Very current this poem of yours, dear
Farzaneh Dorri, since in Italy there is a diatribe about the veil, in this case the
#burqa!
È davvero attuale questa tua poesia, cara
Farzaneh Dorri, dato che in Italia è in corso una diatriba sul velo, in questo caso il
#burqa!
The Public Tongue, The Private Glare
Poem by ©Farzaneh Dorri
The turbaned cleric sits in the austere room of Qom,
having cast off the dust of Paris,
yet beneath the heavy, dark brows,
the camera captures a fracture in the stone.
The Italian journalist sits before him,
notebook open, sharp-tongued and bare-faced,
a woman who refuses to blink,
who pulls back the chador like an unwanted curtain.
They say his gaze lingered,
heavy with a hidden, ancient heat,
a sudden dizziness caught in black-and-white grain,
as if the fierce rigidity of the revolution
might faint under the weight of an unholy desire.
Later, the public tongue rewrites the private glare.
The state decrees her old,
dismisses her as withered and plain,
proclaiming the veil no longer matters for a face so spent.
But the archives hold the truth of the blood:
the sharp contrast of light and shadow,
the old man’s eyes caught in an undeniable gravity,
swimming in the very temptation
he promised to burn away.
Copyright © Farzaneh Dorri
LA LINGUA PUBBLICA, LO SGUARDO PRIVATO
Poesia di © Farzaneh Dorri - Traduzione Franca Colozzo
Il religioso dal turbante siede
nella spoglia stanza di Qom,
gettata via la polvere di Parigi;
ma sotto il peso delle sopracciglia scure
la macchina fissa sulla pietra
una crepa.
Di fronte a lui, la giornalista italiana,
il taccuino aperto, la parola affilata,
a volto scoperto,
una donna che non sa, né vuole, batter ciglio,
e tira indietro il chador
come una tenda che non le appartiene.
Dicono che il suo sguardo indugiasse,
grave di un fuoco remoto,
antico;
un improvviso capogiro
impigliato nella grana del bianco e nero,
come se l'aspra corazza della Rivoluzione
potesse, per un istante, vacillare
sotto il peso di un desiderio
che non avrebbe nome né benedizione.
Poi, più tardi,
la lingua pubblica riscrive
lo sguardo privato.
Lo Stato la dichiara vecchia,
la consegna al verdetto
di un volto sfiorito e senza grazia,
proclamando che il velo ormai non conta
su una faccia tanto consunta.
Ma gli archivi custodiscono
la verità del sangue:
il taglio netto fra luce e ombra,
gli occhi dell'uomo anziano
fermati da una gravità
che non concede alibi,
a nuotare dentro quella stessa tentazione
che aveva promesso
di bruciare.
Traduzione in italiano di Franca Colozzo
RECENSIONE IN INGLESE by Dr. Arch. FRANCA COLOZZO
Academic Literary Review of "The Public Tongue, The Private Glare"
Farzaneh Dorri’s "The Public Tongue, The Private Glare" is a politically charged poem that examines the tension between official discourse and the involuntary evidence preserved by visual memory. Constructed around an encounter between a turbaned cleric in Qom and an Italian female journalist, the poem develops a sophisticated meditation on ideological authority, gender, surveillance, desire, and the instability of historical representation. Its central opposition, announced already in the title, is between the “public tongue”, which possesses the power to name and redefine reality, and the “private glare”, which appears to escape ideological control.
The poem is particularly effective in its use of the photographic or archival image as a silent counter-narrative. The camera does not merely record an event; it becomes an interpretive instrument capable of revealing what official language attempts to suppress. The striking image of a “fracture in the stone” beneath the cleric’s “heavy, dark brows” establishes the poem’s principal metaphor. Stone evokes rigidity, permanence, institutional authority, and ideological immovability, whereas the fracture suggests vulnerability and contradiction. The apparently immutable political persona is therefore presented as containing an internal fissure.
The encounter with the Italian journalist introduces a second important symbolic dimension. She is characterized through a series of gestures associated with resistance: she sits “bare-faced,” refuses to blink, keeps her notebook open, and metaphorically removes the chador as though it were “an unwanted curtain.” The curtain image is particularly significant because it transforms the veil from a purely material object into a theatrical device. What lies behind the curtain is not simply the female face, but the contested relationship between visibility and concealment, public identity and private perception.
Dorri’s treatment of the journalist is also notable for the way in which female agency is constructed through the act of looking. She does not merely become the object of observation. She is herself an observer, recorder, and potential witness. Her open notebook and unwavering gaze establish an epistemological position: she is there to see, document, and potentially challenge an established narrative. The poem consequently turns the politics of looking into a reciprocal process.
