Forough Farrokhzad's 'Tavallodi Digar'

This is Part 12 of "Persian Poetry for People Who Don't Read Poetry." Forough Farrokhzad is the most important female voice in Persian literature. and one of the most controversial. She wrote about desire, loneliness, and being a woman in a society that wanted her silent. "Tavallodi Digar" is her masterpiece. If you've been searching for forough farrokhzad poems english translations, this is the one to start with, and I'll show you why it still shakes people.

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Who Was Forough Farrokhzad?

Forough Farrokhzad (فروغ فرخزاد) was born in Tehran in 1935 and died in a car accident in 1967. She was 32 years old. In that short life, she became the most radical poet Iran had produced. not because she wrote political manifestos, but because she wrote honestly about being a woman who wanted things.

She married at 16. Had a son, Kamyar. Got divorced. and in the custody laws of 1950s Iran, that meant losing her child. Her ex-husband's family took Kamyar, and Forough was largely cut off from him for the rest of her life. She wrote about this loss repeatedly, and it haunts her work with a grief that never settles into acceptance.

After the divorce, she did things that scandalized Iranian society. She had relationships. She traveled alone. She made a documentary film. "Khaane Siyaah Ast" (خانه سیاه است), "The House Is Black". about a leper colony in Azerbaijan province that's now considered one of the greatest short films ever made. She lived with the filmmaker Ebrahim Golestan. She published poems about physical desire from a woman's perspective, which in 1960s Iran was roughly equivalent to detonating a bomb in the literary establishment.

Men had written about desire for centuries in Persian poetry. Hafez was soaked in it. But when a woman wrote about wanting, about skin and hands and the ache of the body. that was different. That was dangerous. Forough paid for it with her reputation, her social standing, and a level of public hostility that would have silenced most people. It didn't silence her.

The Poem: "Tavallodi Digar" (Another Birth)

Tavallodi Digar (تولدی دیگر), published in 1964 in the collection of the same name, is Forough's most famous poem. It's long. much longer than a ghazal or a typical Shamlu piece. and it reads like a confession that keeps going deeper. The title means "Another Birth" or "A Rebirth," and it announces that the speaker is starting over. Not with optimism, exactly. More like: I've been destroyed, and from the wreckage, something new is growing.

I won't reproduce the entire poem here. it's too long, and the full Farsi text is widely available. Instead, I'll break down the key passages that carry the poem's emotional and linguistic weight.

Key Passages: The Breakdown

The Opening: The Window

همهٔ هستی من آیهٔ تاریکیست
Hame-ye hasti-ye man aaye-ye taariki-st
My entire existence is a dark verse

که ترا در خود تکرار کنان
Ke toraa dar khod tekraar konaan
That repeating you within itself

به سحرگاهِ شکفتن‌ها و رستن‌های ابدی خواهد برد
Be sahar-gaah-e shekoftan-haa o rostan-haa-ye abadi khaahed bord
Will carry you to the dawn of eternal blossoming and growing

Vocabulary:

• هستی (hasti). existence, being
• آیه (aaye). verse (as in a verse of scripture. a loaded word choice)
• تاریکی (taariki). darkness
• تکرار (tekraar). repetition
• سحرگاه (sahar-gaah). dawn, the time just before sunrise
• شکفتن (shekoftan). to blossom, to bloom
• رستن (rostan). to grow, to sprout (also: to be saved/freed)
• ابدی (abadi). eternal

Look at what she's doing. Her whole existence is a dark verse. and she uses aaye, the word for a Quranic verse. This isn't casual. She's claiming her life as scripture. dark scripture, but scripture nonetheless. And that dark verse, through the act of repeating the beloved (or repeating the act of love), will eventually lead to dawn.

The word rostan is doing double work here. It means to grow (like a plant) but also to be saved or liberated. Forough uses both meanings simultaneously. Growth is liberation. Becoming is escape.

