Volume 114 Literary Translation in Modern Iran. A sociological study by Esmaeil Haddadian-Moghaddam Advisory Board

Figure 16.  Sample publication with Franklin/Tehran assistance. L: You as a Machine, an 
early publication in 1333/1954, winning the literary artistic prize of the literary journal, 
Donya-ye Sokhan, for the best children’s book; R: Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, trans. 
Emami in 1344/1965

 
Chapter 4.  The Pahlavi period (1925–1979)  113
illustrative, because they shed light on the publishing field of the period and the 
issue of agency.
The first example is a letter dated February 7, 1954 from Sanati to Smith about 
the selection of books, translators, and publishers. Sanati reports of his presence 
in a literary society in Tehran, which happened to have a meeting on “what books 
should be translated and published in Iran.” The general agreement of the meet-
ing, as Sanati reports, is that there is no need for the translation and publica-
tion of “high [level] technical books” as Iranian experts read the originals. Books 
also should not be published “only for the sake of having them translated and 
published,” rather they “should be published for serving a definite object,” and 
“particular attention must be paid to those books which will improve the morals, 
consciousness, personality and character of our people” (Sanati 1954b). Sanati 
then presents a list of desirable books that Franklin/Tehran should publish in 
Iran. The list includes books for young people under twenty years of age; books 
written by foreigners about Iran; scientific and technical books for the layman; 
books for children; biographies of great scientists, artists, thinkers, explorers; and 
fiction, historical, and geographical books. A close look at Franklin/Tehran’s list 
of publications testifies that Franklin/Tehran followed this guideline throughout 
its history. It is also safe to add that such an approach shaped the publishing field 
in Iran in providing models to be followed by other publishers. Smith, in his letter, 
agreed with Sanati saying “it gives fine scope to your work” (Smith 1954b, letter 
no. 2, February 26, 1954).
The second example is from one of the earliest projects undertaken by 
Franklin/Tehran. This example is important in two aspects. First, it shows that 
Sanati’s institutional agency was in part subordinate to the overall Franklin Book 
Programs. Second, it reveals the agency of consecrated translators who had power 
Figure 17.  The mass distribution network of Sherkat-e Ketabha-ye Jibi, using a mobile 
bookrack in the streets of Tehran (Franklin Publications Annual Report 1962)

114  Literary Translation in Modern Iran
over publishers. Third, it points to sets of criteria publishers used to select transla-
tors. Sanati had to look for suitable translators to cooperate with Franklin/Tehran. 
To proceed with the translation of the Basic Science Education series, as previously 
mentioned, Ebn-e Sina Publishing house agreed to undertake the project. From 
Sanati’s letter, it is clear that the publisher suggested the translator A. M. ‘Ameri 
to Franklin/Tehran and that Sanati had a talk with the translator, who initially 
agreed to work with the publisher, but asked for some time to reflect on the pro-
posal (for more on the translator, see Afshar 1357/1979). In a follow-up letter (see 
Appendix 3), Sanati informs Smith that the translator,
asks for Rls. 50,000 for the translation of six books in [the] Basic Science Series. 
Would you please inform me by cable if you agree to this price. It is a little expen-
sive but he is the most suitable person for doing this job. He is an authority in these 
[sic] kind of literature and has a perfect knowledge of English. He is also a good 
Persian prose writer. If he translates the books, no revision is needed. 
 
(Sanati 1954c, letter F-6, March 13, 1954)
Smith’s answer to Sanati is also of interest. In his letter, he argues that the price set 
by the translator “is a little higher than I had expected but if it does not trouble you 
as establishing a ‘precedent’ that might make you trouble in some other connec-
tion it is quite all right with me” (Smith 1954c, letter no. 11, March 13, 1954).
6
 As 
this example shows, Sanati’s institutional agency was subject to Franklin’s overall 
policy. However, in the following years, correspondence between Sanati and Smith 
led to a greater degree of independence for Sanati. The above example also shows 
the degree of power agents of translation could exert on publishers, depending on 
their various symbolic capital and positions in the publishing field.
After the Islamic Revolution, Sanati was arrested for “having close ties with the 
Pahlavi court, for printing American books and for disseminating Western culture 
in Iran” (Alinejad 2011; for more on the translator, see Afshar 1357/1979). He spent 
five years in the notorious Evin prison in Tehran. Before his death in 2009, he lived 
in Kerman in the south of Iran. He completed his unfinished translations, many in 
the field of Iranian Studies, and authored a number of books (for a list of his books, 
see Alinejad 2011). In addition, he was engaged in various financial, agricultural, 
social, and cultural enterprises. With the help of his wife, he established the Zahra 
Rosewater Company, which revolutionized the social life of the Lalehsar villagers, 
120 kilometers from Kerman, by changing the opium farms into farms for Damask 
6.  Examples of translation fees paid to some other translators are as follows: $1,000 to 
Mohammad Hejazi for The Mind Alive (Overstreet 1954); 20,000 rials to Simin Daneshvar for 
The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne 1850) and 350,000 rials to Abdollah Faryar for A Handbook of 
Mohammedan Decorative Arts (Dimand 1930).

