Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora

15. “Axising” Iran: The Politics of Domestication and Cultural Translation

282 Fifteen “Axising” Iran The Politics of Domestication and Cultural Translation R. Shareah Taleghani Of a Persian Letter and Preemptive Strikes On May 8, 2006, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent George W. Bush a letter— the first, formal, direct contact with a U.S. president by an Iranian leader since 1980. The official U.S. response to the eighteen-page letter, replete with religious references and condemnations of U.S. foreign policy, was dismissal; it offered no solution to the issue of Iran’s nuclear ambitions.1 While antiwar commentators debated the exact meaning of Ahmedinejad ’s rhetoric, the Bush administration had already demonstrated its awareness of the potential disruptive power of translation.2 In September 2003, in an intellectual preemptive strike, and by activating long-dormant regulations , the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) announced a publication ban on any text written by an Iranian living in Iran.3 At first, articles by Iranian scientists were targeted, but the new policies also affected literary works, and violations of the regulations could result in imprisonment and fines up to one million dollars. Under such regulations, as pointed out by Nahid Mozaffari, the editing and translating of literary texts by Iranian authors would also “constitute aiding and abetting the enemy.”4 The OFAC gave new Orwellian meaning to the concept of traduttore, traditore. After several lawsuits were filed by publishers as well as translators and writers, in December 2004 the department eventually altered its position to allow for the publication of texts from countries on the “enemies list.” Meanwhile, however, the policies had delayed the pub- “Axising” Iran / 283 lication of several works—among them the memoir of Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi. The attempt to stifle the translation of works by Iranian authors marked another volatile moment in the ongoing political standoff between the United States and Iran. The OFAC’s embargo on Iranian writing merely added official impediment to the already limited distribution of translations of foreign-language works in the United States. With the exception of Rumi’s poetry, most translations of Persian literature have limited circulation in the United States.5 Though a number of translations of contemporary literature from Iran have been published in recent years by academic and specialty publishers, these works have “modest” printings and sales.6 Statistics on UNESCO’s Index Translationum indicate that between 1979 and 2005, only 253 English translations of Persian texts were published in the United States.7 Although in the United States there is a lack of Persian literature in translation , Iran, nonetheless, has surfaced in many cultural forms. Significantly, in terms of commercial and mainstream critical success, in the past decade, an explosion of English-language Iranian memoirs, authored primarily by women, has hit the book market. The ur-text of this deluge is Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) by Azar Nafisi. Numerous other autobiographical accounts have appeared including Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir turned Academy Award–nominated film, Persepolis (2003). The political and commercial marginalization of Persian literature rendered into English, and the celebratory reception of certain English-language Iranian memoirs appear in the context of a series of translational lacunae. Translation, within poststructuralist theory, is an interpretation, a transference , a movement from one position to another, a transformation as well as the act of turning a written or oral text from one language into another. Representations of Iran that surface in the United States and across the globe are enmeshed within and generate encounters of cultural translation in ways that incorporate all of the definitions above. In tracing these encounters, it becomes clear that Iran, as an imagined object-to-be-interpreted, is confined to a stationary axis—defined by the coordinates of the dominant trends of political domestication upon which U.S. cultural translation rests. Historically, as Lawrence Venuti has shown, domesticating translation theories stressing fluent rather than foreignizing interpretation have been emphasized in the Anglo-American tradition of literary translation.8 Domestication creates the “illusion of transparency”; a fluent translation produces an interpretation partial to English-language values that reduces and excludes the differences inevitable in any translative act. The following 284 / between the middle east and the americas examination of two English-language Iranian memoirs and the fate of translated Persian literature analyzes the notion of translation in broad political and cultural terms. Here, translation will be considered in three intertwined ways: first, the conception of translation...