The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation

Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi, Patricia J. Higgins, Michelle Quay, Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi, Patricia J. Higgins, Michelle Quay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367510411
• eBook ISBN: 9781000583427
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation offers a detailed overview of the field of Persian literature in translation, discusses the development of the field, gives critical expression to research on Persian literature in translation, and brings together cutting-edge theoretical and practical research. The book is divided into the following three parts: (I) Translation of Classical Persian Literature, (II) Translation of Modern Persian Literature, and (III) Persian Literary Translation in Practice.

The chapters of the book are authored by internationally renowned scholars in the field, and the volume is an essential reference for scholars and their advanced students as well as for those researching in related areas and for independent translators of Persian literature.

Part ITranslation of Classical Persian Literature

1Barbad’s Song

Dick Davis

DOI: 10.4324/9781003052197-3

Choose an author as you choose a friend.

Wentworth Dillon, 1637–1685, Essay on Translated Verse (1684)

During an idyllic episode in the reign of the Sasanian monarch Khosrow Parviz, the musician Barbad hides himself among the trees of a royal garden, and from his unseen vantage point sings songs of Persia’s ancient glory to his king.

At the moment when the yellow sun set, and purple night came on, Barbad took his lute and sang the heroic song he had prepared. Hidden in the tree, he sang his beautiful lay, the one we now call “Dad-afarid,” and the king was astonished at the sweetness of his voice. The whole company was amazed, and everyone expressed a different opinion as to what was happening. The king ordered the company to search the area thoroughly, and they looked high and low, but came back empty handed …

A beautiful serving girl brought a goblet, and as the king took it from her Barbad suddenly struck up another song, the one called “The Heroes’ Battle.” The wise singer sang and Khosrow listened, drinking his wine as the song progressed. Then he ordered that the singer be found, and that if need be the garden be turned upside down in the search. They searched everywhere in the garden, taking flaming torches beneath the trees, but they saw nothing but willows and cypresses, and pheasants strutting among the flowers. The king asked for another goblet of wine, and leaned his head forward to listen. Again a song began, accompanied by the lute’s sound; it was the one that is called “Green on Green” nowadays, and which is used for magical incantations.

(Ferdowsi 2016, 923–24)

The hidden Barbad sings of justice, warfare, and magic; Khosrow Parviz is charmed and delighted by the songs he hears, but he has no idea of the identity or whereabouts of the musician whose voice conveys them to him. A translator should, ideally, aspire to be like Barbad; he should use whatever talent he has to pass on the ancient stories to which he is privileged to have access, and he should do this with as much skill and sweetness as he can muster, but he should remain hidden, concealed by the foliage of the historic garden whose beauties he celebrates.

A translator passes on what is not his own, and this is why he must remain in the background, concealed among the leaves of a garden at sunset, but his task is such that it cannot be one of simple, unmediated transmission. In order to speak at all, the translator is forced to add his own voice to the material, as Barbad did, and in doing so he must make many choices, some small and some large, but all affecting the presentation and reception of the artifact with which he has been entrusted.

I entered the vast, sumptuous, many-roomed mansion of Persian literature by a side door; it wasn’t a heritage I was born to by being Iranian, nor had I earned entrance at the front door by studying Middle Eastern languages as an undergraduate and then as a graduate student. Serendipity brought me to that side door while I still thought of myself as being in search of I wasn’t sure what.

Like many, perhaps most, people whose later lives become permeated with literature and literary preoccupations, I spent my adolescence reading everything I could lay my hands on. Those years of my life were lived in a fairly remote and very small town on the bleakest part of the Yorkshire coast (an area the Elizabethan poet Joseph Hall had called “the wastes of Holderness”); the world at large felt very far away, my surroundings seemed mundane and monotonous, my family didn’t have a (black and white) television until I had almost left high school, the town had no cinema. I lived in books; for some reason I lived mainly in poetry, which I read voraciously. An English master at the local school encouraged me; he would set me a major long poem to read over a holiday (those I most clearly remember reading were Milton’s Paradise Lost, Wordsworth’s The Prelude, and Byron’s Don Juan—the last being very heady stuff for a fifteen-year-old in 1960) and then quiz me on it when school reconvened. This teacher suggested I take the entrance exams to Cambridge University, and to my, and I imagine his, immense surprise I passed, and went up to King’s College to read English a few months after I turned eighteen. I realized that by this time I had read more or less the whole central canon of English poetry (as it was then—the 1960s—conceived to be), and I had already decided that I didn’t want merely to read poetry for the rest of my life, but to write it too, which is something that I have done and, intermittently, continue to do.

