“The Laughing Philosopher” in a Persian Costume

What happens to Whitman when he enters Iran? What does the Persian Whitman look like? What does his Persianness or his foreignness tell us about Whitman, Iran, and the interaction between the two? This chapter answers these questions to elaborate on the dialogue created between American poetry and contemporary Iran through translating Whitman.

Studies of the reception of a writer in another culture primarily deal with the translation of the works into the target language. Such studies usually ignore the translation of the writer's image. This chapter focuses on the translation of an American writer's image into a contemporary Iranian context. In this study, “image” refers both to visual representations, such as pictures or photographs, and the mental conceptions held in common by members of a group, such as is the subject of imagology.

This chapter studies Whitman's reception in relation to the common image of the poet in contemporary Iran and the current sociopolitical and literary discourses. The objects of investigation in this chapter are two recent book-length Persian translations of Whitman published in Iran to examine the interaction of different literary and sociopolitical discourses that affect the translation of the image of the American poet into an image of a Persian Whitman.

The books chosen for this chapter are Man Vālt Vītmanam: Guzīdi-yi Shiʿrhā-yi Vālt Vītman [I am Walt Whitman: A Selection of Walt Whitman's Poems] (1390/2011) and Ey Nākhudā Nākhudā-yi Man [O Capitan my Capitan] (1389/2010). Man Vālt Vītmanam: Guzīdi-yi Shiʿrhā-yi Vālt Vītman was translated into Persian by a poet, Mohsen Towhidian (1985–). Towhidian's translation, a monolingual edition published in Tehran in 2011, is the third book-length translation of Whitman published in Iran. It contains fortyfive poems. The book has 120 pages and provides the reader with a one-page introduction by the translator in which he refers to the “unconventional,” “mysterious and colorful” world of Whitman followed by the poems translated into Persian. The book ends with a chronology of Whitman's life and three photographs supposedly of Whitman, one of which is actually of Robert Frost.

Ey Nākhudā Nākhudā-yi Man was translated into Persian by Farid Ghadami (1985–), a writer, literary translator and critic. Ghadami's translation, a monolingual edition published in Tehran in 2010, is the second book-length translation of Whitman published in Iran. This volume belongs to a series called “Literature of Protest.”