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The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Feminism and

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Luise von Flotow, Hala Kamal

Translation of women-centred literature

in Iran

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Sima Sharifi
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3
Translation of women-centred
literature in Iran
Macro and micro analysis

Sima Sharifi

Introduction/definitions
The objective of this chapter is to provide insight into the translation of feminist writings before
and after Iran’s 1979 revolution, and examine how the Islamic Republic of Iran (henceforth, IRI)
has influenced this process. To take into account the transformation of women-centred texts
in translation across two different eras – in a monarchy1 and under an Islamist g­ overnment –
I attempt to answer four questions: First, which books on women-centred texts (i.e., feminist
literary fiction or non-fiction) were published in Persian translation, before and during the
1970s and the reign of the Shah? Second, which women-centred texts were translated into
Persian in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, i.e. after the Islamic Revolution, what kinds of changes
can be traced in the translated texts over these decades, and why were these made? Third, how
has the androcentric agenda of Ayatollah Khomeini (henceforth, Khomeini) and its Islamiza-
tion of Iranian society, from his arrival on 1 February 1979, influenced Iranian women’s lives,
societal culture and as a result the translation of feminist or women-centred texts? Finally, what
happens to a source text (ST) which is committed to ending the subordination of women and
is meant to have political impact when it is transferred into an overtly and stiflingly patriarchal
target system?
The definition of women-centred or feminist texts I adhere to here is the sort of writing
that Eva Lennox Birch defines as “enabling an expression of the world as it is perceived by the
female” (1994, 241). Such women-oriented texts may be authored by women and/or involve
thematically pertinent female characters with an eye to the question of equal legal, political,
social, and economic rights for women.
To locate Persian translations of women-centred literature of foreign origin prior to and after
1979, I tapped into three resources: the data base of ‫ سازمان اسناد و کتابخانه ملی جمهوری اسالمی‬the
online catalogue of the National Library & Archives of the Islamic Republic of Iran (hence-
forth, library), Iranian expatriate scholars, and an Iran-based translation studies journal. Parallel
to my library-based research, and in the hope of adding to my inventory of women-oriented
texts in Persian translation, I reached out, via email and/or telephone, to Iranian scholars resid-
ing in North America, Australia, and the UK, all of whom are known for their feminist work.
I provided these professors with a short list of book titles by well-known authors usually referred

32
 Women-centred literature in Iran

to as feminist such as George Eliot (Middle March 1871), Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique
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1963), Virginia Woolf (A Room of One’s Own 1929), Simone de Beauvoir (Le deuxième sexe
1949), and Kate Millet (Sexual Politics 1970). I added that any writings by these or other authors
interested in the status of women were welcome. As they were unable to provide any useful
information in regard to the existence of Persian translation of feminist texts before 1979, they
introduced me to colleagues and PhD students who they thought might be able to help and
whom I immediately contacted. Most of my contacts were certain that no translations of such
materials had been produced in the decades prior to and including the 1970s. As for Simone
de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe, however, some replied in the affirmative. One PhD graduate,
Golbarg Bashi said, “I know The Second Sex was translated because my mother used to read it
in the 1970s” (email).2 But when I asked her for further information, she admitted that she was
unable to locate the book.
A PhD candidate offered, via email, an explanation about the reasons for the lack of a coher-
ent women-friendly translation policy in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. According to him, in
those decades, there were three potential groups who had the tools, power and funds to engage
in the act of translating women-centred literature but for a variety of reasons failed to do so:
(1) the dominant institutions of the monarchy which had no political interest in the conscious-
ness-raising effects of such literature; (2) the religious class of clergy that was unwilling to invest
in secularism, in spite of its close connection to the masses and independent flow of income;
(3) leftist groups who were among the most educated and linguistically competent, but who con-
sidered feminist literature a capitalist product with a divisive effect on the working class (email).3
Since my research focuses on the translation of women-centred literature, I did not pursue
the question of whether or not the said institutions devoted their resources to translating other
literary genres, such as poetry or autobiography, for example. That being said, I agree with my
contact’s argument about the scarcity of feminist translations in Persian in the decades leading
up to, and including, the 1970s possibly due to potential translators’ ideologies, and their disin-
terest in feminism.4 Further, the sparse translations of feminism may also be explained by the low
rate of literacy in Iran in the decades before the 1970s. In her article, “Educational Attainment in
Iran,” Mila Elmi5 (2009) writes that in 1966 only 17% of the Iranian female population, and 39%
of males, were literate. Even if there were feminist translators, the low literacy in Iranian society
made feminist translation in that period highly unfeasible. In 1976, however, the literacy rate
had more than doubled to 35% for women and 47% for men; this stems from the Shah’s decree,
strictly implemented in the 1960s and 1970s, dictating the need for girls and boys to be literate.
After 1979 the literacy rate climbed to 52%, 74%, and 80% for females, in 1986, 1996, and 2006
respectively,6 a phenomenon that may explain not only the increase in the rate of translations
in those decades but also the reason for the change in the kind of books translated. This will be
discussed in the following sections.
The other source I reached out to is an Iran-based Translation Studies Quarterly, originating
in Tabatabai University in Tehran; it has published an article titled “The historiography of the
translation of women in contemporary Iran” (Farahzad et al. 2015, 57–74) with the stated objec-
tive to examine the kind of material Iranian women have chosen to translate in different histori-
cal periods over 100 years, since the early 20th century. The research paper claims that between
1901 and 2011, Iranian women have translated over 1700 books of a variety of genres and topics
from English, French, Russian, and Spanish. Although the article includes the number of trans-
lations, no book titles, names of writers or translators, or the countries of the source texts are
mentioned. Neither does the study reveal if any feminist books are considered in the research, or
to what extent Anglo-American literature may have been prevalent in Persian translation during
the Shah’s reign (1941–1979), which might be expected as the USA had a strong influence on

