Translating Modern Fiction into Persian: A Snowball Story

Abstract

This chapter reflects on the findings of research carried out by studying a parallel corpus of 310 short stories consisting of source texts published in American-English in the United States after World War II and target texts in Persian, translated in the period of 1979–2010 in Iran. This study aims to show empirically, by following the publication of these short stories and their arrival in Iran, how ideological, cultural, and individual factors interact in the creative yet constrained translation. The movement of each short story from the North-American author to its Iranian readers can be schematically compared to that of the snowball that, in a Persian anecdote, the commander orders to be passed along a line of soldiers. The commander’s large snowball turns to a small watery piece of ice at the end, and the commander explains symbolically how the ration he normally allocates to each soldier changes to nearly nothing by the time it reaches the infantrymen. At a denotative level, this anecdote reveals the role of some explicit parameters affecting anyone, including the heat of the sun as a major pre-existing factor, and also implicit parameters such as the fact that the commander can manipulate the chain of command and the number of soldiers passing on the snowball, and hence the amount of what remains at the end. At a connotative level, the story is open to many interpretations but also it works as a reflection on the effects that the actions of middlemen taking their share in a process have on the final product.