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Ebrahim Golestan's The Treasure: A Parable of Cliché and Consumption

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Paul Sprachman
Paul Sprachman*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Extract

Asrar-e Ganj-e Darreh-ye Jenni [The Secrets of the Treasure of Possessed Valley], hereafter The Treasure, is the name of both a novel and a film by Ebrahim Golestan (b. 1922), the important short story writer and filmmaker now living in London. Golestan made the film in the fall and winter of 1971, and later, in the summer and fall of 1974, reworked the screenplay into a novel. This perspective is critically useful, for it helps to explain the presence of certain cinematic touches in the novel's composition. But, before a review of these touches, here is a summary of the contents of The Treasure.

The action of The Treasure betrays the simplicity of a parable. While plowing his field, a poor farmer accidentally uncovers an ancient burial chamber loaded with gold artifacts. Realizing that the trove would somehow liberate him from his bumpkin existence, he brings pieces of it to a jeweler in the city.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 15 , Issue 1-4: Literature and Society in Iran , 1982 , pp. 155 - 180
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1982

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References

Notes

1. There is an unauthorized translation of the story “My Neighbor's Parrot Died” in The Literary Review, No. 1, 18 (Fall 1974), pp. 85-103. For Golestan's reaction to it and comments about him in that issue of The Literary Review, see The Literary Review, No. 1, 20 (Fall 1976): 126. Then, a translation of the story “Esmat's Journey” appears in Major Voices in Contemporary Persian Literature, Literature East & West 20 (1976): 191–195.Google Scholar And this writer's translation of The Treasure is ready for publication.

2. Golestan, Ebrahim, Asrar-e Ganj-e Darreh-ye Jenni, first edition (Tehran: Entesharat-e Agah, 1974)Google Scholar; second edition (Tehran: Rowzan, 1978). All page references are to the second edition.

3. The economy of the Persian engar khab bud va khabalud, as with many of Golestan's finely sculpted phrases, makes it difficult to translate. In the space of five words, the word khab [sleep, dream] appears twice, once in the phrase khab budan [to be asleep] and once with an adjectival tail in khabalud [sleepy].

4. Burgess, Anthony, Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), p. 136Google Scholar, comments on a similar pun used in Finnegan's Wake: “The coat of arms of the Shakespeare family, which shows as its crest an eagle shaking a spear, is a kind of pun weakened by etymology….” Another famous figure, the father of photography Louis Jacques Daguerre (d. 1851), appears anachronistically in Golestan's short story about the first family of Shi'ite Islam (ᶜAli, Fatemeh, Hasan and Hosayn), “Budan ya Naqsh Budan,” Juy-o Divar-o Teshneh (Tehran: Rowzan, 1346), pp. 125–184).Google Scholar Unlike the Bard who does not have an active role in The Treasure, Daguerre travels back in time, suffering the heat of the plains of Karbala to take the official family portrait (with lion).

5. Later on in the novel, an idyllic morning receives similar treatment:

“It was morning and a nice day. The multicolored butterflies, the mountain wildflowers, the wild mountain birds, the sunlight, the breeze, the azure sky and…what else? O yes, the sound of a shepherd's flute and cowbells came from afar…”(p. 165).

6. This is the ban or baneh tree, that is the Persian turpentine tree or pistacia acuminata, used in many parts of Iran as grafting stock for pistachio scions.

7. Located in a mountainous region in southwestern Iran and the scene of a violent clash between government troops and Tamoradi tribesmen.

8. Baraheni, Reza, Qesseh nevisi (Tehran: Ashrafi, 1969), p. 450.Google Scholar Golestan is the Persian translator of Huckleberry Finn, from which Hemingway declared “all modern American literature comes.”

9. Hemingway, Ernest, The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953), p. 402.Google Scholar

10. Golestan, Ebrahim, Maddo Meh (Tehran: Rowzan, 1969), pp. 48–49.Google Scholar

11. Levin, Harry, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (New York: New Directions, 1960), p. 88.Google Scholar

12. “Pressed it…squeezed it”: the avoidance of conjunctions accelerates the pace of this passage. In Golestan's short story, “Ba Pesaram Ruy-e Rah,” Juy-o Divar-o Teshneh, p. 197, asyndeton produces this burst of verbs: baz david amad dastamra gereft kashid goft… [my son ran again, came, took my hand, pulled, said…].

13. Creating new identities from soluble characters was part of Max Beerbohm's recipe for caricature: “The whole man must be melted down in a crucible and then, from the solution, fashioned anew,” quoted in Pritchett, V. S., The Tale Bearers (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), p. 15.Google Scholar

14. Nabokov, Vladimir, Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975), p. 120.Google Scholar

15. Occasionally, he appears as if the transformation is not quite complete, as the hyphenated Zaynalpur-Leshku'i (p. 130).