Translation in Moaveni and Zarbafian's Essays

Arya Samuelson

What immediately stood out to me about “Sex in the Time of Mullahs” was the author’s tone. Incisive, frequently derisive, and absolutely certain of the bold claims she was making. Moaeveni describes two parties, singling out particular people and details that serve as launching boards for her larger analysis about the banality of the Iranian party scene that believes itself to be so revolutionary.

Describing her friend Davar and his gravitation towards a “young divorcee,” Moaeveni writes: “She had thick wrists and a cartoonlike beauty, as if she had been drawn by a talented child. He enjoyed half an hour of small talk, working his way toward possible conquest, toward the consummation of an act that would, however briefly, restore his sense of autonomy, display his total disregard for the regime’s tattoos, allow him to the say to the world, or to himself: ‘I am not just another twenty-five year old Iranian making a $300-a-month salary that I can’t get married on, in a country that offers me no joyful or remunerative opportunity’” (57).

I was struck by Moaeveni’s lack of ambiguity when asserting such a declaration. She lets the reader know that she is an outsider at such parties and yet she professes her analysis with such authority. She asks, “Where was I in all this?” but all she tells the reader about her personal life and positionality is that she is sitting on a pile of cushions, observing the various characters and encounters relayed in the scene. Rather than speculating, or reflecting, or posing questions to those around her, Moaeveni asserts that the people at the party seem at once sullen and alive: “alive because people had carved out a space where they could drop their layers of pretense. Sullen because their revelry was tinged with more darkness than light, reflecting all the thwarted ambitions, the lost opportunities, the violations and stolen freedoms that defined their reality outside” (58).

I admire Moaveni’s courage in making such declarations. For my part, I struggle making assertions about the political climate without feeling the need to preface my statements with words like, “It seems to me,” or “I feel like,” or “I notice.” Such personalization can read as hedging or hiding. At the same time, Moaeveni’s analysis might have felt less embittered and more the result of deep reflective questioning and engagement with the world around her had she begun her statement with something like: “What it felt to me was...”

I hope it’s clear that I’m not trying to dismiss Moaeveni’s analysis – I do believe her and I found the whole situation fascinating. It’s just that the scathing quality of so much of her description reminded me of the judgmental “sitting on the couch and watching everyone else” manner in which I used to write about people and places and things. I now understand that this kind of thinking clouded and prohibited me from perceiving the dimensionality of what was taking place. It kept me from asking questions about what was happening and asking others around me. As an anthropology student, I wondered whether Moaeveni might have asked some of the partygoers about their perspectives on these topics and drawn her analysis from there. It’s not that I’m urging for impartiality or neutrality. Declarative statements are crucial to talking about the state of the world. At the same time, I missed the sense of wonder and curiosity and complexity invoked by an author who approaches analysis and writing from a place of “question-asking.”

This was a really interesting pairing of essays, as Zarbafian speculates and explores how this wonder, curiosity, and complexity are stripped away by the censorship of Western literature in Iran. For one, mistranslation and misplacement of paragraphs cause the books to appear as “a blurry shadow of the other” (63). More importantly, the complexities of emotion, intimacy, and identity within Kundera’s novel are flattened by translations that pander to the conservative values of the Iranian regime. Zarbafian argues that the effect of this isn’t only that the book loses its meaning; but that readers lose sight of the complexity of life. They learn to read with the expectation that literature will serve as a mirror for the world they already live in and know, rather than a complication and problematization of reality. They learn to equate moral ambiguity with “loathsome” values and immorality. They forget about dialogue.

Zarbafian’s point isn’t that Western novels are better or more complex than Iranian or Middle Eastern literature. Zarbafian’s argument is that when people stop reading books that challenge them, they forget how to think in ways that challenge them. As Zarbafian suggests through her opening anecdote, cultural exchanges of music, poetry, and dialogue are essential to building

bridges between Self and Other. Books are an example of this, an exchange between author and reader. But when books are translated in ways that mute their aliveness, the exchange is severed and reading becomes simply an experience of affirming what you already know. Zarbafian writes: “Both [reader and author] remain lonely creatures on two sides of a bridge that is hardly buuilt. There is just an illusion of dialogue, with voices that remain misheard or undheard. A reader who communicates with fragments of wreckage called a translated novel” (73).

To be honest, I’m not sure what writing fluid means. But I do find myself comparing Moaeveni’s translation of the party scene and Zarbafian’s commentary on the translation of Kundera. I think that translation is by definition fluid – translation isn’t about swapping two fixed meanings for one another; translation is about an active and alive sense of interpretation. Yes, a published translation cannot include all the translator’s questions and doubts about whether they’ve done it right and all the other possibilities they could have chosen – eventually, a word or phrase must be selected and published – but I still believe that translation can suggest a world of multi-layeredness meaning that cannot be coerced, but can be grappled with and evoked through language. It’s very different to “translate” a living scene, but in writing beyond the self – as some of my writing projects seek to do -  this is definitely my intention and my struggle.