 
Chapter 4.  The Pahlavi period (1925–1979)  115
roses (see Griffin 2006). Many of the users of Dr. Hauschka skin care today would 
never guess that their favorite products originate from Iran. Bukhara, the Persian 
journal, dedicated a special issue to the life and legacy of Sanati (see Bukhara 
1388/2010). The Lady of the Roses, a documentary film by Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, 
depicts Sanati and his life experience establishing the Zahra Rosewater Company 
in Kerman, Iran.
The impact of Franklin/Tehran on the development of translation and the 
publishing field has not been subject to academic investigation using primary 
resources. However, many Iranian scholars and publishers agree that Franklin/
Tehran was one of the institutions that increased the translation of Western clas-
sics into Persian. Emami, who worked as both a translator and the chief editor for 
Franklin/Tehran in pre-Revolution Iran, summarizes the role of Franklin/Tehran 
in promoting the translation of literary works: “[Franklin/Tehran] paid a fixed 
royalty to the translator and holds all other rights to itself forever; this was not that 
bad for the first print-run, but for the best sellers that could find a lasting place in 
the book market, it was disappointing” (Emami 1379/2000: 52). Ahmad Allahyari, 
a former member of Iran’s Writers Association in pre-Revolution era, who was 
involved with the conservative Keyhan newspaper, downgrades Sanati’s role in 
developing the indigenous publishing field in Iran, associating Sanati with the 
Pahlavi censor. By overlooking his agency at Franklin/Tehran, the critic calls him 
“the executor of Washington’s [the US state] orders” (1387/2008: 147). Interestingly 
enough, this view comes close to what the leftist intellectuals of the pre-Revolution 
period thought about Franklin/Tehran. According to Solhjoo, they saw the latter 
as “the house of the American spies” (1379/2000b: 23).
Our consideration of agency in this chapter has highlighted the increasing im-
portance of translation in modernization projects of the time: translation started to 
become an instrument of fame and political agency. Translation flows also revealed 
the growing significance of literary translation during the period. We also said 
that the issue of copyright has remained contested among Iranian translators and 
publishers with no clear prospect of Iran acceding to copyright laws. The various 
analyses of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice exemplified the way the Iranian translator 
exercised her pedagogical agency, not only in the translation, but also in the larger 
cultural and political fields in Iran. Finally, the analyses of three major publish-
ing houses have shown that individual agency played a key part in the formation, 
continuation, and development of Amir Kabir, on the one hand, and institutional 
agency was employed by both directors of Bongah and Franklin/Tehran to achieve 
both institutional objectives and to enhance the nascent publishing field in Iran, 
on the other.

chapter 5
The post-Revolution period (1979–present)
 نیشن زیم سپ ،دروخب همجرت زا نان دشاب هتسناوت هک تسه ای هدوب یمجرتم رتمک نایم نیا رد
.دنتشاذگ یم راب مه ار دوخ گید تقو یب و تقو هب و دندوب هسسوم نآ ای نیا
 
(
١٣٧٧: ٧٤
  یریشلگ(
In the meantime there have been and are few translators who could make a living merely 
by translating. Hence, they have opted for desk jobs at one institution or another, while 
every now and then doing their own work on the side.  
(Golshiri 1377/1998: 74)
In post-Revolution Iran, there is no “official” room for Gabriel García Márquez’s 
Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2005) to reside at, though the indirect trans-
lation of his other works has remained popular. “Whores,” be they melancholic 
or buoyant, be they real or fictional, do not score well there. Fearing, and being 
confident based on experience, that the direct translation of the above title would 
threaten the chances of the translation being published in Iran, the publisher of the 
book published the novel under the title of Khaterat-e Delbarakan-e Ghamgin-e 
Man [memories of my melancholy sweethearts]. After publication, the Ministry 
banned the book on grounds of “immorality.” According to Tait, “the campaign 
against his latest book was led by the right-wing Tabnak website, which argued that 
the decision to approve it had been influenced by friendly relations with left-wing 
Latin American leaders initiated by Ahmadinejad” (2007).
1
 A rather similar pat-
tern can be seen for yet another popular author: Mario Vargas Llosa’s Travesuras 
de la niña mala (2006), translated from the French Tours et détours de la vilaine fille 
(2008), becomes Dokhtari az Peru [a girl from Peru] in Persian, being self-censored 
by the translator (see our section on “Women translators” in this chapter).
The second quotation above from the Iranian novelist Hushang Golshiri 
(1938–2000) reflects a common belief that translating literary works as a fulltime 
vocation is rare and should be combined with other professions to make a living. 
In the original quotation, there is a metaphorical reference to translation as cook-
ing in the Persian style, one in which patience is the basic ingredient. Though the 
English translation above lacks that level of comparison, translating a literary work 
1.  An electronic version of the Persian translation, done from Spanish, was published in the 
same year and, to date, it has been downloaded 16,745 times from the Persian website Ketabnak 
(visited March 2013). 

