The Cultural Translatability of Betweenness

Abstract

Frequently, literature of the Iranian diaspora, whether written in English or other languages than Persian, is called upon to serve functions that operate beyond the simple experience of the literary. Indeed, Iranian diaspora literature operates in and for multiple reading audiences and thus serves several different literary and cultural functions. Although the word diaspora implies dispersal, movement, outside the bounds of the motherland, it also implies a kind of gathering, congregation, and community. This essay argues that literature of Iranian diaspora writers and experience functions to translate Iranian and Persian culture for non-Iranian readers and also to recreate and reinvent that culture in new contexts for Iranian diaspora subjects themselves as a kind of confirmation of their membership in a larger community. This diaspora literature also affirms that the experiences, cultural idioms, and stories are indeed “translatable” and not lost in the spaces of trauma, forgetting, and alienation that are part of the history of Iranian migration. This essay will engage fiction and poetry by Iranian diaspora writers (in English) and argues for the idea that the translation of Persian language and the culture of Iran is indeed not simply the act of telling one story in one language and translating it into another, but rather embodies the slippage and mobility of diaspora itself—that the language of “betweenness” is itself the act of producing a kind of translation that belongs to more than language, idiom, culture, time, and place. I will argue for a more expansive reading of Iranian diaspora texts through the idea that they are part of the prism of a Persianate culture and sensibility that operates in and through nontraditional notions of translation.