Suvashun, a Persian story and, perhaps, also a little Italian

When you place yourself before the "novel" par excellence of modern Persian literature to translate it, you will necessarily have to sacrifice something, you will have to make the magic of the original, you will have to make readers understand why this novel is considered by millions of Iranians as the progenitor of their modern prose, something unique and unattainable. And even if it's a novel, you're aware that everything about Iran is political, so much so that readers who choose to read your translation will do so not only to abandon themselves to a narrative, but because they still want to know more of that country, its history, its traditions, its customs.

The title is already problematic: Suvashun is the name of an ancient ritual and is untranslatable. You want to preserve it, because it is a term too full of symbols and meanings, so that you add "a Persian story" to help the future reader to orientate at least geographically. And then on for this adventure, through Simin Daneshvar's prose, simple and complex at the same time: simple, because Daneshvar was an intellectual who believed that he had to use a language as close as possible to the spoken language, in contrast to the paludated prose often incomprehensible in vogue for centuries; a political choice, a real democratic protest against an imperial and autocratic regime. Complex, because Simin Daneshvar plays with words, making it sometimes impossible to explain the different layers of meaning in a footnote or glossary. And because the story runs between a maze of customs still alive in contemporary Iran, where many terms are highly connotative, so as to require to be "dissolved" in favor of readers, even the most consumed.

Since the eighties, Suvashun has been translated into seventeen languages, with two versions in English, and many linguists, semiologists and literary critics of Iran have analyzed some of these texts to reach the implicit conclusion that it is a virtually untranslatable novel, raising it to the stature of the Hafez songbook (the archetype of untranslatability), thus consecrating it to the empyrean of Persian literature.

The beauty of Suvashun lies in its being always alive, in the ability to represent a necessary reconstruction of the twentieth century historical-cultural continuity of Iran, cloaked in pathos and divine beauty.

Anna Vanzan

Milan, Francesco Brioschi, 2018 (from Suvashun, Tehran, Khwarezmi, 1969)