118  Literary Translation in Modern Iran
is seen as one of the ingredients we need to put in the cooking pot (dizi) and wait 
for the result (e.g. royalty and symbolic capital). As a good abgusht needs good 
ingredients (mutton, onion, spices, and split peas, among others), to be cooked 
over low heat, so does the translation, if it ever sees the light of the day.
2
 It is this 
patience, the argument goes, which defines literary translation in post-Revolution 
era. Be it as it may, do all the agents of translation share in the virtue of patience? 
These are only some examples that illustrate the politics of translation in the era 
under study, to which we will turn now with four case studies after an overview.
Overview
Following a brief sketch of “Cultural Revolution,” this overview focuses on three 
main characteristics: the selection of titles, the motivations of agents of translation, 
and censorship. It also includes a section on the publishing field in the period and 
a section on translation flows.
“Cultural Revolution” and translation
Following the Islamic Revolution of 1979, another revolution occurred in the cul-
tural field. The so-called “Cultural Revolution” of 1980 resulted in a temporary 
closure of Iranian universities, former cultural centers, and the expulsion of their 
staff. As we mentioned earlier in Chapter 2, for Ayatollah Khomeini, who or-
dered the reform in the Iranian universities, the aim of “cultural revolution” was to 
clean the universities from those professors who were “infatuated with the West” 
(Khomeini 1981: 295). As such, a special committee was formed with the task of 
reforming the Iranian universities and preparing suitable textbooks. Prior to this 
second revolution, and as a result of the temporary freedom of press at the start 
of the Islamic Revolution, the publishing field experienced a sudden boom with 
respect to the publication of banned books of the previous period. But as time 
went on, growing readership, market demand, and the aftermath of the “Cultural 
Revolution” contributed to the idea that translation could be a viable profession 
(see Azarang 1386/2007: 267–268). In other words, because many intellectuals 
could not teach at universities, which were closed following the “cultural revolu-
tion,” they turned to translation, as the last resort. This new situation created three 
groups of translators: (1) those who were not concerned with economic capital and 
who translated well-known works; (2) those who gave up translation and looked 
for other ways to make a living; and (3) a group who, as Emami observes, “were 
2.  To a certain extent, the cocido madrileño, a dish in Madrid, comes close to abgusht.

 
Chapter 5.  The post-Revolution period (1979–present)  119
mostly concerned with the economic factors [and] thus resorted to those kinds 
of translation that secured an easier income” (1379/2000: 54; cf. an interesting 
analysis of the “Revisionist intellectuals” in the years following World War II in 
Ben-Ari 2012). That boom period did not last, for various reasons, including the 
Iran–Iraq War, economic stagnation and social problems, and, in particular, many 
people gradually lost interest in reading.
Much of what has happened to translation in the following years reflects how 
the semiautonomous field of publishing has been affected by the larger field of 
cultural production and above all by the field of power in the post-Revolution era. 
Nonetheless, with respect to the translation of novels from English, it has remained 
a vibrant segment of the publishing field by attracting many young translators and 
an observable increase in titles. For example, although the above division no longer 
holds, there are still many academics who combine teaching at universities and 
doing translations. In fact, the publishing field in Iran (as far as nonliterary works 
are concerned) is dependent on the work of the academics for their survival no 
less than the academics for their promotions at universities.
Selections
What emerges from a close analysis of the various resources we have introduced 
in Chapter 2, in particular, from the Iranian translators’ interviews, is that the 
selection of novels for translation has in general been made by the translators 
themselves. This does not fully rule out the role of the publishers at the sublevel 
of title selection in the three-tier level of agency. The historical role of Iranian 
publishers as title selectors has changed along with the structural development of 
the publishing field. Large publishers with an institutional mechanism or smaller 
publishers with educated managers started to play a part in the selection of works 
for translation, especially in the post-Revolution era. In both cases, however, cer-
tain agents of translation acted as consulting editors for publishers (e.g., Khashayar 
Deyhimi’s role in our case study of Austen in this chapter). This emerging role of 
the translators can be explained in terms of their transposable habitus that enables 
them to engage in various practices close to their main profession.
Although there is little empirical study to determine who has the dominant 
role in decision making, scholarship continues to highlight the role of the trans-
lators and to provide some room for the publishers. For example, in an overall 
evaluation of the contemporary history of publishing in Iran, Emami (1379/2000) 
stresses the role of translators in making decisions about literary translations 
and excludes the role of Iranian publishers (except for the previously mentioned 
Bongah and Franklin/Tehran, see Chapter 4). From another perspective, Deyhimi 
looks at the selection of novels from the point of view of quality. He argues that the 