33
 Sima Sharifi

Iranian politics and culture at the time. In short, my approach to the Iran-based journal, similar
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to my outreach to expat scholars, failed to pinpoint any feminist translations beyond what I had
already accessed through the library.
Further, there seem to be no studies of Persian translations of English work with feminist
perspectives. A number of studies exist that focus on cross-cultural communication and linguis-
tically specific translation issues of certain English novels. These tend to appear in article form,
in online journals, written by Iranian scholars or students based in Iran, with a focus on a lin-
guistic theoretical framework, such as Katharina Reiss’ text types.7 While this chapter examines
and compares the translations of two eras with an eye to the sociocultural contexts of the target
society, the linguistically based studies are not concerned with contextual questions. This brings
me to the point that there may well be no previous study dedicated to a comparison of Persian
translations spanning several decades; nor is there any study of women-centred texts translated
into Persian. On both counts, this chapter intends to fill the gap.
Next, I will examine the search results for the translations published before the 1979 revolution.

Translations of women-centred texts before

the revolution: 1930s–1970s
Through library searches, I accessed Persian translations from 1936 to 1978, a year before the
1979 Iranian revolution (Table 3.3). Some of these translated authors are known for their work on
social justice and women’s issues; for example, Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852,
trans. Keyhani 1936), Louisa May Alcott (Little Women, 1868, trans. Doostdar 1949), Pearl S. Buck
(The Good Earth, 1931, trans. Lorestani 1957), Christiane Rochefort (Les petits enfants, 1961, trans.
Najafi 1965), Simone de Beauvoir (Djmilah Boupacha, 1962, trans. Taraji & Pooyan 1965), and
Edward Albee (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, 1962, trans. Hariri 1977), among others. Common
thematic threads connect these books expressing sentiments opposing colonialism, slavery, autoc-
racy, and poverty. One may argue that the translators sympathize with the themes of the source
texts, and deploy language to challenge the dominant despotic culture in Iran, for as Olga Castro
puts it: “Language and translation inevitably are tools for legitimizing the status quo or for sub-
verting it” (2013, 6). While 13 books were translated between the 1930s and the 1960s, five trans-
lations were published in the 1970s, and all of these 18 translations raised awareness of the poverty
and social injustices plaguing Iranian society. In fact, such translations seem to underline the mood
of protest that ruled the sociocultural discourse in the decades leading up to the 1979 revolution
which overthrew the Shah of Iran and the Pahlavi dynasty (1924–1979). Table 3.1 shows the texts
containing feminist/social justice themes found in Persian translations in the 1970s.
In Table 3.1, the heading of the last column,‘Location,’ points to the labelled shelf in the library
where these books are held. The importance of this location and its effect on readers will be
explained later. Sparse as they are, the translated texts produced in the 1970s are inquisitive, com-
bative, and subversive; but with the exception of Woolf ’s The Waves, they are not strictly feminist.

Persian translations of women-centred texts since the

establishment of Islamist rule after the 1979 revolution

1980s
As demonstrated in Table 3.2, there is an increase in translations of feminist work in the 1980s.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the anti-feminist climate of the 1980s, and probably because
of the already increased rate of literacy, Iranian translators seem to have enlarged the scope of

34
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Table 3.1 Library search results of somewhat feminist translations: 1970s

Authors Source Text, date Theme Translator, date Publisher Location

Buck, Pearl The Child Who Never Rights of children, especially the physically and mentally Ahi, Homa, 1970 Khorrami CS
Grew, 1950 challenged
De Beauvoir, Reflections on a Very Existential questions: mortality, loss of loved ones and Amin Moayed, Roz CS
Simone Easy Death, 1964 independence Majid, 1970
Plath, Sylvia The Bell Jar, 1963 Social and self-estrangement, strict limitation of Emami, Goli, 1973 Neel CS & DS
patriarchy, renewal through suffering
Albee, Edward Who’s Afraid of Virginia Rejection of a number of myths: marriage institution, Hariri, Alireza, 1977 Beena CS
Woolf, 1962 American dreams of happiness, success, manhood;
illusion as an escape from reality
Woolf, Virginia The Waves, 1931 Existential questions: meaning of life; self-definition; Daryoosh, Parviz, Amir Kabir CS
alienation of the feminine from self and other or 1977
permeating into and defining one another; male
dominance

35
Women-centred literature in Iran
 Sima Sharifi

Table 3.2 Library search results of mostly feminist translations: 1980s

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Authors Source Text, date Translator, date Publisher Location

De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949 San’vi, Ghasem, 1981 Toos CS

