Lost in the Middle: How Russian Masterpieces Reached Persian via French
That is, when a Tehrani reader in the 1940s was leafing through Anna Karenina, he probably did not think that the sentences before him had traveled twice: once from Russian into French and a second time from French into Persian. This double journey is not merely a bibliographic footnote; it is something that has taken up residence in the book’s prose and has shaped the tone of Tolstoy and Chekhov for several generations of Persian speakers.
Why Did French Become the Gateway to Russian Literature?
In Iran in the second half of the nineteenth century, French was the language of the new institutions: Dar al-Funun, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the press, and missionary schools. Anyone who wanted to read a foreign text usually knew French and did not know Russian. Moreover, French editions of Russian writers were abundant and inexpensive in Paris and Istanbul, while access to Russian printings was virtually nonexistent. As a result, translators of the Qajar and early Pahlavi periods took the same route they had taken earlier with Hugo and Dumas: French mediation. From the 1950s onward, a second path opened as well, and a number of translations were made from Constance Garnett’s English translations—a three-language chain that many readers remained unaware of.
What Is Lost at Each Link in the Chain
No translation is a “copy” of the original text; an intermediary translation, however, is filtered twice. The most important things that are lost along the way are as follows:
- Verb aspect: Russian makes a precise distinction between perfective and imperfective action; French has no such tool, and Persian produced via French inevitably smooths over this difference.
- Syntax: Tolstoy’s long, intricately suspended sentences become short and “logical” in French, and in Persian the same shortened version is usually reproduced.
- Style: The French translation tradition, from the age of the seventeenth-century “beautiful translations,” considered beauty superior to fidelity; this habit spread into Persian as well.
- Length: Some French editions were abridged or edited for the market, and the Persian reader effectively became acquainted with a shortened Tolstoy.
Tolstoy in Persian: Clerical Eloquence Replaced His Incisive Prose
Tolstoy’s prose unceremoniously lines up details: eyes, hands, sweat on the forehead—and then suddenly a philosophical sentence. A translator working from French had two temptations at once: to smooth out broken sentences and to add explanatory connectives. The result was a more eloquent Tolstoy who sometimes thinks more than the original and sees less. Words of French origin also entered the text silently and took the place of concrete Russian words.
Every intermediary is a filter; and the most dangerous filter is the one whose existence the reader never learns of.
Chekhov: The Subtext That Became Interpretation
The damage is clearer in Chekhov’s case. Chekhov’s humor does not come from carelessness; it comes from dry, ruthless precision; his narrator is almost toneless and leaves judgment to the reader. When this tonelessness travels from one language to another and then into Persian, the main danger is that the translator, in order to “clarify” the sentence, adds a tone that was not there in the original: surprise, regret, or sweetness. Many Persian readers came to know Chekhov as a “sad” writer, while his rule-bound and bureaucratic humor had been muted in intermediary versions. The clipped dialogues and pauses between the lines were also tidied up and turned into complete sentences—precisely the thing that is the backbone of his plays.
| Layer | Intermediary Translation | Direct Translation |
|---|---|---|
| Syntax | Fluent, shorter sentences; less suspension | Preservation of the long sentence and original structure |
| Verb aspect | Disappearance of the perfective/imperfective distinction | Reflection of the Russian aspectual distinction |
| Dialogue | Tidied up, with added explanation | Clipping, pause, incompletion |
| Vocabulary | French loanwords and Latin-derived equivalents | Equivalents close to the Russian semantic field |
Can the Chain Be Compensated For?
Yes, and part of that has been done over the past three decades. A new generation of Russian-speaking translators, including Abtin Golkar, has read the text from the original—translating Chekhov’s stories and plays—and has given Persian a drier, more precise tone. Readers can also act more knowingly: look at the source language listed in the book’s publication details, place two translations of the same short story side by side, and see which sentences have been made “tidier” in one of them. For today’s writer, the main lesson is simple: tone is not a decorative feature; it is part of the meaning, and every layer of translation shifts it slightly.
Conclusion
Russian literature reached Iran by a road that was neither short nor transparent. This road introduced Tolstoy to us as more eloquent and Chekhov as more sorrowful than they are in the original, and in exchange it did something that might never have happened without that mediation: it brought these two writers into the language and mind of the Persian reader. Knowing this chain does not take the text away from us; it only teaches us to read with more open ears and, before judging the “tone” of a Russian writer, to ask ourselves how many times the version in our hands has traveled.
