Modern Iranian fiction in the Soviet Union: Translation and representation

Abstract

During the Soviet era, the works of 55 contemporary Iranian authors were translated into Russian and published in the Soviet Union. Prefaces and afterwords, usually written by Iran scholars, provided the Soviet reading audience with a paradigm for perceiving the translated novels and short stories. This paper aims to offer an analytical survey of the history of the translation of modern Iranian fiction into Russian and to trace the major trends in the representation of the translated works. The thematic range of translated works correlated with the domestic political agenda and the changes in Soviet-Iranian relations, as well as with the current state of Soviet Iranian Studies. The influence of personal tastes and connections of certain Iran scholars engaged in the process of translation can also be detected. Generally, the translations of contemporary literature of Iran were to demonstrate that Iranian intellectuals were aware of the flaws of their society, and eager to choose the more humanistic values of the socialist countries. Before World War II, the translators were mainly interested in the socio-political aspect of the works. After the war and before the thaw in Soviet-Iranian relations, translators focused mainly on social satire. In the 1960s – early 1980s, many works of the most prominent Iranian writers of the period were translated into Russian. In the early 1980s, these translations were viewed as a means of understanding the reasons for the Iranian upheaval. The novels and short stories of Iranian modernists, as well as other ideologically inappropriate works, remained untranslated.