120  Literary Translation in Modern Iran
selections generally amount to what he calls “second hand literatures,” conceived to 
be contrary to “first class literature or the classics of each field of study” (Deyhimi 
1376/1997: 72). Deyhimi’s emerging role as a series editor and consultant for a 
number of Iranian publishers of post-Revolution Iran points to two facts. On the 
one hand, it is an attempt to increase the quality of selection of books and to 
employ more skillful translators, and, on the other hand, to provide a publishing 
model that does not rely solely on the discretion of translators.
Motivations
Although agents of translation point to various social and cultural motives, gener-
ally of an altruistic nature, they also tend to prioritize noneconomic motives over 
economic ones based on the abovementioned evidence. Part of this is because 
translation has worked as an instrument of fame in Iran, and translators have en-
joyed social recognition, that is, symbolic capital (e.g., see Rahimzadeh 1379/2000: 
38). Emami has summarized the perspectives of the translators in this way:
In the first place, these translators did not aim to accumulate wealth; rather, their 
purpose has been to perform a cultural service. They wanted to familiarize their 
fellow countrymen with the literary and cultural achievements of other countries 
and make them accessible through translation.  
(Emami 1379/2000: 55)
In addition to sociocultural motives, some translators have found translation to 
be an instrument of tranquility. For Hoseini, the translator of Faulkner, transla-
tion occasionally worked as an “opium to escape from the extreme anxiety of the 
Iran–Iraq War” (1370/1990: 22), while for Manucher Badiee, the translator of Joyce, 
it helped him survive Iraq’s missile attacks by escaping from one city to another 
doing translations (1381/2002: 26).
With regard to economic capital as the possible motivation of the agents of 
translation, there is hardly any clear evidence or mention of it. Various reasons 
can be conceivable. One is a historically verbal agreement among various segments 
of Iranian society that Iranians do not read enough and that Iran suffers from 
a “publishing crisis.” This crisis, in addition to the drop in readership, involves 
various factors, including the state’s cultural policies in constraining the agency 
of publishers. While this might be partially true, the translation flows in general 
and the increasing number of new titles speak otherwise. Another reason might 
be what the Iranian translator, Reza Rezaei, refers to as “a clever strategy advanced 
by certain publishers to hide their practices” (personal interview, March 2009; see 
also Shargh 1391/2012). That is, they pretend that they are running a poor business 
and are making no profit at all.

 
Chapter 5.  The post-Revolution period (1979–present)  121
Censorship
The issue of censorship during this period has remained a controversial issue, 
defining the way agents of translation find their position in the field of publish-
ing, and how they exercise their agency. Naturally, censorship has also manifested 
itself in other parts of the field of cultural production such as films and music, 
giving rise to a particular way of expression and figurative language. Research on 
censorship in this period (as regards translation from English) is extremely rare, 
because the censorship files (if any) are not publicly available, and researchers 
have every right not to risk their status, given the political complications. As for 
the researchers, authors, and journalists outside Iran, with very few exceptions, the 
image that has emerged from their works is one that is often far from the realities 
of the publishing practices in Iran. What usually amounts from their works give 
the impression that no book ever gets published in Iran, whereas we have shown 
throughout this book that despite censorship, agents of translation continue pub-
lishing their work, negotiating with the relevant authorities of the Ministry, and 
talking about their problems with the censor publicly insofar as the logic of the 
field requires them to do so. Conformity with censorship and learning how to live 
with it characterizes translation in the period, something that hardly finds a place 
in the pertaining literature.
How does censorship come into the game of publishing in Iran? With 
Article 24 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which states “publi-
cation and the press are free to publish their ideas unless they are injurious to the 
fundamentals of Islam or public rights,” the Department General of Book Affairs 
of the Ministry (better known as the Book Bureau, hereafter) is the body that has 
carried out censorship at various levels relating to books. It should be noted that 
the Iranian state does not acknowledge state censorship (cf. the official position in 
the Socialist states on censorship, e.g., Pokorn 2012: 141–142). What they accept, 
however, is momayyezi, that is, examining and distinguishing between good and 
bad for publication or production, be they books or other cultural productions 
such as films, music, and dramas.
3