifeless body will calmly rest-
far from you and the pounds of your heart-
in the voiceless arms of Mother Earth.

Later on,
The sun, the wind and the rain,
will polish the cold stone of my grave:
And lastly I'll be free-
forever free-
from the myths of return,
name and fame.


Translation: Maryam Dilmaghani, July 2006, Montreal.