Hitchcock/Truffaut in Farsi: 4th edition (out of six or seven) |
For the previous posts [here and here] about translating Anglo-American or French film culture in Iran, I mostly focused on journals. Now I would elaborate more on the unauthorized translation of the major and minor film books.
The rules of the game are more or less similar to those of journals. The names who make it to the translations are a combination of current trends (Slavoj Žižek), cult figures (Jean-Luc Godard) and the essential texts (David Bordwell/Kristin Thompson).
The translators are whether the per-revolutionary cinephiles, now trying to retain the memories of a cinephilic haven via written text, or a new generation of one-off, clandestine translators who are often young university graduates, showing their passion for a filmmaker
or writer by translating them. The latter group always starts on
its own, without having a contract or handshake with the publisher, and of course with no guarantee on
publishing the finished work or passing the labyrinth of censorship.
Is there any financial motivation behind this? Based on some statistics, personal observations and conversations with those who do it, I would say no, at least, for the translator who is always the sole driving force behind this cultural reproduction. The publishing industry in any format, whether book or journal, has been one of the key victims of the post-sanction Iran, if not mentioning the ruined economy of Ahmadinejad's Iran. During the eight year of Ahmadinejad's presidency, the systematic rape of the culture was facilitated by eliminating subsidies to the cultural products. One of the first outcomes was a sudden increase in the price of paper. This affected the publishing industry to the extent that the number of book readers went down the lowest in recent history.
To make sure that the publishers are completely defeated, censor was tightened to its most suffocating in recent memory. "We specialize in art and literature," says Farkhondeh Hajizadeh, an Iranian writer and publisher, "that's exactly the area that's problematic for officials, not physics and chemistry. Our books have been either banned, or they have faced censorship after a year, or they remain suspended." [1] In addition to that, just recently, the licence of some of the publishers who had expertise in publishing film books, like Nashr-e Cheshmeh, was suspended or revoked. This new decision by censorship was similar to what happened to Jafar Panahi: it's better to dry the fountain rather than monitoring and censoring every drop of water coming out of it.
To make sure that the publishers are completely defeated, censor was tightened to its most suffocating in recent memory. "We specialize in art and literature," says Farkhondeh Hajizadeh, an Iranian writer and publisher, "that's exactly the area that's problematic for officials, not physics and chemistry. Our books have been either banned, or they have faced censorship after a year, or they remain suspended." [1] In addition to that, just recently, the licence of some of the publishers who had expertise in publishing film books, like Nashr-e Cheshmeh, was suspended or revoked. This new decision by censorship was similar to what happened to Jafar Panahi: it's better to dry the fountain rather than monitoring and censoring every drop of water coming out of it.