Simone
Mémoires d’une jeune fille San’vi, Ghasem, 1982 Toos CS
rangée, 1958
La femme rompue, 1967 Iran-doost, Naser, 1985 Ordibehesht CS
Vieillesse, 1972 Toosi, Mohammad Ali, Shabaviz DS
1986
La femme rompue, 1967 Forooghan, Nahid, 1989 Nashr-e Markaz CS, DS
Woolf, Virginia Mrs. Dalloway, 1925 Daryoosh, Parviz, 1983 Ravaagh CS
Austen, Jane Emma, 1815 Aghaa-Khaani, Ayoob, Ordibehesht CS
1983
Sense and Sensibility, 1811 Khosravi, Hossein, 1984 Golshaaii: CS
Mazhar
Sense and Sensibility, 1811 Karami Far, Abbas, 1984 Kooshesh CS
Villette, 1853 Teymoori, Farideh, 1986 Ekbatan CS
Mansfield Park, 1814 Haghighi, Maryam, 1986 Kooshesh CS
Bronte, Charlotte Jane Eyre, 1847 Afshar, Mehdi, 1987 Mahtab: Erfan CS
Voynich, Ethel Gadfly, 1897 Shaheen, Daryoosh & Negaretstan CS
Lilian Soosan Ardekaani, Ketab
1987
Eliot, George The Mill on the Floss, 1860 Yoonesi, Ebrahim, 1989 Negaah CS
Buck, Pearl S. Imperial Woman, 1956  Badre’i, Fereidoon, 1989 Chekavak NE

translated books by selecting women-centred texts for translation. While in the 1970s only
one out of five translated books were clearly women-centred (e.g., Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves
1931/1977), the 1980s saw the production of 15 translations of 13 women-centred books (see
Table 3.2). A possible additional explanation for the increased number of such translations in
the 1980s, a turbulent decade when a long list of revolutionary changes, detrimentally affect-
ing women’s lives, were put in place as laws (section 3) is that at least some of these translations
had already been produced in the preceding decade(s), but revised and reprinted in the post-
1979 years. Some others may have been purged from the national library of the Islamic Repub-
lic of Iran. For example, according to my contact in the USA, the Persian translation of de
Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, existed in the 1970s, but does not show in the library’s search results.
As indicated in Table 3.2, in the 1980s several of Simone de Beauvoir’s fiction and non-
fiction books were translated. Similarly, while Jane Austen’s work is absent in translation in the
1970s, four of her novels were imported into Persian in the 1980s.

Persian translations of feminist texts: 1990s and 2000s

There is a plethora of translations of feminist articles on unofficial websites in Iran that self-
declare as feminist, one of which is the web page The Feminist School, founded in 2009 and
managed by Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani,8 who is also an author and translator of books focused
on women’s issues. The web page was initiated by a group of Iranian women activists involved
in women’s rights campaigns. In ‘About Us,’ the managing director and editor in chief, Ahmadi
Khorasani, describes the web page as a “platform for voicing women’s issues” and “demand for

36
 Women-centred literature in Iran

equality” (original in English). The home page features a variety of women-centred articles
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written in Persian, or translated, by both women and men, that explore topics such as peace and
women, advocate the transformation of the male-dominated face of the Iranian parliament, and
run reviews of feminist magazines and books.
Translated articles on the Feminist School web page include Cassandra Balchin’s “Fundamen-
talism and Violence Against Women” (2010; trans. Faranak Farid, 2011), an essay about Pierre
Bourdieu’s Masculine Domination (1998; trans. Norman Rahimi, 2013), Michael Kaufman’s “The
Guy’s Guide to Feminism” (2011; trans. Norman Rahimi, 2012), Mary F. Rogers’s Ecofemi-
nism (1974; trans. Parastoo Ansar, 2014), and Judy Whipps’s “Pragmatist Feminism” (2004; trans.
Djelveh Djavaheri, 2010), among many others. None of these articles turn up in the search
results at the national library. It seems that the relatively free transnational exchange of feminist
concepts and thoughts, albeit in the form of short articles, takes place only through unofficial
Iranian channels such as the aforementioned Feminist School, which has become a leading plat-
form showcasing women’s experiences of everyday life under the Islamist theocracy of Iran.9
Unofficial feminist web pages tend to focus on strictly feminist material for translation, but
the same cannot be said about books translated since the 1990s, which do turn up in the offi-
cial channel of the library. Here are a few examples: Pearl Buck’s Imperial Woman (1956, trans.
Shahshahani, 1992) or Ethel Lilian Voynich’s Gadfly (1897, trans. Nahid Dade-Bakhsh, 1996);
and in the 2000s, Phyllis Chesler’s Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman (2001, trans, Farideh Hem-
mati, 2008). However, the library also offers other translations for the 1990s and beyond that
can be considered feminist work, such as Maya Angelou’s poem I Shall Not Be Moved (1990s,
trans. Farzin Hooman Far, 1996), Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour (1894, trans. Rooh Anguiz
Poor Naseh et al., 2006), Marilyn French’s The War Against Women (1992; trans. Toorandokht
Tammadon, 1994), and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963; trans. Fatemeh Sadeghi,
2013), among others.
Between 2000 and 2017, the source books selected for translations become increasingly
bold and more provocative in their approach to feminist consciousness-raising. A case in point
is the translation of the Canadian author Rupi Kaur’s debut poetry collection Milk and Honey
(2015) and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s What Happened (2017). Kaur’s poetry is described by
some critics as “explor[ing] female experiences with evocative and accessible language”10 and
engaging in “raising awareness of taboos on menstruation and sexual abuse.”11 This book of
poetry is translated in two consecutive years, 2017 and 2018, by three different translators. Two
translators, Samaneh Parhiz-kari (Tehran, Mikhak Publishing) and Niloofar Ebrahimi, worked
independently and produced one translation each in 2017. A third translation was created by
Fahimeh Godaz Chian in 2018.
In the 2000s, books such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985, trans. Soheil
Sommy, 2003), Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple (1992, trans. Amir Hossein Mehdi Zadeh,
2009), and Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of Her Own (1929, trans. Masoomeh Mehr Shadi, 2012),
among many others, appeared in Persian.
The search results for Persian translations of English feminist fiction and non-fiction in
three periods, prior to and including the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and beyond, available through the
national library, display a remarkably consistent pattern: fewer translations turn up before or
during the 1970s while the number of translations steadily increases after the 1979 revolution.
For the sake of space, I do not present the numerous translations produced during those periods.
However, I will show the number of translations from the 1930s to 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and
beyond in Tables 3.3 through 3.5 respectively.
Table 3.3 shows that in the years prior to and including the 1970s, before the revolution, the
number of women-centred translations are 18 in total, and only five out of the 18 volumes are