I had been a bit of an outsider in Withernsea, the little Yorkshire town where my teenage years were spent; my family didn’t come from there, and I had the wrong accent. I was more than a bit of an outsider in Cambridge too. King’s was at that time still a very aristocratic college; I came from decidedly the wrong side of the tracks, and again I had the wrong accent. After that it seemed natural to slip into the role of outsider, into being a foreigner, and when I went down from Cambridge I taught English first in Greece, then in Italy, then in Iran, all the time looking in on cultures from the outside as it were, but in the main happy to do so. I went to Iran in 1970 with a contract to stay for two years, and stayed for eight.

I was twenty-five in 1970, and though I would probably have emphatically denied it at the time, I was to all intents and purposes still a child. I feel I became an adult, in so far as I have done so at all, in Iran; I met, fell in love with, and married the person who became my wife, and as I struggled to learn its language I also fell in love with Persian poetry. The somewhat shiftless directions my life had been taking crystallized for me: I would marry Afkham, and I would in some fashion or other make Persian poetry a central part of my intellectual life.

To my shame, I had been too lazy in Greece to learn much more than the bare rudiments of the language; certainly not enough to decipher even the simplest bits of verse. In Italy I had been more attentive and had worked my way through Dante’s Commedia with a crib, a dictionary, and a lot of swearing, although I had still been the child who peers through a patisserie window at cakes whose tastes he could as yet barely imagine. But something fell into place for me in Persian in a way that it had not begun to do in either Greek or Italian. Not that the language seemed easier or more accessible; on the contrary, what fell into place as I pored over the first poems I tried to read made it seem more elusively difficult, but also more enchanting and enticing.

Only dimly at first, I realized that one thing that was attracting me was the sheen and glitter of medieval Persian poetic rhetoric, the complexity of its formal patterns, its artisanal wit, dexterity, and high finish. Persian poems seemed like reliquaries adorned with gold filigree and studded with precious stones, no matter what scrappy bone of paraphrasable “meaning” they held within. This ran contrary to almost everything I had been taught to look for in poems as a child, but it also elicited a profoundly appreciative response in me, one that cleared from my mind all trace of what Henry James called “the odious ascetic suspicion of any form of beauty.” I don’t want to emphasize too much the bleakness of the Yorkshire coast where I grew up, or the paucity of luxurious stimuli in my childhood, but there was certainly a kind of barebones drabness (associated, as so often in British childhoods of that time, with a rather self-punishing morality) about the whole experience, one that left me half consciously hungry for something that would be more lavishly indulgent and emotionally comforting. I realized that poetry could be glamorous, almost literally enchanting, as well as intellectually persuasive and edifying; of course Persian poetry can be edifying too, often very self-consciously and didactically so, but it wasn’t that aspect of it that primarily interested me (and it still isn’t). Later on I remembered that as an undergraduate I had read of how the young puritanically brought up John Ruskin had walked out of a dourly moralistic sermon being preached in the English church in Turin, and moments later found himself standing entranced before the voluptuous extravagance of Veronese’s Solomon and the Queen of Sheba; I realized that discovering Persian poetry was my own equivalent to Ruskin’s Solomon and the Queen of Sheba moment. To invoke another equally sensuous and sumptuous Veronese painting, The Wedding at Cana, water was being turned into wine, heady and very delicious wine, for me as it had been for Ruskin.

In its premeditated artificiality, and its emphatic dependence on convention coupled with the extravagance of emotion that was often medieval Persian poetry’s subject, the closest analogy I could think of in the English and European art forms with which I had hitherto lived was not poetry but opera, an art form that references raw, visceral emotion by highly artificial means, and this has remained a fallback analogy for me. Medieval Persian poetry still seems to me to be far more “operatic” (this is meant as a compliment) in its deliberate effects than its Western counterparts, with the possible exception of some Renaissance and baroque poetry (say by Tasso or Ariosto) written in the language of opera’s birthplace, Italy.

