Translating Women

Different Voices and New Horizons

Luise von Flotow, Farzaneh Farahzad

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138651562
• eBook ISBN: 9781317229865
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book focuses on women and translation in cultures 'across other horizons' well beyond the European or Anglo-American centres. Drawing on transnational feminist connections, its editors have assembled work from four continents and included articles from Morocco, Mexico, Sri Lanka, Turkey, China, Saudi Arabia, Columbia and beyond. Thirteen different chapters explore questions around women's roles in translation: as authors, or translators, or theoreticians. In doing so, they open new territories for studies in the area of 'gender and translation' and stimulate academic work on questions in this field around the world. The articles examine the impact of 'Western' feminism when translated to other cultures; they describe translation projects devised to import and make meaningful feminist texts from other places; they engage with the politics of publishing translations by women authors in other cultures, and the role of women translators play in developing new ideas. The diverse approaches to questions around women and translation developed in this collection speak to the volume of unexplored material that has yet to be addressed in this field.

Part I
The Role of Women Translators

1
Women Translators in Contemporary Iran

Farzaneh Farahzad
ALLAMEH TABATABA’I UNIVERSITY, IRAN

A major indicator of the degree and nature of women’s social presence is their rate of publication, comprising not only their writings but also their translations. In contemporary Iran, women’s presence as translators, which seems to have both preceded and facilitated their later work as writers, can be traced back to the late Qajar period from the mid-nineteenth century to the early 1900s.

The contemporary history of women’s translation in Iran, as covered in the present study, is roughly divided into three periods. The first dates from 1900 to the late 1920s and marks the end of the Qajar period,¹ the Constitutional Revolution in Iran, and the beginning of the reign of the Pahlavis. The second runs from the 1940s, which is when women writers and translators started to be recognized and published, to 1979 and the Islamic Revolution. The third covers the post-revolution period up to 2010.

1. Hidden Presence (1900–1930s)

In the late Qajar period, women were encouraged to attend informal religious schools, but by the 1900s, there already existed some in-house private education for girls and a limited number of modern elementary schools for girls throughout the country. Bibi Khanum Estarabadi founded the first girls’ school in 1906 in Tehran. Her father was a military colonel and her mother was a literate woman teaching at the private religious girls’ school in the Qajar court. Bibi Khanum is seen as one of the first Iranian feminists because of her efforts in establishing the school, which she had to turn into a kindergarten for girls, and in convincing the government and the public that girls had to be educated for modern life. European missionaries had already started their bilingual schools and some religious/ethnic minorities who wished to educate their girls² had their own schools. But all of these were out of the reach of ordinary middle-class people. The rate of literacy was very low throughout the country, and especially among women. The women who had access to private schooling came from upper classes and families of the elite courtiers, and some of them gradually turned to translation, which became a passage to their future literary activities.

The first reported translational presence of women in Iran is in a collaborative work in mid-nineteenth century. Kolsoom Khanum, the wife of a Qajar courtier, co-translated a long version of The Thousand and One Nights from Arabic into Persian with her husband, Abdul Latif Tasuji, around 1845 under the patronage of the imperial court. This work is known for its excellent quality and fluency, verse-to-verse translation, and illustrations by well-known graphic artists of the time. According to Mahjoob (2003, 361, cited in Mirabedini 2006),³ Kolsoom Khanum translated at a time when “out of every one thousand men, not even one could read and write, and when teaching women to write was an unforgiveable sin.” The translation of this work is reported to have taken a few years. But according to Mirabedini (2006), the first woman who worked as an independent literary translator in Iran is Tajmah Afagh Dowleh. She translated and published the play Nader Shah, by Narimanov,⁴ from Turkish into Persian in 1906 around the time of the Constitutional Movement in Iran when literacy was still a luxury for all. Women’s invisibility and their lack of social presence at that time doubtless forced her to introduce herself in the preface of the translation as “… sister of Colonel Ebrahim Khan (who has translated the play Zahak, written by Sami Beik), the wife of Fatullah Khan …” (Mirabedini 2006). The choice of this work was particularly important, not only for its source language, Turkish, but also for its theme and genre. The language of the Qajar court was Turkish, whereas the official language of the country was Persian. The translator Tajmah Afagh Dowleh, working from Turkish into Persian, thus had a non-Turkish speaking readership in mind and was extending her presence beyond the walls of the royal court. Her choice of the text might well have been due to the theme of the work; the late Qajar court encouraged the translation of historical works of literature rather than other types, because they were thought to elevate moral values and to teach lessons of life (Mirabedini 1999, 37). What adds to the significance of her choice is the genre. Drama, in its European sense, was mediated into Persian literature through translation, and this work is perhaps one of the very first plays that contributed to the introduction and development of the genre in Persian. The translator is also known for her poems and personal letters (see Golbon 1988, 223).