37
 Sima Sharifi

Table 3.3 
Number of translations concerned
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with social justice (1930s–1970s)

Decade Translations

1930s 1
1940s 2
1950s 3
1960s 7
1970s 5
Total 18

produced in the1970s. In the 1980s, the first decade after the revolution, a total of 15 transla-
tions were produced (Table 3.4 based on the details of Table 3.2). In the 1990s, the number
of translations of women-centred literature were slightly higher than those of the 1980s. The
greatest increase in women-centred books in Persian translation takes place in the 2000s with
a total of 148 translations (Table 3.5). It is conceivable that the proliferation of women-centred
publications in Iran has created a clash of ideologies between these and the anti-feminist leaning
of theocrats in power. The following discussion is one possible example of how the IRI deals
with such an ideological collision.
In the library search results of 2018, I observed a situation, pertinent to the translation of
feminist literature, which did not exist in previous searches (2012 and 2014), and that is the
marking of some feminist book titles (Table 3.1 and 3.2). In the column ‘Location,’ certain
books are marked as either Closed Shelves (CS), Non-Existing (NE), Donation Shelves (DS),
or the “source text may not be loaned.” To illustrate, here are some examples of marked book
titles: Alice Munro’s Runaway Stories (2004; trans. Mostafa Shayan, 2016) is located in Closed
Shelves, while Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando (1928; trans. Mohammad Naderi, 1991) is marked
Non-Existing. Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is placed in the Closed Shelves for one translation
(Soheil Sommy, 2003) while it is Non-Existing for another (Seyyed Habib Gohari Rad, 2018).
Mary Wollstonecraft’s text of Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is an interesting case
which clearly reveals the patriarchal zeal of the IRI. The Vindication is a book written in protest
against Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Emile (1762) in which he opines that women’s education must
be inferior to that of men, because if a woman is fully educated, she “would no longer be bound
by her marital and domestic responsibilities” (qtd. in Jane Afary 1996, 197). The library search
turns up no translation for the Vindication, which I therefore assume is not available in Persian,
and the English source text is marked “may not be loaned.” However, Rousseau’s Emile has been
translated by at least four translators. All of these translations, as well as the source texts, both in
French and English, seem to be accessible to the public.
To disambiguate the meaning of the terms Closed Shelves (CS), Non-Existing (NE), and
Donation Shelves (DS), I asked my contact, residing in Iran, to find out from his local librar-
ies the correct meaning of these terminologies. The librarians’ reactions and answers varied
depending on whom he asked:

• “These words mean what they say: CS means not accessible to the public, NE means the
library does not possess the volume, and the DS means the books were donated.”

When my contact pointed to a case marked with both CS and DS, the librarian simply said,
“no clue.”

38
 Women-centred literature in Iran

Table 3.4 Number of translations of feminist

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books (1980s)

Decade Translations

1980s 15
Total 15

Table 3.5 Number of translations of feminist

books (1990s and beyond)

Decade Translations

1990s 18
2000–2010 50
2011–2018 80
Total 148

• “Never seen such a thing in our local library.”

• “These are special classification systems of the national library.”
• “I really don’t know.”

Yet, one librarian tested my contact’s claim by searching Jane Austen herself. She was genuinely
shocked at the sight of such results as Closed Shelves appearing on her own computer. Finally,
she could only say “I really don’t know.” Since my contact was eventually questioned by the
security personnel of some of the local libraries about his ‘suspicious’ interest in such a matter, he
quit his line of inquiry, out of fear. As a result, I cannot offer a conclusive explanation for these
terminologies. Yet, the terms seem to indicate a simple purging of books from the library shelves.
The library marking of certain books suggests that women-centred literature, even in post-
translation and publication, may be at risk of being obliterated by obstructing public access to
them. It may be argued that some of these books do exist in the black market. However, not
everybody, students and researchers in particular, can afford to purchase costly books; nor can
it be expected that every reader navigates the underworld of unauthorized market. The Closed
and Non-Existing shelves deprive that section of the population who are most in need of books
in public libraries.

How do the sociopolitical changes influence women

and translation?
To unpack my third research question, I will look at the impact of the social-legal-political dis-
courses on women and what they might mean for translations and book publishing in the IRI.
The integration of sociopolitical contexts into the analysis of translation has a long history in
translation studies, hence the coined term “cultural turn” by Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere
(1998, xxi). In the aftermath of the 1979 revolution, “the government of the Islamic Republic
of Iran repealed many of the legislative and social changes of the Pahlavi era that were seen to conflict
with the laws of Islam” (Lewis and Yazadanfar 1996, xii). Within two months after his arrival,
Khomeini undid decades of women’s achievements in the area of legal reform. He abrogated
the family protection law which had allowed women to initiate divorce and have custody of
their children, and subjected women’s travel and employment to their husband’s permission;

