Negotiating Translatability in Persianate Literary Culture

While scholars in Persian Studies draw both broadly and specifically from Translation Studies, there are few panels dedicated to this emerging field. A panel centered around the critical study of translation will afford scholars from diverse backgrounds a space for an exchange on the place and importance of translation theories, practices, and politics in the Persianate world. This panel hopes to contribute to this dialogue.
By its nature, Translation Studies crosses many disciplines and languages. Due to its interdisciplinary framework, the problem of translation is discussed across different panels and fields. Often relegated as a secondary topic, this panel is an effort to bring the question of translation to the center stage of literary and cultural studies research. Consisting of speakers who have engaged various aspects of translation, this panel also hopes to address the gap that has persisted for long between the practice and theory of translation.
Beyond its basic definition as transference from one language into another, the panelists will theorize translation in its extended senses in their respective literary contexts. We begin in seventeenth-century India. Dārā Shokūh’s Majmaʿ ol-baḥrayn (1655), a work of comparative religion produced in Mughal India, allows us to consider the concept of alignment as a criterion for “good translation” mediating two texts and literary traditions infused with distinctly different religious cultures. We will then move to twentieth and twenty-first century Iran. Considering prison memoirs (either written in Persian and English or translated from Persian to English), we will explore the relation between translatability and genre. This talk will further examine how translatable Iranian prison memoirs are to other linguistic, cultural, political, and economic contexts. The next talk critically examines the translatability of Bizhan Jalâli’s poetry. While it is common to think of Jalâli’s verse as “translatable,” this talk will address the challenging process of translation in light of the poet’s place both in contemporary Persian poetry and historiography. Our last talk examines the relation between translation and the formation of the modern Iranian political and literary cultures through a reading of Safarnameh, a travel document written by Qajar statesman Mirza Saleh Shirazi.
We hope that the presentations and discussions of this panel will offer insight and applicable results to theoretical debates concerning translation and translatability in Persianate literary culture. Finally, we hope the panel contributes to future efforts centered around the critical examination of translation theory and practice.


Presentations

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Episodic approaches to literary history may point in the direction of general trends in contemporary Persianate culture by examining the ideological presuppositions of dominant poetic discourses; however, they necessarily reduce the aesthetic and social complexity of literary currents. They further occlude a vigorous consideration of figures whose poetic vision does not directly speak to the common trends posited by episodic accounts. Poets such as Bizhan Jalâli (d. 1999) have been rendered standalone figures whose visions of poetic modernism are overlooked or understood only in the context of their “non-adherence” to the dominant literary discourse of their time. Using Translation Studies as an analytical lens, I unpack some of the unique challenges that arise while translating the poetry of Bizhan Jalâli into English, primarily how to render visibility to form in a target language wherein Free Verse is seen as established and normative. I propose certain measures to accommodate Jalâli’s modernist poetics and make his poetic form shine through in English. I will conclude that translating Jalali into Arabic would require different accommodations that do not necessarily involve drawing attention to its distinct form. Such framework is a step towards fully situating the poet in the contemporary Persianate literary culture.

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Prince Dārā Shokūh’s Majmaʿ ol-baḥrayn (1655) has long been celebrated as one of the most outstanding works of comparative religion in Mughal India. Mindful of Dārā Shokūh’s role as a patron and practioner of translation from Sanskrit to Persian, in this paper we propose to consider this particular work as centrally preoccupied with translation in an extended sense. By this we mean not translation from one language into another, but rather the translation of what could be called conceptual schemes. We will take seriously Dārā Shokūh’s own practice, in particular his use of the term taṭbīq – “comparison”, or, more aptly in this case, “alignment” – in order to demonstrate that Dārā Shokūh’s project of realigning certain conceptual schemes of Islamic and Hindu monotheisms may have served as a precondition for successful translation in the ordinary sense of the word. Importantly, we believe Dārā Shokūh intended that his practice of realignment not leave the translator, or the beneficiaries of translation, unchanged. As Tony Stewart has shown in his pioneering work on the interaction between Islamic and Vaiṣṇava Hindu traditions in early-modern Bengal, correspondences between religious concepts may be constructively analysed through the lens of modern translation theory. In a similar spirit, we hope to show that the Majmaʿ ol-baḥrayn was intended by Dārā Shokūh to be a deep grammar for conceptual translation, and was perhaps even projected by him to serve as a template for such endeavors in cultural translation. Certainly Dārā Shokūh’s remarkable vision of the alignments necessary for cultural translation is not without relevance today.

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For unfortunate historical reasons, the Iranian prison memoir has arguably become an established mode of writing, if not a distinct genre, in modern Persian literature. Beginning at least since Bozorg Alavi’s The Fifty Three (1941), a wide range of political dissidents, intellectuals, writers, and revolutionaries have recounted their experiences of incarceration under various governments—whether during the Pahlavi period (1925-1979) or under the Islamic Republic (1979-today). This paper begins by asking how and why these accounts can indeed be considered a genre of Persian literature and therefore, as with any genre, how the prison memoir assumes some common reader expectations, even as individual works vary in the degree to which they fulfill the expectations or requirements of the platonic text. These generic considerations lead the paper’s central question: how translatable are Iranian prison memoirs to other linguistic, cultural, political, and economic contexts?

On the surface, the prison memoir may seem to represent one of the least problematic genres to translate; since there lies an essential actuality at the core of the account, in other words, since the memoir consists of an individual using language to recount the “true” story of his or her incarceration, then that actuality should be transferrable to any language. In fact, however, I will argue that the prison memoir as genre involves aesthetic, discursive, and cultural negotiations that do not remain unchanged in translation. Here, I understand translation to appear in at least two, interrelated forms—either an account written in Persian is rendered into another language by means of a third-party translator or the former prisoner writes his or her account in a language other than Persian. The paper studies three forms of Iranian prison memoir—those written in Persian, those translated to English, and those written in English. In all three cases, I argue, translation theories offer a particularly productive framework with which to make sense of the prison memoir inside and outside its Persian literary context.

While a number of historians have studied prison writings as documentation of human rights abuses in Iran, Mehdi Khorrami’s recent study of counter-discourses in modern Persian fiction marks perhaps the first consideration of prison writings through a literary lens. This paper draws from Khorrami’s work to begin the important task of historicizing, contextualizing, and theorizing Iranian prison writings, not only as historical documents, but also as literary texts.

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This paper examines the relation between translation and the formation of the modern Iranian political and literary cultures through a reading of Safarnameh, a travel document written by Qajar statesman Mirza Saleh Shirazi. My analysis foregrounds translation as a historical and cultural practice that reaches beyond the linguistic transposition of texts and concerns the potentiality of linguistic and cultural traditions to open to and articulate difference and thereby reencounter and regenerate themselves. I situate Mirza Saleh’s travel writing within an emerging genre and in the context of the Perso-Russian wars of 1804-13 and 1826-28. I argue that Mirza’s travelogue demonstrates the relationship between the navigation of linguistic and textual boundaries in translation to the drawing of geopolitical borders of empires and nations, as well as the temporal boundaries between epochs and traditions. It paradigmatically captures how translation as a literary activity emerges in relation to, or at times as one with, a historical and political practice. Translation enters and reveals historical crises and deformations, as well as efforts of regeneration and renewal, in light of what can be recursively identified and traced as novel cultural and political forms. Through an examination of the travelogues within their historical context, my paper highlights the geotectonic historical and political forces that operate within the discursive use of language and come to surface in works of translation such as Mirza’s Safarnameh.