The production of these two early translations reveals something of the presence of women in the publication market in Iran, a market that seems to have its roots in the Constitutional Movement starting around 1906. The Movement formed in opposition to the presence of foreign forces in the Qajar court and throughout the country and as an attempt to gain independence from the great forces, i.e. Britain and Russia.⁵ Many women gradually joined the Movement and came out of the house to support it, thus taking their first steps toward visibility. The first public girls’ school was formally established in 1906, and the first women’s weekly magazine, Danesh (Knowledge) was published in 1910 by literate elite women addressing domestic issues. The name of the editor of the magazine is not given anywhere in its thirty issues. All we know is that she was the wife of Dr. Hossayn Khan Kahal (Mirabedini 1999), which is another sign of the hidden presence of women. A large production of women’s periodicals followed, which focused on “women-related” issues, such as cooking, housework, family, personal hygiene, and fashion. But they also published translations from Arabic, English, and French, and included Iranian women’s poetry and prose pieces. The themes covered women’s roles as mothers and caretakers and over time extended to political and social discussions. The establishment of women’s organizations in later years, the women’s literacy movement which followed, together with the changes resulting from modernization policies and socioeconomic changes in the 1920s provided further ground for women’s visibility. Their social presence gradually came to light in literature, and their rising rate of literacy and level of education turned them first into readers of literature and later into producers of literature (Mirabedini 1999) preoccupied with exploring their traditional identities and at the same time modifying them to suit the changing conditions.

The social and political changes that derived from Reza Shah taking power in 1926 and introducing his modernization project gradually changed the status of women. In 1925, there were sixty-three girls’ schools in Tehran, and the American Women’s College was already educating the upper-class women and girls, but only 3 percent of women throughout the country were literate. Among them, only those who came from upper classes found a chance to write and perhaps to translate. So there is little trace of woman translators in Iran before the 1930s. The main reasons are their low rate of literacy and their limited social presence. But the 1930s were significant in making changes. In 1936, a law mandating unveiling was issued by the government, which encouraged women’s presence in public and was part of the modernization project initiated by Reza Shah. Women’s magazines grew in number and elite women started to write and translate for them. According to Mirabedini (2006), Jamileh Farrokh translated stories for Afsaneh, a major women’s periodical, which inspired her work as a literary translator over the next decades. Parvin Etesami, the first woman poet to be published in Iran with a collection entitled Divan e Parvin Etesami (Etesami 1935), graduated from the American Women’s College and had in her early works versified some of her father’s translations. These appeared in women’s journals of the 1930s. This was the time “when modernization encouraged a discourse of women’s liberation” (Vatanabadi 2000, 1273), whereas the traditional expectations of the society tended to resist women’s social presence. Etesami’s poetry is largely didactic, confirming the traditional role of women as mothers and teachers, and the same line is followed in her selection of works for translation. However, one of her poems, which appeared in the initial print of her volume entitled Zan e Irani (The Iranian Woman), is in favour of Reza Shah’s unveiling project.

Of the two books translated and published by women in the late 1930s, one was the biography of Marie Curie by Eve Curie, published in London by William Heinemann in 1936. It was translated by Monir Jazani Asfia and published in 1939 by Afshari Publication in Tehran. The other was The Soul of Woman, an anti-feminist work by Gina Lombroso Ferrero, which legitimized the traditional role of women in society. It was translated by Pari Hesam Shahraisi and published by Danesh Publishing House in 1939 in Tehran. Interestingly, this translation was reprinted five times after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.

2. Contested Presence (1940s–1979)

In the 1940s, several changes took place in the country. Reza Shah’s son replaced him when the Anglo-Soviet forces invaded Iran in 1941, and these forces settled in various parts of the country. Despite the turbulence, more women entered schools, women’s literacy rate rose to 4 percent, and learning a foreign language was encouraged among the elite, who now had limited access to bilingual education, partly because of the foreign military presence in the country. According to Amin (2006),⁶ women translated eighteen books in this decade. Literature ranked first with nine volumes, of which five were British, two were German, and two were Russian. The choice of literature from these three languages relates to the socio-historical settings of the time,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I The Role of Women Translators
• PART II Applying Feminism in Translation
• PART III Translating Women Authors in Context
• PART IV Feminist Translation Projects
• List of Contributors
• Index