Untranslatable Modernity: Modern Literary Theory from Europe to Iran

ended

It is widely accepted that the advent of modernist Persian literary theory, its transformation from traditional Persian rhetoric (balagha) into modern criticism (qeritiqa) in the mid-nineteenth century, has been driven by translation and adaptation of European literary critical norms. While the central role of translation in importing and transmitting critical norms has been emphasized in the studies of the evolution of modern Persian literary theory, these studies usually take translation for granted without noticing that a major part of this literary and critical modernity has been shaped around the challenges of untranslatability. TRANSMODERN will innovatively theorize the shaping of modern Persian literary criticism around untranslatability through a close study of a wide range of Persian publications in literary criticism, from 1860s to 2000s. This will permit an understanding of how European critical norms affected Iranian literary systems and how the adaptation of these norms to a radically different non-European poetics transforms the way we think about and experience the literary form. TRANSMODERN will deploy and combine methods of archival research, translation methodologies and comparative qualitative and quantitative analysis. The main outputs will be three peer-reviewed articles, a critical monograph and academic and public presentations.