Ordinary Renditions: Iranian Prison Memoirs in the Global Market

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.