The most complex section concerns the alleged moment in which the cleric’s gaze appears to linger. Dorri does not present this as an uncomplicated psychological fact. Instead, the language is deliberately mediated through photographic terminology: “a sudden dizziness caught in black-and-white grain.” This formulation is crucial because it places uncertainty between event and interpretation. The reader does not directly enter the cleric’s consciousness. What remains is an image, a visual trace, and the interpretation imposed upon it.
The poem subsequently introduces a powerful contradiction between revolutionary austerity and forbidden desire. The phrase “the fierce rigidity of the revolution” gives political ideology a corporeal quality, almost transforming it into an inflexible body that might nevertheless “faint” under the pressure of desire. The resulting tension is not merely erotic. It is fundamentally political because it exposes the difficulty of maintaining an absolute separation between ideological doctrine and human subjectivity.
The poem’s structural turning point arrives with the sentence: “Later, the public tongue rewrites the private glare.” This is arguably its conceptual centre. The verb rewrites transforms language into an instrument of historical revision. The distinction between what happened and what is subsequently declared to have happened becomes essential. Official discourse possesses the authority to construct a socially acceptable version of the woman, even when the archival image appears to resist that construction.
Dorri's imagery of ageing is therefore deliberately connected to political rhetoric. The woman is described by the state as “old,” “withered,” and “plain,” suggesting that her physical appearance is retrospectively reconstructed in order to neutralize the implications of the encounter. Beauty, age, and desirability consequently become political categories rather than merely aesthetic ones. The female body is not simply described; it is administratively interpreted.
The final stanza returns to the archive, establishing a dialectic between language and evidence. Whereas official discourse can alter descriptions, the photograph retains the “sharp contrast of light and shadow.” Light and shadow operate here both technically and metaphorically. They belong to the visual vocabulary of photography, but they also represent the coexistence of contradictory realities: public virtue and private attraction, ideological certainty and human ambiguity, historical narrative and visual testimony.
The final image, in which the cleric’s eyes are described as “swimming in the very temptation / he promised to burn away,” provides the poem with its strongest irony. The language of fire evokes purification, prohibition, and ideological condemnation, while “swimming” introduces fluidity and surrender. The juxtaposition produces an unresolved paradox: the very desire condemned by doctrine appears, according to the poem's interpretation of the archival image, within the gaze of its representative.
From a formal perspective, Dorri employs free verse, enjambment, cinematic imagery, and controlled repetition rather than conventional rhyme. The poem's rhythm is predominantly syntactic, with short declarative movements interrupted by longer descriptive sequences. This gives the text a documentary quality while allowing metaphorical intensity to accumulate gradually. The movement from room → gaze → camera → public statement → archive resembles a cinematic montage, with each scene adding another layer to the relationship between visibility and truth.
The poem should also be read with attention to its epistemological limitations. Its central claim depends upon interpreting a visual expression as evidence of an interior emotion. A photograph can preserve a gesture or facial expression, but it cannot independently establish the psychological meaning of that expression. Dorri's poetic strategy is therefore strongest when understood as an exploration of the ambiguity of evidence, rather than as an empirical reconstruction of an individual's private emotions. The poem itself participates in the very process it examines: it interprets an image and constructs a narrative around it.
This self-reflexive dimension gives The Public Tongue, The Private Glare considerable literary interest. The poem is not simply opposing official propaganda with an allegedly transparent visual truth. Instead, it stages a conflict between different acts of interpretation: the state's verbal interpretation, the camera's visual record, and the poet's subsequent reading of that record.
Ultimately, Dorri's poem explores the fragile boundary between what is seen, what is said, and what is permitted to be remembered. Its most compelling achievement lies in transforming a seemingly isolated encounter into a meditation on the politics of representation. The “public tongue” possesses institutional power, but the “private glare” survives as an unsettling residue within the archive. Whether that gaze definitively proves desire remains deliberately uncertain; what is certain within the poem is that the image refuses complete obedience to the official narrative.
In this sense, The Public Tongue, The Private Glare is less a poem about a single gaze than a poem about the struggle to control the meaning of a gaze. Its fundamental poetic gesture is archival: it searches the fissures between historical language and visual memory, discovering in those fissures the unstable, often irreducible presence of the human subject.
By Franca Colozzo
I testi, le immagini o i video pubblicati in questa pagina, laddove non facciano parte dei contenuti o del layout grafico gestiti direttamente da LaRecherche.it, sono da considerarsi pubblicati direttamente dall'autore Franca Colozzo, dunque senza un filtro diretto della Redazione, che comunque esercita un controllo, ma qualcosa puó sfuggire, pertanto, qualora si ravvisassero attribuzioni non corrette di Opere o violazioni del diritto d'autore si invita a contattare direttamente la Redazione a questa e-mail: redazione@larecherche.it, indicando chiaramente la questione e riportando il collegamento a questa medesima pagina. Si ringrazia per la collaborazione.