The Hands, the Garden

من در این جزیرهٔ کوچک آوازی خوش را
Man dar in jazire-ye kuchak aavaazi khosh raa
On this small island, a sweet song

چون پلنگی تنها و وحشی
Chon palangi tanhaa o vahshi
Like a solitary, wild leopard

به خیابان‌های بهت‌زدهٔ آبی‌رنگ
Be khiaabaan-haa-ye boht-zade-ye aabi-rang
Into the astonished blue-tinged streets

رها خواهم کرد
Rahaa khaahem kard
I will release

Vocabulary:

• جزیره (jazire). island
• آواز (aavaaz). song, voice
• پلنگ (palang). leopard
• وحشی (vahshi). wild, untamed
• بهت‌زده (boht-zade). astonished, stunned
• رها (rahaa). free, released

A sweet song released like a wild leopard. That image is pure Forough. tenderness and ferocity in the same breath. The song isn't gentle. It's predatory. It will stun the streets. And the "small island" is her isolation. her life as a divorced woman, a poet, an outcast. reimagined as a place from which she can launch something dangerous.

The streets are boht-zade, astonished. In spoken Tehrani, you'd hear "boht zadam" (I was stunned) when something shocks you into silence. Forough is saying her song will shock the world into stillness.

The Window. The Central Image

پنجره‌ام را سازم
Panjare-am raa saazam
I will build my window

و از پنجره به جهان نگاه کنم
Va az panjare be jahaan negaah konam
And from the window, I will look at the world

Vocabulary:

• پنجره (panjare). window
• ساختن (saakhtan). to build, to make
• جهان (jahaan). world
• نگاه (negaah). gaze, look

The window in Forough's poetry is everything. It's the boundary between the private interior (the woman's space, the domestic prison) and the world outside that she's been told she can't fully enter. But notice: she doesn't say "I will open my window." She says "I will build my window." She's constructing her own point of view. The window doesn't exist yet. she has to make it.

For women reading Forough in the 1960s. and for women reading her now. this image is electric. The act of looking out is not passive. It's architectural. You have to build the frame before you can see through it.

The Garden and the Hands

من از نهایت شب حرف می‌زنم
Man az nehaayat-e shab harf mizanam
I speak from the depth of night

من از نهایت تاریکی
Man az nehaayat-e taariki
I speak from the depth of darkness

و از نهایت شب حرف می‌زنم
Va az nehaayat-e shab harf mizanam
And from the depth of night, I speak

Vocabulary:

• نهایت (nehaayat). end, depth, extreme point
• شب (shab). night
• حرف زدن (harf zadan). to speak, to talk

The repetition here is incantatory. She's not describing darkness. she's speaking from it. The preposition az (from) makes her the source. Darkness is her position, not just her condition. And the repetition of nehaayat-e shab insists on it. this is where I am, this is where I am, and I'm talking anyway.

In spoken Farsi, harf zadan is the most basic verb for talking. "Harf bezan" means "say something," "speak up." Forough uses everyday language here. no classical flourishes. She speaks from the depths in a voice you'd recognize on a Tehran bus.

"Digar" vs. "Dige". A Grammar Moment

The title word digar (دیگر) means "other" or "another". another birth, a different beginning. In written Farsi, it's always digar. But in spoken Tehrani, it collapses to dige (دیگه). You hear dige constantly: "chi dige?" (what else?), "bas-e dige" (that's enough), "dige tamum shod" (it's done now).

This is one of those spoken vs. written splits that trips up learners. If you're watching an Iranian movie and hear "dige," that's the same word as "digar" in Forough's title. Same meaning, different register. The literary form carries more weight, more formality, more echo of history. When Forough writes "tavallodi digar," it sounds like a declaration. If she'd written "tavallodi dige," it would sound like a shrug.

What Makes Forough Different from Every Other Persian Poet

Persian poetry has a lot of love poems. Hafez wrote about love. Rumi wrote about love. Sa'di wrote about love. But those poems are almost always written from a male perspective. even when they're mystical, even when the beloved's gender is ambiguous, the poetic voice is traditionally male.

Forough wrote from inside a woman's body. She wrote about desire not as metaphor but as physical experience. She wrote about hands touching, about lying next to someone, about the specific loneliness of a woman who has been socially punished for wanting.

One of her earlier poems. "Gonah" (گناه), meaning "Sin". describes a sexual encounter from the woman's point of view, and it nearly destroyed her career before it started. Critics called her immoral. Her family was horrified. But she kept writing, and with each collection she got bolder, more technically accomplished, and harder to dismiss.

By the time she wrote "Tavallodi Digar," she'd moved beyond personal confession into something more expansive. The poem is still intensely personal. the "I" is unmistakably Forough. but it reaches for universal statements about existence, darkness, and the possibility of starting again. She managed what very few poets manage: being completely specific and completely universal at the same time.

