In Tehran in 1956, a bookseller introduced the young poet Forough Farrokhzad (1934-1967) to texts by the French writer Pierre Louÿs, which he sight-translated into Persian. Cyrus, known as the Turtle, and Forough will become lovers and over the course of their meetings, over a dozen years, will play at being Parisians in Tehran.
A living link between the East and the West, he will be its translator-purveyor of the texts of the author of Songs of Bilitis and Civility manual for little girls for use in educational establishments. For the young Iranian poet, Pierre Louÿs “is the forbidden West, the flesh at the height of the smile”.
But behind Louÿs, there is another figure who perhaps fascinates the young Iranian woman more: Marie de Régnier (1875-1963), second of the three daughters of the writer José-Maria de Heredia. If she agreed to marry Henri de Régnier to please her indebted father, this marriage of convenience will not prevent her from becoming the mistress of Pierre Louÿs – who also photographed her from every angle.
She was a writer under the name Gérard d’Houville, sanguine, bisexual. Her legend and her trajectory underline, according to Forough, the impossibility for a woman to be free in Tehran, as Marie de Régnier had been in her time. Forough will seek to follow in those of Marie, the latter becoming his consolation, living and writing more and more “totally out of step with her contemporaries”.
As an announcement of the “political-religious tragedy” still to come – the Islamic revolution which would, in 1979, lock down the country and oppress several generations of women and men.
Based largely on the reality of these historical figures, free and passionate, I have sinned, sinned in pleasurethe second feverish novel by Abnousse Shalmani — whose title is taken from a poem by Forough Farrokhzad — thus alternates between Iran of the 1950s and Paris of the Belle Époque.
A few decades apart, while coming from two different worlds, Marie and Forough are the symbols of a quest for feminine freedom. Freedom to create, love and enjoy without hindrance all the pleasures that life can offer.
Born in Tehran in 1977, arrived in France at the age of eight with her family, anticlerical feminist and enemy of the mullahs, essayist Khomeini, Sade and me and D’Praise of the metic (Grasset, 2014 and 2019), columnist in France at LCI and in The ExpressAbnousse Shalmani also fights a fight in his own way.
Died at the age of 32 in 1967 in a car accident, Forough Farrokhzad is for us, readers, the true revelation of this novel with a double bottom.
An incandescent poet, read and celebrated by generations of Iranians who always learn some of her poems by heart, she has however been appropriated, Abnousse Shalmani tells us, by the Islamists who “disguise life in paradise” and obscure the dimension the most revolutionary of his work. The writer is convinced: “The future of Iran is in Forough’s poems. »