Posts filed under 'iranian translation'

The Persian Edifice of Catch 22

May 11, 2016  |  in Essays, Translations  |  by Poupeh Missaghi

"To rebuild the edifice of Catch 22 in Persian would not have been possible with just one architect."

Written by Ehsan Norouzi[1]

***

I read Catch 22 in high school, completely by accident. I found it in a box of books in an abandoned basement. I read it during my third-year quarterly exams, and it made me fail geometry. My ruined summer was worth my laughter while reading it, though. Amidst the structure of school and the terrifying purgatory of the pre-university year and its entrance exam, Catch 22 (Joseph Heller), The Good Soldier Švejk (Jaroslav Hašek) and other books like them provided a restless teenager like me with some respite. However, the joy of encountering Catch 22 in those teenage years, those dreamlike moments filled with satire that demanded a different kind of laughter, were the result of something else as well.

At the time, literature had not yet become my profession and reading was simply an act of pleasure, with no goal in mind. Later on, there would come a time when I couldn’t read an extraordinary sentence without thinking about how it could be translated into Persian. I lost the joy of reading. READ MORE…

34 Animal Farms: Literary Translation and Copyright in Iran

July 13, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Poupeh Missaghi

Our Editor-at-Large Poupeh Missaghi on the peculiarity of copyright and translation in Iran

It’s safe to say that the Iranian book market has a strong interest in translation: it’s easy to find several translations of the same book in a single bookstore. Several reasons fuel this phenomenon, but the most important is rather banal: Iran’s glaring disregard for copyright laws—both internationally and domestically—mean that these kinds of retranslations run rampant.

Most literary publishers enter the translation and publication processes without securing the rights to the original foreign book. Or they can simply translate/publish a title already in print or well into the process of translation/publication by another publishing house.

Iran is not a signatory to the Copyright Treaty of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), though it joined WIPO in 2001. Neither does Iran take part in international conventions on the protection of literary and artistic works. Not legally bound in the way that organizations in other countries—such as many European countries and the United States—are, Iran’s public and/or private literary/artistic organizations do not often behave ethically toward their foreign counterparts. READ MORE…