Forough's Life: The Facts That Matter

I don't want to reduce Forough to her biography. But certain facts are essential for understanding the poems.

The divorce and the child. When Forough divorced Parviz Shapour at 19, Iranian law gave custody of their son Kamyar to the father's family. Forough was effectively erased as a mother. The grief of this loss runs through her entire body of work. In "Tavallodi Digar," when she speaks about building something from darkness, some of that darkness is the specific darkness of a woman who lost her child to a legal system that saw her as disposable.

"The House Is Black." In 1962, Forough made a 22-minute documentary about a leper colony in Tabriz. It's unflinching. close-up shots of disfigured faces, children playing in the dirt, the daily reality of people society had abandoned. Forough adopted a child from the colony. The film won the Grand Prize at the Oberhausen Film Festival. It's now considered a masterpiece of Iranian cinema and documentary filmmaking worldwide. If you're interested in Iranian film as a learning tool, I wrote about that here.

The death. On February 13, 1967, Forough died in a car accident in Tehran. She was driving, hit a wall to avoid a school bus, and was killed instantly. She was 32. The circumstances have been debated endlessly. some believe it was an accident, others suspect it wasn't. What's certain is that Iranian literature lost its most vital voice decades too early.

Why Forough Is Still Controversial

You'd think a poet who died in 1967 would be safely historical by now. She's not. Forough is still controversial in Iran because the things she represented. female autonomy, sexual honesty, refusal to perform propriety. are still contested. Her poems are taught in some universities and banned from others. Her name carries a charge.

Young Iranian women who discover Forough often describe it as a revelation. Not because the poetry is "empowering" in some Instagram-caption way, but because it's honest in a way they've rarely encountered. She wrote about wanting and not getting. About building a window because no one would open a door. About speaking from darkness because the light was never offered.

Forough influenced generations of Iranian women in poetry, film, music, and activism. The filmmaker Shirin Neshat has cited her repeatedly. The musicians who came after her. both inside Iran and in the diaspora. carry her DNA. And during the 2022 protests, when women burned their headscarves and danced in the streets, Forough's poems circulated alongside Shamlu's. Different energy. Shamlu's anger, Forough's fierce tenderness. but the same refusal to be silent.

Vocabulary Recap: Forough's Language

Forough sits between the classical and the modern. She's more accessible than Hafez but more literary than daily speech. Here are the essential words from "Tavallodi Digar":

How These Lines Appear in Daily Life

Forough's influence on daily Iranian speech is subtler than Hafez's or Shamlu's. People don't quote her as often in casual conversation. But her images. the window, the garden, the dark verse. have seeped into the cultural vocabulary in ways that are hard to trace but impossible to miss.

"Az nehaayat-e shab harf mizanam". "I speak from the depth of night." You'll see this on Iranian social media, especially from women. It's become shorthand for speaking from a place of difficulty, for refusing to wait until things are better before opening your mouth.

"Panjare-am raa saazam". "I will build my window." This line gets referenced when someone is creating their own perspective, their own way of seeing. Starting a business, leaving a bad relationship, moving to a new country. building your window.

The digar/dige split shows up every time a learner encounters written Farsi after only hearing spoken. Knowing that tavallodi digar and "ye tavallod-e dige" use the same root word. just in different registers. is the kind of connection that makes the whole language click.

Forough didn't write for posterity. She wrote because she couldn't stop. "Tavallodi Digar" is the sound of a woman who has been through darkness. real darkness, not the poetic kind. and is choosing to grow anyway. That's not optimism. It's something tougher than optimism. It's the insistence on being alive in a world that would rather you weren't.

FAQs

Want to learn the vocabulary from this poem? Try ZabanYar. it's free and works offline.

Forough's Farsi sits at the advanced level. not because her words are obscure, but because her syntax bends and stretches in ways that reward close reading. If you want to get to the point where you can read her without a translation propped next to you, come work with me on Preply. We'll build your window together.

This is Part 12 of the Persian Poetry for People Who Don't Read Poetry series.
Previous: Episode 11. Shamlu's "Dar In Bonbast"
Next: Episode 13

Get it wrong and the worst that happens is a warm laugh and a story they’ll tell for years. Get it right — refuse the tea twice, accept on the third — and you’ll watch a face open up. You didn’t just speak Persian. You played the game.