39
 Sima Sharifi

these are only several of the many changes that directly impacted women’s lives (Afary 2009,
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271–272). As a result of these changes, the revolutionary constitution abounds in legal codes
whose main goal seems to be to relegate women to an inferior secondary status.
For example, Article 630 of Iran’s Constitution allows a husband to kill his wife (i.e. honour
killing) and her lover, if he catches them in flagrante (Nayyeri 2013, 12);12 Article 162 makes
judgeship the exclusive right of men (56); Article 907 states that “when a father dies his son(s)
are entitled to twice as much as his daughter(s)” (49); Article 198 provides that “[t]he standard of
testimony in all crimes is the testimony of two men, except in cases of illicit sexual intercourse,
and homosexuality which shall be proven by the testimony of four men, or two men and four
women [. . .]” (15); Article 1041 prohibits marriage before the age of puberty (i.e. nine lunar
years or eight years and nine months) for girls, but with the permission of the paternal guardian
it is allowed (20). According to Amnesty International,13 across the country, girls even younger
than ten were being married off to older men, especially in rural areas. This practice continued
until 2002 when the age of marriage for girls was raised to 13, or less with paternal permission.
Nayyeri, the Iranian-British lawyer and human rights activist, observes that the minimum age of
marriage for girls also determines their age of maturity or criminal responsibility as approved in
2012 and stipulated in Article 147. According to Nayyeri:

The IRI legal system recognizes women as dependent upon men and incomplete human
beings who need to be supervised and controlled by men and the State [. . .]. As discussed
above, under the Islamic Penal Code, the value of a woman’s worth is only half that of a
man’s; or a woman’s testimony in court is given half the weight of a man’s testimony.
(61)

Feminist literature challenges such a degrading sexist view of women, hence the censorship
imposed on such literature. The immediate question at this point is, given the institutionalized
sexism sanctioned by the patriarchal/theocratic governing systems of the IRI, what censorial
apparati are used to safeguard against women-centred translations.
Censorship in the IRI is a complex and non-transparent system in which the publisher must
first submit the book to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (henceforth, MCIG) to
ensure it conforms to a myriad of written and unwritten rules and the censor’s own interpre-
tation of those rules. Weeks, months, and sometimes years later, the MCIG may issue a pre-
publication permission. Hejazi (2009) details the process as follows:

When the publishers decide to publish a book, they have to commission the translation (if
necessary), copy-editing, typesetting, layout, cover design and proof-reading and then sub-
mit it in the final press-quality PDF format to the Book Department of the MCIG [. . .].
The publishers are responsible for paying all these origination costs even before they know
whether they will receive a PPP [Pre Publication Permission] for the book.
(41)14

As for the censored elements, in addition to the obvious word ‘feminism’ being considered
taboo and unwritable, many other references to women seem to be offensive to the censor.
Censorship is not limited to translations. Non-translations such as local literary creations that
allude to a woman’s body are also subject to extensive censorial scrutiny. In his non-fiction
Persian book, Ketab-e Momayyezie [Scrutinized Book] (2010), the Iranian writer Ahmad Rajab
Zadeh found words, phrases, and sentences ordered deleted. For example, the line “That night
my daughter had her first period” was crossed out of one manuscript by the censor. Another

40
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censor found the phrase “wedding night” to be offensive to society. The sentence “She in her
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dress of red velvet and a white scarf was more beautiful than a red rose” was crossed out (qtd. in
Mahloujian 2010).15
One may ask if there is any neat list declaring what must be censored. An Iranian translator,
Abbas Ezati describes the arbitrary nature of censorship in Iran:

After 20 years of translating experience and contact with the censorship system, I thought
I could, in my work, reliably avoid all the words or phrases that would provoke the censor’s
sensibility. But I was wrong because it is impossible to find any pattern in the kind of text
the censor censors.
(Ezati 2013; my translation from Persian)

As a result of the non-transparency in what needs to be censored, translators, editors, and

publishers experience the constant, omnipresent scrutiny and surveillance of the censor which
creates “scissors in the head” (qtd. in Stark 2009, xxi) of both the writer and the translator.

A case study: micro-details of the translation

In this section, I present two excerpts of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) as a case study
that illustrates what can happen to a text that is ‘translated’ across cultural boundaries into a
theocratic receiving society such as the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In the search results for post-1979, Margaret Atwood’s speculative novel The Handmaid’s Tale
appears on the list of books translated into Persian in 2003. In Canada and the target society
Iran, the book is widely known as a women-centred novel because the source text is concerned
with the sociocultural status of women, and the myriad ways that women’s voices, thoughts, and
experiences can be, and are, drowned out, either by socioculturally entrenched gender norms
or by theocratic legal systems. Yet, this same book was translated into Persian by Soheil Sommy
(2003) and circulated among Iranian readers in a clearly theocratic regime, at least until 2014
when it was marked Closed Shelves.
The book tells the story of a 33-year-old woman named Offred who tapes her life story
while living as a handmaid under the oppressive theocracy of Gilead, or more likely after her
escape from that captivity. The narrative begins when Offred is in Gilead, a newly established
Christian fundamentalist theocracy, and ends with her escape that enables her to tell her story.
We learn from Offred’s story that Gilead’s ideologues are bent on purifying society from the
liberalism of the pre-Gileadean era through the establishment of a hierarchical binary in which
women are silenced and their basic human rights are purged. The Handmaids, a group of (still)
fertile women, are assigned to the homes of the ruling classes for the purpose of procreation.
The handmaids are not allowed to have their own names, an education or knowledge of any
kind, own anything, choose their clothing, or have sex for pleasure. In short, handmaids in
Gilead are not allowed to have power or self-awareness; yet the protagonist, Offred, strives for
all that: to gain control if not directly, but vicariously through the memory of her friend, Moira.
While in Gilead, and perhaps because of such oppressive treatment, Offred, who in her past
never identified as a feminist but criticized her mother’s feminism, longs for the two most radical
feminists in her life: her mother and her lesbian friend and radical feminist, Moira.
It must be noted that the purpose of the following contrastive analysis is not to “establish
what has been ‘lost’ or ‘betrayed’ in the translation process” (Bassnett 2005, 8), merely for the sake
of adhering to the source text. The micro-level text analysis here is meant to expose the way
patriarchy is perpetuated through language use.

