Fereshte Teyfouri Hadjazi

Short biography

Dr Fereshte Teyfouri: author and editor in Persian; official translator for the German courts and social services; former teacher of Persian at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster.

Fereshte Teyfouri is an Iranian writer who published her first book, The Obscure Script (

Khat-e tire) in Tehran in 1969, before leaving for Germany where she settled and wrote her M.Phil (Magister) thesis (1977) on the philosophy of the early Christian scholars, focusing on St. Thomas Aquinas. Her Doctorate in modern Persian literature (2010) was entitled “Intertextuality in Modern Persian Prose”.

The author has lectured in Persian at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster as well being an editor of books in Persian. Along with her academic work she is also an official translator for the German courts, the social services and for the organisation for assisting abused women and refugees.

Her particular literary focus is on Sufi thought and mystical concepts.

She has continued to write both in German and in Persian; short stories, plays, poems and poetical prose, including Tales of the Forbidden City (Dastanha-ye shahr-e mamnu’e) (2016) a collection of short stories steeped in the pain of human existence, some based on actual events, some imaginary.

Sufi themes are explored further in Khat-surkhi bi roshanai ofaq

(2020) illustrated, and with a bilingual edition in English and Persian:

A Crimson Line to the Bright Horizon, Poems and Poems in

Prose on the Anguish of Existence (2021).

The Obscure Script was reprinted in Persian (2022), and other works are available on the internet.

A Unique Line in the Span of time (Khat-i digir dar imtidad-i zaman)

by Fereshte Teyfouri.

     Fereshte Teyfouri’s mystical poems and poems in prose resonate with Sufi themes on the search for understanding existence, a contemporary quest, but looking back to the poetry of Attar, Rumi, and Hafiz, the philosophy of Avicenna, and Suhrawardi (the master of enlightenment), and drawing also from Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and the Neoplatonists.

     In her Outpourings, Tales and Reflections, searching for the meaning of detachment, she explores the search for freedom while tied into the warp and weft of the dazzle of daily life “For attachment had made life full of colour, and the poet was searching for the one who is free of colour”.

     With a light, engaging touch, taking an imaginary conversation between Socrates and the chalice she poses the eternal question that did God create man in his own image, or it is man who creates God, in the image of man.

     The boundaries between logic and imagination are a recurring theme: “When I die, I will be shame in the injustice of the arbitrators. I will be the beating in the hearts of the kind”, expressing eternity as continuation in the span of time, the noble spirit, grace and beauty, not encapsulated in an individual life, but what has always been and would remain.

     Tales includes stories rooted in philosophical ideas, musing, for example, outside a

courthouse and concluding “I returned to the court. Knowledge was seated on one side of the scale.

     He said: ‘Alas, even in this place values are to be bought. The thick tomes are forests of useless words’”.

     Reflections take images of the everyday world: a train, influenza, trying to dump earthly attachment in the shape of a knapsack. “Not long passed before someone came, bearing the knapsack of identity. Smiling he said: ‘You are not free of this load’”.

ISBN: 978-3-86835-363-1

Erscheinungsjahr: 2024

Seitenanzahl: 174