This article is more than 7 years old
Former lover of the poet known as Iran's Sylvia Plath breaks his silence.
This article is more than 7 years old.
Fifty years after Forough Farrokhzad’s death, Ebrahim Golestan talks about his affair with the giant of Persian literature
Saeed Kamali Dehghan
Sun 12 Feb 2017 17.22 CET
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Forty miles south of London, in a quiet West Sussex village, lives a 94-year-old Iranian intellectual who has for half a century kept silent about his former lover, a giant of modern Persian literature who was killed in a car accident aged just 32.
But 50 years after Forough Farrokhzad’s sudden death, the reclusive Ebrahim Golestan has finally broken his silence, speaking out about the seriousness of their relationship and describing her as a poet who wrote honestly about the most fundamental human emotions.
Farrokhzad, one of Iran’s most loved literary figures of the past century who was largely overlooked in the west, was known for her candid writings challenging the patriarchal limits of Iranian society and has been compared to Sylvia Plath.
Her relationship with Golestan, an enigmatic writer and film-maker, coincided with a period during which she wrote some of her most memorable works. But little was known publicly of their tryst, and many believed Farrokhzad’s feelings were unrequited.
In a rare interview in his opulent, Victorian-era palace in the village of Bolney, decorated with paintings of some of Iran’s most prominent artists, Golestan admitted that their relationship was mutual.
“I rue all the years she isn’t here, of course, that’s obvious,” he said. “We were very close, but I can’t measure how much I had feelings for her. How can I? In kilos? In metres?” Mehdi Jami, who has written extensively about Farrokhzad’s influence on Persian literature, said the film-maker made a significant impact on her writing, particularly in introducing her to modern literary movements in the west. “If you want to name one person that had the most influence on Forough, that’s undoubtedly Golestan. They met each other at the right moment,” Jami said.
Ebrahim Golestan
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Ebrahim Golestan, the Iranian writer and film-maker: ‘I rue all the years she isn’t here’. Photograph: ITN/REX/Shutterstock
“In every culture you have cultural icons, like Shakespeare in Britain. Farrokhzad was like that for contemporary Iran, someone who formed the identity of our contemporariness,” Jami added. “She wrote in a simple and intimate way. She was not fake, nor was her poetry … She was the last prophet of truth-telling that our country has seen.”
Mohammad Reza Shafiei Kadkani, Iran’s most famous living poet, told the Guardian from Tehran that she was “truly modern”, without talking about modernism directly in her poetry. “She was very natural. She was the epitome of a real poet in her own time,” he said. “She had no masks, that’s why today we still read her, and in future we will read her, too.”
Golestan said two friends had introduced him to Farrokhzad in the late 1950s when she was looking for a job. At the time he was running a well-known studio in Darrous, an affluent area in northern Tehran. He left Iran a few years after Farrokhzad’s death over his dismay at the political atmosphere under the Shah, and has lived in Sussex since 1975. He has never returned to his home country.
