Nationalism In and Out of "Translation": Theater, Satire, and Memoirs across the Persianate World
Panel 181, 2017 Annual Meeting
On Monday, November 20 at 3:30 pm
Panel Description
The word translation often indicates the rendering of one language to another. Embedded in this rendering are common geographical, ethnic, and political associations to the original and target languages. In a broader scope, however, translation can include the transference of ideas, aesthetics, and objects beyond geographical borders.
Do certain historical, religious, and political contexts give rise to certain non-textual translations, or are the latter borrowed and lent chiefly with the determination and active awareness of individual and group translators? Is national identity a primordial continuous sense throughout centuries, or does it translate to other, perhaps contradictory, concepts?
If we define thinkers, writers, artists, and political activists primarily as translators, how do we respond to the question of originality? How do we engage with Benjamin's concept of "an ideal receiver" being a detrimental consideration? What happens to thoughts, aesthetics, and objects, in their translational afterlives? Under what circumstances are they seen as translated?
This panel wishes to engage with the above questions by bringing together the perspectives of cultural and literary historians of the Persianate world, mainly focusing on Iran, the Caucasus, and Central Asia.
One paper analyzes the translation of a pre-modern national identity to nineteenth-century patriotism and twentieth-century nationalism through playwriting and theatre. This paper discusses how the progressive elite of late nineteenth century and the constitutionalists of early twentieth century advocated for theatre as a means to revive a historic sense of Iranian identity, and later, similar to their Caucasian and Ottoman counterparts, disseminated ideas of nationalism and nation-construction.
The next presentation traces the various translations (linguistic, spatial, and aesthetic) of Soviet socialist realism and modernity into a particular Iranian nationalism, primarily through Maxim Gorky’s Mother in Iran. It specifically examines how the novel left a lasting impression on expressions of patriotic love in literature and leftist discourse as seen through memoirs.
The final paper examines the role of satirical journals in the formation of Tajik identity during the Tajik Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1924-1929). Inspired by satirical journals in the Caucasus, journals such as the Samarkand-printed Mullo Mushfiqi utilized biting social commentary and vibrant illustrations to articulate notions of national progress as defined by Communist party ideologues.
Through theatre, memoir writing, and satire, a particular language of nationalism and nationalist progress was developed. In multiple senses, however, this language was a transmission of knowledge, ideas, and stories translated from varying political and cultural contexts.
Disciplines
Participants
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Dr. Blake Atwood
-- Chair
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Dr. Sheida Dayani
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Mr. Rustin Zarkar
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Belle Cheves
-- Presenter
Presentations
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Mr. Rustin Zarkar
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Persianate literary sphere had undergone a massive transformation; educational reform and technological innovations greatly expanded reading publics, and the socio-political movements in Qajar Iran, Imperial Russia, and the Ottoman Empire placed new emphasis on literature as a form of social critique. From Calcutta to Istanbul, satirical journals and periodicals became a medium for a rising intellectual class to humorously identify societal woes and to articulate remedies to them.
Previous research on satirical commentary in Iranian studies tends to focus on the Azerbaijani journal Molla Nasreddin (1906-17, 1921-31), Dekhoda’s Charand Parand column in the weekly Sur-i Israfil (1907-08), and novels such as Maraghei’s Safarname-yi Ibrahim Beg (1896) and Mirza Habib Isfahani’s translation of Sargozasht-i Haji Baba-yi Isfahani (1886). This scholarship emphasizes the circulation of these texts between the Caucasus and Iran, but very few works explore satirical writing from Russian-administered Central Asia. Adeeb Khalid’s The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform (1999) and Making Uzbekistan (2015) have shed much-needed light on Jadidist print culture in the cities of Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bukhara, but the author has primarily utilized Uzbek language primary sources to address his scholarly inquiries.
This paper is a close examination of Mullo Mushfiqi (1926-1931), a Tajik-language monthly periodical printed in Tashkent and Samarkand during the national delimitation of the Soviet Union (razmezhevanie). Using issues housed in the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg, I will explore the various ways satire was utilized to support the transformative platform of the Soviet Union in regards to national progress, women’s liberation, anti-clericalism, class struggle, and language reform. Furthermore, I will argue that Mullo Mushfiqi’s visual and textual similarities to other illustrated journals in the Caucasus (particularly Molla Nasreddin) reveals a larger network of literary translation and textual transactions spanning the Caspian Sea. In doing so, I wish to geographically expand the scholarship concerning satire in the Persianate world as well as emphasize Farzin Vejdani’s notion of a “Persian republic of letters” traversing the political demarcations of twentieth-century Eurasia.
