From Translation to Appropriation: Poetic Cross-Breeding in Early Twentieth-Century Iran

Abstract

T HE CONCEPT OF literary hybridization, a relatively recent addition to the increasingly metaphorical language of poststructuralist literary theory, is already being applied to a staggering variety of activities cutting across traditions and languages, as well as formal, generic, and thematic divides.' It is used on the one hand in reference to a variety of modelling activities, ranging from creative plagiarism to all manner of literary borrowing. On the other, it embraces numerous acts of imitatio. In this essay, I use the concept and the terms that express it in reference to a specific activity, and I illustrate that activity through two poems in the literary culture of Iran in the early decades of the twentieth century. These texts are considered major esthetic statements of a new style in Persian poetry. Although they owe their existence to their authors' contact with certain identifiable texts of foreign origin, they have been classified in their own linguistic culture neither as verse translations of those foreign texts, nor as imitations in any sense. Instead, wherever possible such texts are invariably judged as superior to their foreign counterparts. Examining them in relation to their parent texts and within their generative ambience may