In considering literary translation, I feel we must acknowledge a distinction between translators who translate from their own first language into a different language, and those who translate from another language into their own first language, and in so far as I can generalize about these activities I can speak only for the latter undertaking. The reasons that someone translates a “foreign” literary text into his or her own language can be complex. Money is very rarely one of them, as translators of literature, particularly medieval literature which is what I have mainly tried to translate, know that the monetary rewards will be slight at best; and though they might gradually pile up if the translation catches on at all, this will happen only very slowly. The first and I think necessary reason for undertaking a literary translation is an admiration for the chosen text, an admiration which often goes with a sense that what the text says and the ways in which it says these things open for the non-native reader perspectives on a world that seems absent from, or at best hardly adumbrated in, literature written in his or her own first language. That is, the translator feels that a version in his native tongue of the non-English work he is dealing with will add something new and previously perhaps unavailable to the literary culture in which he has grown up. Elsewhere I have written on the ways in which many of the obvious technical features of traditional English poetry (the sonnet, the couplet, blank verse, and so on) as well as much of the general ethos of English verse at any given time (amour courtois, Petrarchanism, the balanced “reasonable” verse of the eighteenth century) appeared largely as the result of verse translations from other cultures’ literatures into English (Davis 2002). And here we come to the vexed problem of a translator’s relationship with the original text on which he works.

Recently, one of the most common ways of talking about literary translation is to see it as “appropriation,” that is, in its worst guises, as a by-product of colonialism, and as an insidious, or even blatant, form of cultural triumphalism. This formulation goes back at least as far as Nietzsche; of the Roman/Latin translation of ancient Greek literature he wrote,

how violently, and at the same time how naively, it pressed its hand upon everything good and sublime in the older periods of ancient Greece. Consider how the Romans translated this material to suit their own age and how intentionally as well as heedlessly they wiped away the wing-dust of the butterfly moment.

(Nietzsche 1992, 68)

This may be true, and constrained by the limits of their own cultural understanding, it may be that the Romans could not have approached Greek literature in any other way. When dealing with translations from Middle Eastern literature the situation seems to turn into a Catch-22 compounded by Saidean implications of Western conscious or unconscious neocolonialist bad faith vis-à-vis anything hailing from a Middle Eastern source. Catch-22 because if Middle Eastern literature is not translated into Western languages this can be taken as clear evidence of Western condescension towards cultures it doesn’t think are worth its attention, and if Western writers do translate Middle Eastern literary works into Western languages their translations are seen as inevitably tainted by conscious or unconscious neocolonialist perspectives on cultures other than their own. So what’s a poor girl to do?

Part of the problem may lie with the metaphor (because it is a metaphor) of “appropriation.” If something (a house, say) is literally appropriated, it is no longer in the possession of its original owner. This is not true of artistic “appropriation,” including literary “appropriation.” Let us consider for a moment Akira Kurosawa’s films derived from two Shakespearian tragedies, Throne of Blood and Ran. Throne of Blood stays fairly close to its original, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but even setting aside the film’s language, it is very obviously a Japanese film, set in Japan, and deriving as much from Japanese culture as from Shakespeare’s. Ran’s relationship to King Lear is even more tangential; the sisters become brothers, the Gloucester/Edgar/Edmund subplot is completely reimagined, and there are moments derived as much from traditional Japanese theatre as from any English original. But from the point of view of Shakespeare’s plays, so what? The plays still exist as Shakespeare wrote them (or at least as his seventeenth-century editors thought he wrote them), and a reader of them need pay no attention at all to Kurosawa’s films if he doesn’t wish to. If Kurosawa has appropriated anything from Shakespeare, this has made no difference whatsoever to what the plays were before he did so, or it makes a difference only in so far as a specific reader wants it to do so. Most lovers of Shakespeare’s plays, an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Translation of Classical Persian Literature
• Part II Translation of Modern Persian Literature
• Part III Persian Literary Translation in Practice
• Index