The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation

481 Pages·2022·4.659 MB·English

by  Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi (editor), Patricia J. Higgins (editor), Michelle Quay (editor)

The Routledge Handbook of
Persian Literary Translation

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.
Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi is Instructional Professor of Persian in the Department of Near Eastern
Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, USA. She holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from
the University of Ottawa, Canada (2012) as well as a Ph.D. in applied linguistics with a focus on
translation from Tehran Azad University, Iran (2004). She has published on a variety of topics including
translation, linguistics, and second language acquisition. In addition, she has translated several books
from Persian to English. She is the editor of T he Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition
and Pedagogy of Persian and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Persian Linguistics.
Patricia J. Higgins is University Distinguished Service Professor Emerita at SUNY Plattsburgh, USA.
She received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1974. Besides an
eighteen-month ethnographic study of education and socialization in Tehran, she spent ten months as a
Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Tehran, Iran. She is co-translator, with Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi, of
H afez in Love: A Novel by Iraj Pezeshkzad. At SUNY Plattsburgh, she served as a faculty member, an
associate vice president, and then interim provost and vice president for academic affairs.
M ichelle Quay is Visiting Lecturer of Persian at Brown University, USA. She has taught Persian
language and literature at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, USA, and the University of
Cambridge, UK. As a Gates Cambridge Scholar, she undertook research for her dissertation on depictions
of gender in premodern Persian literature, particularly in the writings of Farid al-Din Attar and other early
Sufi mystics. She was awarded her doctorate from Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, in 2018.

The Routledge Handbook
of Persian Literary
Translation
Edited by Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi,
Patricia J. Higgins and Michelle Quay
Cover image credit: Frederick C. Hewitt Fund, 1911
First published 2022
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi, Patricia J. Higgins, and
Michelle Quay; individual chapters, the contributor
The right of Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi, Patricia J. Higgins, and Michelle Quay to be
identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-51041-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-21791-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-05219-7 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003052197
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents

Abbreviations viii
Contributors ix
Acknowledgments xiv
Introduction 1
Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi, Michelle Quay, and Patricia J. Higgins
PART I
Translation of Classical Persian Literature 7
1 Barbad’s Song 9
Dick Davis
2 Rumi and Hafez: Reflections on Translation 25
Geoffrey Squires
3 The Crowded Borderlands of an Iconic “Translation”: Material
and Immaterial Paratext of FitzGerald’s R ubaiyat of Omar Khayyam 40
Christine van Ruymbeke
4 Classical Persian Poetry and World Literature: The Case of Hafez 69
Alireza Anushiravani
5 Making Sense of Classical Persian Ethics in English: The Case
of Jami’s Baharistan 85
Gregory Maxwell Bruce
6 Challenges of and Strategies for Translating Indo-Persian
Poetry and Prose: The Case of Bedil (1644–1720) 110
Hajnalka Kovacs
7 Saʿdi’s Gulistan in British India: A Provocation 131
Alexander Jabbari
v
Contents
PART II
Translation of Modern Persian Literature 143
8 The Persian Short Story and Its Histories of Translation 145
Amy Motlagh
9 Translation of Persian Drama into English 160
Behrooz Mahmoodi-Bakhtiari
10 White Rabbits of Wonderland: Scenes from Translating
and Teaching Persian Theatre 178
Marjan Moosavi
11 Gender and Canonization in Contemporary Persian Short
Story Anthologies, 1980 to 2020 200
Michelle Quay
12 Mirroring the “Orient” in Words: Persian Prose Fiction
in Translation in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 229
Pegah Shahbaz
13 Color’s Fracture: Translating Fugitive Experience in
Early Modern Persian Poetry 247
Jane Mikkelson
14 What Does Translation Mean in the Age of Colonial Modernity? 286
Aria Fani
PART III
Persian Literary Translation in Practice 299
15 Teaching the Practice of Literary Translation: A Personal Perspective 301
M. R. Ghanoonparvar
16 “This Being Human Is a Guest House”: Reflections on Coleman
Barks’s Translations of Jalal al-Din Rumi’s Poetry 312
Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab
1 7 Use of Translations of Classic Persian Poems in the Study of Persian 334
M ichael Craig Hillmann
1 8 The Cultural Translatability of Betweenness: Reading the Literature
of the Iranian Diaspora 385
P ersis M. Karim
vi
Contents
19 A Linguistic Perspective on Persian Literary Translation 400
Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi
2 0 Persian Poetry in the Second-World Translation System 427
Samuel Hodgkin
Index 447

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Abbreviations

CL Cognitive Linguistics
DA Discourse Analysis
EFG Edward FitzGerald
QG Qasem Ghani, the critical editor of Hafez’s D ivan
OK Omar Khayyam
ROK Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
SHAF Shiraz Art Festival
SL Source Language
SOV Subject-Object-Verb
ST Source Text
SVO Subject-Verb-Object
TL Target Language
TT Target Text
UG Universal Grammar
UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

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Contributors

Alireza Anushiravani is Professor of Comparative Literature at Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran.
He received his B.A. and M.A. in English literature from Iran and his Ph.D. in comparative
literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has taught comparative
literature, theory of literature, contemporary literary criticism, world literature, translation and
interdisciplinary studies, literature, and film at Shiraz University for the past thirty years. He
has published several papers on theoretical and practical aspects of comparative literature.
He has recently translated Siegbert Prawer’s C omparative Literary Studies: An Introduction
(Tehran: 2019, 4th edition) and François Jost’s I ntroduction to Comparative Literature (Teh-
ran: 2019, 2nd edition) with his colleagues. He is the editor of the forthcoming journal Inter-
disciplinary Studies of Literature, Humanities and Arts (in Persian).
Gregory Maxwell Bruce lectures in Urdu at the University of California, Berkeley. He is
the translator and annotator of the multilingual travelogue T urkey, Egypt, and Syria: A Trav-
elogue (Syracuse University Press 2020). Other publications on Persian and Persianate lit-
eratures include journal articles and a series of entries in the Encyclopaedia of Islam and
Encyclopaedia Iranica . He has taught courses in Persian and Urdu literatures at UC Berke-
ley since 2016.
Dick Davis is Professor Emeritus of Persian at Ohio State University. His publications include
volumes of poetry and verse translation chosen as books of the year by T he Sunday Times (UK)
1989; The Daily Telegraph (UK) 1989; The Economist (UK) 2002; T he Washington Post 2010;
and The Times Literary Supplement (UK) 2013 and 2018. His most recent books are T he Mir-
ror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women (2019) and a verse translation
of Nezami’s L ayli o Majnun (2021).
Aria Fani is an assistant professor of Persian and Iranian studies at the University of Washing-
ton, Seattle. His research on translation studies has been published in scholarly venues such as
T RANS: Revista de Traductología, Iranian Studies, and the R outledge Handbook of Transla-
tion and Activism as well as on open-access public platforms like the Ajam Media Collective.
He is currently designing a seminar at the University of Washington entitled “Politics and
Poetics of Translation” that aims to conceptualize translation from the point of view of non-
European literary traditions like Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew.
M. R. Ghanoonparvar is Professor Emeritus of Persian and comparative literature at the Univer-
sity of Texas at Austin. He has also taught at the University of Isfahan, the University of Virginia,
and the University of Arizona; was a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Michigan; and has
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