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Belle Cheves
The Iranian left in the late 1930s and 1940s, in addition to vast literary production of their own, avidly consumed and translated work across borders. Much of the literature came from the Soviet Union. Maxim Gorky in particular helped bring about socialist realism in leftist literature. How was Gorky translated in Iran – both literally and figuratively? How and where was he read, by whom, and how were his ideas translated into not only leftist literature in Iran, but also into how the left conceived and wrote of itself historically?
The story of the translation of Maxim Gorky’s novel Mother is a fascinating one. Initially written in the US and immediately translated into English, the original Russian manuscript was lost. Several translations and iterations later, Gorky finished a final Russian version in 1922. Reading of Mother was not confined to the US and Soviet Union, however. While not translated into Persian until years later, the novel was widely read in Russian by Iranian leftists. As Bozorg Alavi writes in 53 Persons, Gorky’s work was circulated through prison so the leftist political prisoners could continue to read and learn - acquiring books and reading Soviet literature in particular was one of their primary acts of resistance. How did these leftists read Gorky? How did they “translate” Mother?
In this paper, I trace Gorky’s Mother through its Persian life and afterlife – the literal translation of the novel, but also how socialist realism and conceptions of motherly and familial love came to shape not only the Iranian literary sphere, but also leftist life. While the role of socialist realism in shaping Iranian literary production has been examined, the ways in which the Iranian left molded aspects of socialist modernity into a notion of Iranian nationalism, particularly through multiple conceptions of love – love of the leftist cause, familial love, and the tensions between them – has not yet been addressed. I will trace these translations of love through prison memoirs and literary production of the late 1930s and 1940s. The ideas present in Mother became translated into and shaped the role of the leftist family in Iran. I ask the question of what this implies about the interconnectedness of literature and history, or the “translation” of literature into history, and how we can use both literary sources, along with memoirs, to show how translations of ideology and love come to affect history.
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Dr. Sheida Dayani
Modern playwriting in Iran emerged in late nineteenth century alongside quests for modernism, class equality, and the rule of law, and it flourished with the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911. The Revolution spoke of nationalism and “the reawakening of an ancient civilization” in face of Western economic and cultural penetration, but it also borrowed from the modernity, progress, and lawfulness of the West. Prior to the state agendas for nation-construction and national identity under Reza Shah, a call for patriotism, union of religions, and equal treatment of ethnicities is evident in late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Iranian plays. Hobb-al-vatan (love of fatherland), was a translated concept, borrowed from Ottoman and Caucasian counterparts, that soon became the rallying cry of the Constitutional theatre.
This paper will examine Iranian theatre’s early calls for an Iranian identity prior to the formation of an Iranian nation-state. Of particular interest are plays that showcase religious or ethnic minorities, and their notions of national identity. Examples are Ti?tr-e Karim Shirehi by an anonymous writer, and a translation of Narim?n Narim?nov's Nader Shah from Azeri Turkish into Persian in 1906. This translated play is the first historical Iranian play with explicit advocacy for civility and patriotism, and the first play to portray an Armenian character who fights for his country, Iran. In sharp contrast to its preceding comedies, Nader Shah also stands as the first modern Iranian play that translated the form of tragedy into an Iranian structure. It is also the first play to have been translated into Persian by an Iranian woman, T?j M?h ?f?q al-Dawla.
The paper will investigate how Persian playwriting, itself a product of imported modernization, was a medium for translating a pre-modern sense of national Iranian identity to the modern concept of nationalism with an eye on the French Revolution. Was early Persian playwriting tied to the previous literary traditions with a continuous sense of Iranian identity, or was it a “modern and progressive” way to implement “cultural refinement” and “educate” the populace? My arguments are informed by Marvin Carlson’s The Theatre of the French Revolution, Gregory Jusdanis’s Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature, Ahmad Ashraf’s “Iranian Identity,” and Afshin Marashi’s Nationalizing Iran: Culture, Power, and the State, 1870-1940.