41
 Sima Sharifi

The following excerpt is a commentary on Offred’s mother who was a radical feminist in her
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day. In the source text (ST), Offred talks about the day when she returns from her daily grocery
shopping in Gilead, enters the kitchen in the Commander’s house, where she smells the yeast
in the freshly baked bread. This catapults her imagination back to former times. An imagery of
food arouses memories of a better time when she was a mother and had a kitchen at her disposal.
She also recalls her own childhood when her mother did not bake.

ST (The Handmaid’s Tale):

It reminds me of other kitchens, kitchens that were mine. It smells of mothers; although my
own mother did not make bread. It smells of me, in former times, when I was a mother. (45)

TT:
‫ بوی‬،‫ مادر من‬،‫ بوی مادرها را می دهد‬.‫ آشپزخانه هایی که مال من بودند‬،‫مرا به یاد آشپزخانه های دیگر می اندازد‬
.‫ در گذشته ها وقتی خودم مادر بودم‬،‫مرا می دهد‬
[It reminds me of other kitchens, the kitchens that belonged to me. It smells of mothers, my
mother, it smells of me, in the past, when I was a mother myself.] (71)

In the source text, we learn that unlike Offred, her mother, as a radical feminist activist, did
not make bread. The TT reader is deprived of this clue and must reach a different conclusion.
The matricial translation norms omit most of an important part of the sentence: “although my
own mother did not make bread,” leaving only “my mother.” As a result, the segments, “It smells
of mothers,” “my mother,” and “It smells of me” are seamlessly connected to one another and to
the kitchen. The cumulative effect of the TT implies that Offred and her mother, like all other
mothers, are nostalgic about the smell of a kitchen. Thus, Offred’s commentary on her mother,
that clearly says she defied the stereotypical association of baking bread with mothers, is silenced.
The new formulation creates a text in which an imbalance in the “ratio of semantic load vs. lin-
guistic carriers” (Toury 1995, 107) creates a vacuum in meaning. The omitted lingual material is
compensated for by the translation strategy of “informational intensification” (ibid.) in the transla-
tion, that is, the strategy of placing a lone phrase ‫“ مادر من‬my mother” in association with the
kitchen serves an important patriarchal function: situating Offred’s mother squarely in the kitchen.
Here is another example from The Handmaid’s Tale in Persian translation that demonstrates
how patriarchy is maintained through language use, resulting in undermining the feminist intent
of the novel. The following excerpt is from Chapter 6. On the way to their daily shopping, the
two Handmaids, Offred and Ofglen, stop to gaze at The Wall patrolled by Guardians, Gilead’s
Police. As she looks on, Offred narrates her observation of the six abortionists who have been
hanged on The Wall, their heads covered by white bags, and their hands tied in front of them.
Offred knows the executed victims are doctors from their lab coats. Offred says they must have
been doctors who performed, now illegal, abortions in the past. Then she reflects on the possible
informants who could be two ex-nurses because, in the new regime of Gilead, the testimony
of one woman is no longer admissible, implying that unlike the regime before it, Gilead has
downgraded women’s testimony due to their sex – requiring two testimonies.
Employing translation strategies of omission and addition, as explained next, the TT makes
the Persian texts sound like the testimony of one woman was unacceptable in both the pre-
Gilead and the Gilead regimes. In glaring opposition to the ST, the Persian translation becomes
aligned with the IRI’s current Islamic laws, which give a woman’s testimony in court half the
weight of a man’s testimony.

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 Women-centred literature in Iran

ST (HMT):
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ex-nurses perhaps, or a pair of them, since evidence from a single woman is no longer admis-
sible (31–32).

TT:
۵۳. ‫ چون شهادت یک زن قابل قبول نیست‬،‫ الاقل دونفر از آن ها‬،‫احتماال از طریق پرستارهای سابق‬
[Probably via former nurses, at least two of them, because testimony of one woman is not
accepted.] (53)

Through strategies of omission and addition, the Persian translation makes two modifica-
tions, with the effect of creating a reading in which unequal gender relations are normalized in
the Gilead, and by extension for the target system. The lingual changes relate to the omission
of the adverb “no longer” in the English version and the addition of the quantifier “at least”
in the Persian text. The omission of the adverbial phrase “no longer” has the effect of blurring
the distinction between the liberal pre-Gilead and the dictatorial Gilead eras. The problematic
difference appears only when the Persian text is compared to the original English text and its
evocation of the pre-Gilead liberal sociopolitical institutions, where unlike the present, a single
woman’s testimony was admissible. It implies that the situation is “no longer” as it was before. In
fact, during the Gilead regime, the condition of women has deteriorated sharply.
From the point of view of women’s rights, the two eras – before and during Gilead – represent
dramatic opposites. This point is anchored in the English adverbial expression “no longer”
which is deleted in the Persian text. Further, when the Persian quantifier “at least” is added to
the text, it suggests a minimum number or amount, which in this case means that the evidence
for the guilty partner must come from two women or more in order to be admissible by the
Gileadean legal code. This sense is absent in the English original. The Persian creates a matter-
of-fact statement suggesting that it has always been the case that evidence from two or more
women is needed, in both pre- and current Gilead times. The two modifications, the omission
and the addition together, create a gendered configuration in which the sub-standard status
assigned to women as a group is normalized. The textual-linguistic change in the preceding two
examples from The Handmaid’s Tale creates a semantic shift with disparaging effect on the female
character, an attempt to synchronize the Persian text with the realities of the target system. It
is evident that even if a translation of a feminist/women-centred text exists in Persian, it may
(because of censorship) completely undermine the feminist intent of the source text.

