Abstract

The 20th century Iranian writer and translator Sadeq Hedayat played a key role in the modernization of contemporary Persian literature. Engaged in political struggles, he used translation to transmit the novelties of world literature to the Iranian literary space. Our reflection on the social trajectory of Hedayat lies within the purview of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theorization adapted for translation. We consider the socio-cultural situation of Iran in the twentieth century, and attempt to demonstrate the impact of Hedayat’s habitus on the transfer of the illusio of Kafka’s Metamorphosis in Persian translation.
To define our study, we present a contrastive analysis of the French and Persian translations. The modifications made by Hedayat allow us to perceive the vision he had of Kafka. These changes contribute to transform the illusio of the German text and to give it a different illusio in translation. Disparities in Persian add to this semantic shift, and as a result readers of the Persian translation do not undergo the same fictional experience as their French-speaking counterparts. In this regard, we note that it is the fictional literary illusio which is excluded from Iranian culture, independent of the disparities observed between the translation and Kafka’s novella in German. In conclusion, we propose that beyond the modifications of the translation in Persian, it is the absence of the Persian literary field and the rejection of any fictional illusio which constitute the source of dependence and absence of autonomy that is Persian culture at the time of Sadeq Hedayat.