6. Textual Strategies

This chapter engages textual strategies in Hedayat’s writing: humorous works, translations, and adaptations. His humorous works falsify the predominant idea of him as a dark and depressed writer, and deliver social, cultural, and political critique in a very secular spirit because they are merciless in targeting dominant ideologies of the time—both religious and secular. Since most of this kind of writing is parodic and adapts previous narratives for its own purposes, adaptations and translations are also discussed in the present chapter. His views on adaptation are significant to understanding the way his creativity was nurtured and informed by diverse literary traditions. Similarly, even though in most studies only his translations from European literatures are mentioned, it is important to know that he also translated texts from Pahlavi literature into Persian, and the introductions he added to these texts explain his motivations for selecting them, and the role he conceived for the act of translation in a literary tradition.