Conclusion
In general, the library search results as well as the outreach for further sources showed that
feminist ideas hardly travel freely between the English source and the Iranian target society. In
fact, the importation of feminist texts was probably of little import to the early Islamists in Iran.
While there is a visible increase in the translation of feminist texts in the 1980s, the first decade
of the revolution, the 1990s, turns up a similar number of importations. The 2000s showcase a
thriving growth of translations concerned with women’s issues and well-being. As was demon-
strated in the preceding comparative text analysis, such translations are, however, bound to pay a
heavy price for their existence by being censored and seriously altered.
Since translation is not exclusively the concern of linguists but is also influenced by the
broader social context in which it is produced, I presented a brief introduction to the status of

43
 Sima Sharifi

women under the patriarchal realities of the Islamic Republic of Iran, as well as a glance at the
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censorship apparatus of the IRI. At this point, I pose the final question about the incongruent
link between an authoritarian, theocratic, and patriarchal regime, such as the IRI, and the trans-
lation of feminist texts. In other words, why did the feminist texts available in translation increase
in quantity after the 1979 revolution, and particularly in the 2000s, and include provocative and
often radical feminist authors? A combination of two reasons may help account for such a state
of affairs.
First, allowing translations of feminist work to be produced under the watchful eyes of the
vigilant censor may be a sign of the IRI yielding to pressure from women. Since the 1980s, if
not earlier, Iranian women as readers and activists have demanded that feminist texts be made
available for their enlightenment and to continue the struggle against sexism.16 Since the revolu-
tion, women, both religious and secular, have been increasingly and negatively affected by the
enforcement of the legal and political discriminatory laws against gender equity. Therefore, the
pressure has gained momentum, and, at the same time, translations of feminist materials have
increased to a historically high number. However, this does not mean that the IRI is moving
away from its patriarchal policies.
On the contrary, in light of the increase in the translation of feminist literature, the IRI has
found ways to contravene such a trend. For example, as a countermeasure to the proliferation
of women-centred translations, the IRI seems to make such books unavailable to the public
by placing them in Closed Shelves, or Non-Existing sectors of the libraries, among other
strategies.
The other equally plausible reason might be simply self-serving; translations appear, women
readers (and the outside world) are satisfied, but the censorship system purges the text, and
removes or undermines the feminist features, imposing texts that prop up the hegemonic doc-
trine. The comparative text analysis of excerpts from The Handmaid’s Tale illustrates how the
women-centric passages are trimmed and tamed to the taste of the male-centric censor. The
excerpts used in this chapter are only a miniscule sample of a large body of text analysis of two
books, by two authors translated in two different times by two translators, meticulously analyzed
in my doctoral dissertation where I found women-centred texts are consistently manipulated.17
Contextually speaking, translations of women-centred literature are impacted by the gender-
based discriminatory laws of the target society and this inevitably results in the erasure of the
content of the source text, in order to synchronize it with and conform to what is allowed to
exist in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Future research directions

The fact that feminist books are translated in societies antagonistic to the very goal of f­ eminism –
gender equality in social, political, legal, and economic matters – provides any translation scholar
with numerous options for research topics that could enrich the discipline of translation studies.
It would be enlightening to compare the translation of feminist texts in a secular society with
that in a theocratic one to highlight the linguistic features that offend the sensibility of the cen-
sor. It would be equally interesting to focus on the selection and translation of texts as a function
of a societal political ideological mood. Given the fact that the Iranian-based translator, Soheil
Sommy, has translated four of Atwood’s eight translated novels, it would be worth investigating
whether the other three novels were treated like The Handmaid’s Tale. A research project aimed
at uncovering the role that publishers and editors play vis-à-vis the translators could also reveal
the kinds of forces involved in translation in theocracies or in other strongly ideological govern-
ing systems possessing effective censorship apparati.

44
 Women-centred literature in Iran

Further reading
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There are a large number of collections that tackle the translation of feminist texts, the repro-
duction of patriarchy through language use, and the censorship of women-oriented texts. North
America is particularly well served with Kathy Mezei, Sherry Simon, and Luise von Flotow
(2014), an anthology that explores the intersection of culture and translation; Flotow (2011)
covers a range of topics, from women authors to women translators and characters in translation.
Sara Mills and Louise Mullany (2011) and Mary Talbot (2010) explore the question of language
study and its significance for feminists. To understand the role of translators and publishers in a
non-Western culture, Esmaeil Haddadian-Moghaddam (2015) provides a fascinating sociologi-
cal study of literary translation in Iran. On the censorship front, Michaela Wolf (2002), Denise
Merkle (2002), Maria Tymoczko (2008), and Michelle Woods (2012) explore the complexity
of censorship, the role of the translator, the subtle censoring of texts, and how language can be
used as a totalitarian and patriarchal weapon. Sima Sharifi (2018) explores, from the perspective
of two sisters, one based in Canada, the other in Iran, how a censored feminist translation is
understood by Persian female readers and the memories this invokes.

