Over the last few decades, many courses on Persian literature, both classical and modern, have been created, followed by numerous new positions in Persian literature in translation. While the number of works translated from Persian to European languages remains limited, that number is growing. This panel aims to offer an overview of the field of Persian literature in translation, discuss the development of the field, and capture critical accounts by leading scholars of cutting-edge theoretical and practical research. It will also discuss current debates and problems and suggest productive lines of future research in translation studies from historical, linguistic, and socio-cultural perspectives. It will investigate intra-textual and meta-textual concepts in translating Persian literature, including a linguistic view of translation; poetics and stylistics of translation; untranslatability in Persian literature, especially Persian poetry; cultural considerations in translating Persian literature; and the practical process of translation.
Several of the panelists will investigate the implications of gender in translation, including the practice of translating premodern ghazals, which entails theoretical problems that relate to the very nature of lyric and to the relationship between gender and sexuality, spirituality, and performativity. One of these papers will tackle the practice of translating ghazals in light of desire’s ambiguous nature as a characterizing feature of this genre, both in its historical evolution and in the implied critical approaches that Anglophone, Italian, and French scholars have adopted when exploring this literary heritage through their own languages. Another paper addresses the role of gender in the canonization process, and offers some preliminary analysis of the representation of women writers in short story anthologies, both in English and in Persian, from 1990 to the present. In conducting this analysis, the paper looks to the contemporary theories on canonization in English literature, especially the feminist critic Joanna Russ.
Other aspects addressed by the panel will include historical approaches to translation out of Persian, including an examination of Sa’di’s Gulistān and its status as a core text for teaching literary and social sensibilities in India to British Orientalists. The paper considers some of the earliest English translations of the Gulistān, thereby shedding light on the enterprise of translation in British India. Additionally, translation from Persian will be addressed from a linguistic standpoint, including discussions of both linguistic and metalinguistic factors that influence translation. One such metalinguistic issue would be the translator’s visibility in the text, and the ever-relevant question of domestication vs. foreignization.
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Dr. Michelle Quay
Considering the recent dominance of women fiction writers in Iran, this chapter investigates whether women’s writing has filtered its way into modern translated short story anthologies to the degree expected. It addresses the role of gender in the canonization process, and offers some preliminary analysis of the representation of women writers in short story anthologies, both in English and in Persian, from 1980 to the present. In conducting this analysis, the chapter looks to the contemporary theories on canonization in English literature, especially the feminist critic Joanna Russ. Russ noted in her investigation of anthologies of English poetry that 11% seems to be the preferred percentage for the representation of women in canon. My paper suggests that a new market for anthologizing women has emerged – one that tends to be separate from so-called ‘mainstream’ (that is, largely male) writing – at least partly in response to increasing demands for representation and diversity by publishers. This phenomenon can be seen as roughly analogous to what is occurring with other ‘hyphenated’ groups, including, for example, Kurdish writing in contemporary Iran, or diaspora literature in Persian. As such, it asks scholars and translators to re-evaluate our assumptions underlying the canonization process of Persian literature and not to assume the perceived meritocracy of the process is immune from social forces. It encourages translators to carefully evaluate their role in shaping the works of the current moment and ensuring which ones will be remembered in the future.
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Dr. Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi
This paper examines linguistic and metalinguistic factors that influence translation. The structure of the paper is as follows. First, I will briefly mention the linguistic approaches to translation. Then I will talk about translational universals at the background of linguistic universals. Other than linguistic issues, there are metalinguistic issues affecting translation. One of these metalinguistic issues is translator’s visibility in the text. The question is whether the translator should produce the TT in such a way that it cannot be recognized as a translation, or should the translator leave a trace of his own by means of foreignization (Venuti, 1995). The metalinguistic issues, especially the use of rhetorical devices, affecting translation become even more tangible when it comes to poetry. As Jones (2011) puts it, “Poetry translators are concerned to interpret a source poem's layers of meaning, to relay this interpretation reliably, and to ‘create a poem in the target language which is readable and enjoyable as an independent, literary text”. The paper ends with some broader discussion on untranslatable linguistic and metalinguistic features. These untranslatable features are not universal, but rather specific to each language pair. Some of these problems specific to Persian-English translations are discussed in the paper.
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Prof. Domenico Ingenito
Modern approaches to the translation of classical Persian lyric grapple with problems that relate not only to the issue of the semantic meaning of a given poem, but also to the overall functions of this specific literary genre within its historical and socio-anthropological contexts. While the existence of an underlying literary critique inhabits the practice of translating all poetic texts from the past, the case of the Persian lyric tradition known as ghazal poetry is particularly significant. The practice of translating premodern ghazals entails theoretical problems that relate to the very nature of lyric and to the relationship between gender and sexuality, spirituality, and performativity.
This paper will tackle the practice of translating ghazals from the perspective of the ambiguity of the nature of desire as a characterizing feature of this genre both in its historical evolution and in the implied critical approaches that Anglophone, Italian, and French scholars have adopted when exploring this literary heritage through their own languages. The analyses will focus mainly on the renowned (and widely translated) 13th–14th century C.E. poets Sa‘di, Rumi, and Hafez, with peripheral incursions in the less-known translations of poets such as Sanā’i (11th–12th c. C.E), ‘Erāqi (13th c. C.E.), Jāmi (15th century C.E.), and Mohtasham of Kashan (16th century C.E.).
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Dr. Alexander Jabbari
The thirteenth-century Gulistan (“Rose Garden”), a didactic prosimetrum by Sa‘di of Shiraz (1210-1291 or 1292 CE), is among the best-known and most widely read works in the history of Persian literature. For centuries, study of this mirror for princes was a traditional staple of education throughout the Persianate world. Its status as a core text for teaching literary and social sensibilities in India made it the subject of particular interest for British Orientalists, who translated the Gulistan into English on more than ten separate occasions before the twentieth century. This paper looks closely and comparatively at several nineteenth-century English translations of the Gulistan, examining choices made in translation and analyzing the various approaches to translation. In doing so, it sheds light on the enterprise of translation in British India, and considers how English fit in to an evolving Persianate ecumene.
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Mr. Samuel Hodgkin
Before the post-WWII watershed of decolonization, the Soviet-led translation system stood alone as a systematic, reciprocal attempt to establish a canon of world literature in which “world” did not practically coincide with “Europe.” Persian played an integrating role in this system second only to Russian, as a prestige language of world classics, the language of a Soviet nationality (Tajik), a common second language among Soviet Eastern nationalities, and a bridge between the Soviet and international East. The result was a fundamental transformation of the relationship between the Persian literary classics and their readership across the Persianate world and beyond. This essay introduces the network of intellectuals responsible for this transition: Soviet Eastern writers and bureaucrats, Russian and foreign leftist orientalists, Russian poet-translators, and anticolonial writers and scholars across West and South Asia. It then surveys the forms and venues whose skopoi and production conditions informed the varied styles of Soviet and second-world translations of Persian classics: Russian, Azerbaijani, and Uzbek scholarly annotation-translations, prestige editions of literary translations from interlinear ponies, school textbooks, etc. Finally, it briefly situates Persian classics translations in relation to second-world translations of modern Persian/Tajik poetry, and literary translations to Tajik/Persian.
