A novel by Shahrnush Parsipur centered in Sufism

By Golbarg Bashi - Payvand's Iran News
Tuesday, July 11, 2006

The English translation of the novel Touba and the Meaning of Night by the pre-eminent Iranian writer Shahrnush Parsipur was recently released by a major US publishing house in New York.

Shahrnush Parsipur's Touba and the Meaning of Night is considered one of the unsurpassed masterpieces of modern Persian literature. The protagonist of the novel, Touba, a young girl turning into a determined woman, goes through major personal upheavals throughout a turbulent 80-year long Iranian history. Touba's life-story is connected to the historical predicaments of her country and thus makes the novel one of the best works of literature to provide a fictive narrative of contemporary Iran.

The first thing that one notices about this translation is the idiomatic ease and fluent diction with which the novel reads in English. The translation of Touba and the Meaning of Night is quite beautiful. Kamran Talattoff, a scholar of Persian literature, and Havva Houshmand have done a wonderful job translating one of Iran's greatest works of literature.

All translations are thankless jobs. The better a translation the more the translator/s disappear into the prose and diction of the writer they are transforming into another language. It is, however, exceedingly important to keep in mind the labour of love and dedicated scholarship that usually goes into translating a literary masterpiece. In this respect, Shahrnush Parsipur has been blessed by exceedingly competent admirers of her work. This particular translation, however, is overburdened by too many explanatory accoutrements that in fact slow down and overtax the literary grace of the text. The novel does not need a foreword, an afterword and then a biography to introduce it to an English-speaking readership. To be sure, each one of these items is quite informative in its own right (especially to students of literature and history). But their collective imposition on the literary grace of this novel adds an unnecessary and even distracting succession of alternating narratives that is damaging to the literary integrity of the work. These additional narratives project an undue nativist anxiety over the novel —Talattoff thus writes:

"…every turn of the page of the translation called for explanations. Parsipur's novel is replete with religious, literary, and other cultural references. Some readers may not fully appreciate how central to the narrative is Sufism…fewer are likely to grasp Parsipur's references to the ethereal girl in Blind Owl by Sadeq Hedayat…They also might easily overlook the subversion of the symbol of the pomegranate, an image that has symbolized the feminine in classical works such as those of Nezami Ganjavi…Such footnotes would have been indeed necessary every time the text refereed too or portrayed something from the medieval period, or some complex aspect of a society in a state of transformation from a traditional time to a peculiar mode of modernity. In the end, we decided that the narrative would have been interrupted too often if we succumbed to the expedient of footnotes. Instead to the extent that was possible, we incorporated the necessary information into the text".