Related topics
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, women-centred texts, Islamic Republic of Iran, theocratic patri-
archy, translation studies, legal equality

Notes
1 The monarchy in Iran is often described as culturally paternalistic in nature as it subscribed to inequity
based on sex. While the government supported women in their pursuit of education, their struggle
against child marriage and men’s unilateral rights to divorce and child custody was promptly suppressed;
the Shah regime also shut down feminist organizations, and the “family laws of Iran in the late 1970s
still considered the man as the head of the household,” (Paidar 1995, 157).
2 Email correspondence, in English, with Golbarg Bashi, PhD, Colombia University, 27 November 2017.
3 Email correspondence, in English paraphrased, with Babak Mazloumi, translator and PhD candidate,
University of California, Irvine, 16 October 2017.
4 My agreement with Mazloumi’s argument is based on personal experience: almost every novel I read
in my youth was a translation of some male Russian author (e.g. Maxim Gorki’s The Mother). This
implies that some translators of the pre-1979 era may have been members, or sympathizers, of Iran’s
communist party, known as the Toudeh Party or the party of the masses – an ideologically close ally
of the Soviet Union. These translators knew Russian and other European languages and had political
interests in disseminating leftist or liberal material. Yasamin Khalighi et al. (Scholars of Ferdowsi Uni-
versity of Mashhad, Iran) studied the Persian translation of literature in the 1940s and 1950s and found
that members of Toudeh Party translated 67 works by Russian authors such as Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dos-
toyevsky, Turgenev, as well as Balzac, and Dickens, among other European authors ( Journal of Language
and Translation Studies, 48(3), 19 December 2015, 1–7.
5 Zahra Mila Elmi is an assistant professor in Mazandaran University, Iran. Available at: www.mei.edu/
content/educational-attainment-iran [Accessed 6 March 2018].
6 The increased rate of literacy is partly due to the development of education for both males and females,
but also to the fact that girls in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s found education the only way to gain
some freedom in the face of the many restrictions imposed on their lives by the leaders of the Islamist
government. In other words, the IRI could not stop, or reverse, the trend for literacy that had already
spread across Iran before the 1979 revolution. In his study of “Islam, Education and Civil Society in
Contemporary Iran,” Zep Kalb, Graduate of Oxford University, completed his MA at the University of
Tehran, and PhD at UCLA, states that while the number of university students in the 1950s Iran was
fewer than 9000, this number grew to 30,000 in the 1960s and over 100,000 between 1976 and 1977
(2017, 582).

45
 Sima Sharifi

7 For example, Shokooh Khosravi and Mohammad Khatib (September 2012) wrote an article titled
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“Strategies Used in the Translation of English Idioms into Persian in Novels” in Theory and Practice in
Language Studies. Vol. 2, No. 9, 1854–1859.
8 Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani is also a publisher, an essayist, journalist, author of several books on the
women’s movement in Iran, and a founding member of the Women’s Cultural Center (markaz-e
Farhangi-ye Zanan) in Tehran, “an NGO that focuses on women’s health as well as legal issues.” In
2007 she was sentenced to three years in prison for threatening the national security, and the NGO
was shut down. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noushin_Ahmadi_Khorasani. In order to
secure permission to operate, the NGO’s founders “were required to be married, university graduates
without any previous convictions for criminal (or political) activities.” Available at: https://tavaana.
org/en/content/noushin-ahmadi-khorasani-two-decades-struggle-womens-rights. Ahmadi Khorsani
was also “a prominent member of the One Million Signatures for the Repeal of Discriminatory Laws
campaign, which used public petition to challenge the inequality of Iranian men and women before the
law.” The IRI banned the Feminist School web page in 2016. Available at: www.feministschool.com/
english/spip.php?article52. As of February 2019, it is still accessible.
9 Although the IRI officially shut down the web page in 2016, for some unknown reason people can still
publish articles in it.
10 Simran Singh. Available at: https://owlcation.com/humanities/Critical-Analysis-of-Rupi-Kaurs-Milk-
and-Honey.
11 Abigail Eardley. Available at: www.oxfordstudent.com/2017/08/21/poetry-review-milk-honey-
rupi-kaur/.
12 My legal source is the British-Iranian human rights lawyer, Mohammad Hossein Nayyeri, whose report
on gender inequality and discrimination in Iran’s post-1979 Constitution (http://anyflip.com/jzeo/
ghyt) is documented in Human Rights Documentation Centre, an independent non-profit organiza-
tion that was founded in 2004 by international human rights scholars and lawyers: https://iranhrdc.
org/gender-inequality-and-discrimination-the-case-of-iranian-women/ [Accessed 20 July 2014]. But
this site http://anyflip.com/jzeo/ghyt was consulted in 20 January 2019.
13 Amnesty International. 2012. “Iran: Joint Statement on the Status of Violence Against Women

in the Islamic Republic of Iran.” 29 November. Available at: www.amnesty.org/en/documents/
MDE13/074/2012/en/ [Accessed 20 July 2014].
14 Arash Hejazi, in his MA at Oxford Brookes University, studied the multi-level procedure of censorship.
According to Hejazi’s personal website (http://english.arashhejazi.com) he was the founder, publisher,
and senior editor of Caravan Books Publishing in Tehran. He is the current editor of John Wiley and
Sons Inc., a global publishing company that specializes in academic publications.
15 An Iranian journalist, Azar Mahloujian, fled to Sweden in 1982; she is the spokeswoman for the Writers
in Prison Committee and a Member of the Board of Directors of Swedish PEN. She is the author of
two books: Back to Iran (2004) and The Torn Pictures (2005).
16 Personal email, in Persian, with an Iranian-based established translator who spoke to me on anonymity,
9 July 2014.
17 Doctoral dissertation defended October 2016. Text Analysis, pp. 177–218. Available at: https://ruor.
uottawa.ca/bitstream/10393/35677/1/sharifi_sima_2016_thesis.pdf.

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