A 'Requiem' for the short-lived democracy in Iran in the 1950s: Jamalzadeh's rewriting of Ibsen's <i>An Enemy of the People</i>

Farhadi S., Ketabi S., GHADERI SOHI B., Amirian Z.

PERSPECTIVES-STUDIES IN TRANSLATION THEORY AND PRACTICE, 2023 (AHCI) identifier identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Basım Tarihi: 2023
  • Doi Numarası: 10.1080/0907676x.2023.2268147
  • Dergi Adı: PERSPECTIVES-STUDIES IN TRANSLATION THEORY AND PRACTICE
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Scopus, IBZ Online, Educational research abstracts (ERA), Linguistics & Language Behavior Abstracts, MLA - Modern Language Association Database
  • Erciyes Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

This paper challenges the conventional histories concerning early translations of dramas in Iran through a sociohistorical reading of Jamalzadeh's Persianized representation of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People in 1961. Focusing on Bourdieu's theory of practice toned with Pym's translation historiography, the authors explore the 'whys' of Jamalzadeh's motives when he opted to translate Ibsen's drama. The article, therefore, examines Jamalzadeh's rewriting against the backdrop of the field of theatre in 1950s Iran to unveil the sociopolitical dynamics that conditioned and shaped his translation. Also, embedding in Bourdieu's concept of habitus the Derridean notion of the ideal translator, the authors explore Jamalzadeh's (bi)cultural habitus(es) as a translator in self-exile. It is proposed that (a) utilizing his Iranian cultural memories, Jamalzadeh depicted parallels between incidents in the drama and the political events of the decade leading to the 1953 coup and the fall of Mosaddegh; (b) exploiting his European cultural/intellectual memories, he deploys Ibsen's text to taunt Iranian political elites' short-sightedness and/or hypocrisy and lament the herd behaviour of the masses consequent on the former group's debilitating conflicts.