Kayvan Tahmasebian

The history of Iranian modernism is inseparable from the history of literary translation. In most accounts of Iranian literary history, the translation of European literary works played a formative role in the redefinition of poetic discourse as well as in the introduction of new literary genres, such as the short story and the novel, to modern Persian literature. In his landmark study of Iranian literary modernism, Mohammad Reza Shafiʿi-Kadkani rejects the ascription of originality to Iranian modernism. “Whatever beauty is witnessed in Persian poetry today,” Shafiʿi-Kadkani insists, “is the result of grafting the tree of European culture onto that of Iranian culture.” By contrast, Iranian critic Morad Farhadpour has argued that all modern Iranian intellectual projects entail a kind of translation. Iranians’ relation to modernity, Farhadpour argues, is “mediated through translation,” which in turn makes possible Iranians’ relationship to their tradition. “Beginning with the Constitutional Revolution [1906],” Farhadpour notes, “translation in its broadest sense is the only true form of thought for us” (Farhadpour, Parahā-ye fekr, 231; emphasis added). For Farhadpour, “Western history has always been modern,” whereas for Iranians, modernity is a situation ( vazʿiyat) to “step into.” This account of the translational origins of Iranian modernity has been challenged by arguments for its indigenous origins. In his Value of Emotions in the Artist’s Life (1940), the maverick modernist poet Nima Yushij (1897–1960) noted that “European influence in our literature is received irregularly and imperfectly due to the form [ tarz] and the style [ oslub] of our poems.” Nima (as he is called in Persian) undertakes a comparative review of literatures such as Georgian, Tajik, Uzbek, Turkish, and Persian that modernized themselves through their encounter with Europe (Yushij , Arzesh-e ehsāsāt, 81). Nima argues that literary influence becomes productive only when the target literature can find common ground with the source literature. In a more recent stringent evaluation of the impact of European literature on modern Persian poetry, Mohammad Qazi, himself a translator of Flaubert, Cervantes, Boccaccio, and Gorky, maintains that with the translation of foreign poems into Persian a “modern poetry has entered our language” that “damages beautiful Persian poetry.” The Iranian critic Mohammad Ali Eslami-Nodushan similarly warns against the harm done by poor translations of inferior European literary texts in fostering a superficial literary modernism.