1. Persian Literature, World Literature

Despite its flaws, Index Translationum provides indicative numbers: 3170 documents have been translated from Persian whereas in the same period 1,279,527 documents have been translated from English, 231,008 from French, 212,572 from German, 20,327 from Chinese, and 12,691 from Arabic.

While there are other researches that use Persian as a transnational language and, more importantly, read its literary heritage as world literature (e.g., Dabashi 2019), it will be years before the critical change is received at Iranian institutions. Another unresolved issue to date is whether and how diaspora writers, in particular if they write in other languages, could be included in modern literary history.

This is the difference between nationalism in the West and in Iran: The former has experienced globalization whereas the latter is yet to experience it.

Article 15 of the current Iranian Constitution reads: “The shared language and script of Iranians is Persian. Documents, correspondences, official texts, and educational books must be in this language but the use of local and ethnic languages in the press and media, and the teaching of their literature next to Persian is permissible.” This establishes Persian as lingua franca and imposes it on non-native speakers. While this is problematic for the state’s own governing purposes, it does not consider how other languages will exist at a national, and not merely local, level.

Indicating how the national discourse draws on classical literature, in part of his speech at the United Nations General Assembly in 2017, the Iranian President made the following statement: “Our ambassadors are our poets, our mystics and our philosophers. We have reached the shores of this side of the Atlantic [the US] through Rumi and spread our influence throughout Asia with Saadi [sic.]. We have already captured the world with Hafez” (Rouhani 2017).

Since the turn of the twentieth century, to the modern Iranian imagination “the world” has been synonymous with Western Europe and Northern America. The reception, however limited, of a literary text in these contexts has so far given a false impression that Persian literature circulates in “the world.” These contexts host important and influential cultural institutions, but they do not delimit “the world.” Using the phrase, I imagine translating from and reading beyond what is known as “the West” or what circulates only in written form. At the same time, being effectively present in the literary markets of, say, Western Asia, or reading the literatures of neighboring languages, would be significant, but regional literary exchanges are limited. This means Persian works may have enjoyed some circulation in “the West,” but they have a long way to the world.

A recent translation program launched by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, known as “The Translation and Publication Grant Programme of I.R. Iran,” funds translations from Persian into other languages.

Persian sources on the novel are innumerable, some of which are mentioned and cited in the following chapters.

His views on adaptation, however, have been addressed in Chapter 6. This is an important topic because it displays Hedayat’s awareness of ideological transformations that happen in texts that cross languages, time, and space.

Hedayat was not the first person to do this. Before him, Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh had started the linguistic simplification and even published a manifesto on it; many others followed suit and some resisted the proposal.