Aria Fani | University of Washington (original) (raw)
Online Publications and Media by Aria Fani
Book Reviews by Aria Fani
In this brief review, I explain why The Pearl of Dari charts a new terrain in Persian literary hi... more In this brief review, I explain why The Pearl of Dari charts a new terrain in Persian literary historiography.
A review of Rajeev Kinra's Writing Self, Writing Empire
Papers by Aria Fani
PMLA, 2024
If the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries established the high-water mark of Persianate transregio... more If the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries established the high-water mark of Persianate transregionalism, then the following two centuries were defined not so much by the undoing of this world in toto, but by its redeployment and regeneration in new cultural guises and (trans)national contexts. This article begins by exploring the resonances of the Persianate world to assess how a cosmopolitan ecumene appeared in new guises in the modern era. The article then transitions to contemporary times to explore the entangled literary-cultural relationships between Afghanistan, Iran, and Tajikistan to ascertain the validity and possibilities of employing a Persianate/Persophone paradigm.
Philological Encounters, 2023
This article analyzes a little-known practice called iqtirāḥ-"test of poetic talent" or "poetic c... more This article analyzes a little-known practice called iqtirāḥ-"test of poetic talent" or "poetic competition"-that proliferated in twentieth-century Persian-language periodicals. It examines two case studies: one in Tehran in 1928, which mythologized Nādir Shah (r. 1736-1747), a Turko-Persian monarch, as a national hero, and one in Kabul in 1932, which eulogized Muḥammad Nādir Shah (r. 1920-1933), a ruling monarch at the time, for restoring an Afghan homeland imagined as unified. The article frames iqtirāḥ as an afterlife of Persianate modes of sociability that were reconfigured by modern periodicals to serve the demands of romantic nationalism in the twentieth century. By critically examining the ways in which poetic composition interacts with the formation of a national historiography, this article also shows that any clear-cut distinction between the two is arbitrary.
Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation, 2022
The early twentieth century was a period of monumental cultural and social change in Persian-spea... more The early twentieth century was a period of monumental cultural and social change in Persian-speaking lands. The proliferation of print culture and the rise of educational institutions set in motion a series of conceptual transformations of such central ideas as farhang, tārikh, and adabiyāt, notions that defy self-evident and clear-cut translations. It is widely acknowledged that translation played a vital role in trafficking ideas and practices that constituted a new literary culture centered on the ethos of colonial modernity. Yet, the operative assumption has been that translation as a concept remained unchanged. As a result, we know extremely little about the peculiarities of early twentieth-century translation culture in Persian-speaking societies. How did late nineteenth and early twentieth-century intellectuals understand and think about translation as a conceptual category? Early twentieth-century Persian-language journals from Afghanistan and Iran provide a particularly rich case for such an inquiry. This chapter aims not only to reexamine common assumptions about translation and multilingualism in this period, but also to produce more robust categories of analysis.
Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, 2021
This essay argues that literature as a conceptual category is not timeless or universal. In the c... more This essay argues that literature as a conceptual category is not timeless or universal. In the case of Iran and Afghanistan, the formation of literature, or adabiyat, was the outcome of early twentieth-century associational culture that introduced new ways of naming, understanding, and appreciating textual production. These new ideas became conventionalized in the framework of literary journals that flourished in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Briefly put, this essay provides an illustrative account for the historical process by which Persian literature, as a modern concept, became institutionalized.
Iran Namag, 2020
This article comprises three methodical vignettes centered on Mohamad Hosayn Forughi’s life, his ... more This article comprises three methodical vignettes centered on Mohamad
Hosayn Forughi’s life, his little-known Literary History, and the
broader cultural context to which it belonged. The brief biographical
section places the author in the emerging ecosystem of literary institutions
and journals in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, illustrating
his liminal position in the Qajar court and his role in creating a national
pedagogy based on which generations of Iranian students were
educated. The second section focuses on introducing his Literary
History by outlining its different sections, explaining what they mean
and why they were important to the formation of literary history as a
modern genre. The last vignette addresses the common historiographical
impulse of overestimating works of prominent intellectuals by
demonstrating how Forughi’s Literary History belonged to a much
broader social context in which similar ideas were in circulation.
Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism, 2020
This chapter examines the reliance of asylum as a legal category on a transnational social-scient... more This chapter examines the reliance of asylum as a legal category on a transnational social-scientific vocabulary since its codification into international law in 1951. It makes a case for the use of a vernacular, non-imported lexicon in order to directly speak to the cultural-linguistic register of claimants who are unfamiliar with asylum legal jargon. This chapter draws on my experience as a Spanish-language interpreter and translator for the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant (EBSC), a non-profit organization that advocates for the rights of asylum-seekers and refugees in the San Francisco Bay Area. I situate the EBSC's establishment within the broader context of theSanctuary Movement in the early 1980s which mobilized human rights advocates in California and Arizona in response to US-supported atrocities in El Salvador and Guatemala and in defiance of US asylum practices. I analyze the cases of two Central American asylum-seekers with whom I worked at EBSC to demonstrate the extent to which a transnationally imported legal lexicon fails entirely to connect with their lived trauma. To make a credible and compelling asylum claim is to be made visible within a legal category. In that vein, I argue that the field of translation and interpretation can help bring asylum as a legal category into closer alignment with the cultural-linguistic register of asylum-seekers who come from El Salvador, Guatemala, and many other countries.
Iranian Studies, 2020
How could one translate into any European language a Persian poem as culturally and aesthetically... more How could one translate into any European language a Persian poem as culturally and aesthetically embedded as this hemistich by Hāfez: beh may sajjādeh rangin kon garat pir-e moghān guyad. This is the central question Mohammad-Rezā Shafiʿi-Kadkani addresses in his essay titled “On Poetic Untranslatability.” For Shafiʿi, translation is primarily a function of cultural—and not linguistic—affinity. Therefore, he argues that Hāfez’s poem is all but untranslatable in European languages given their fundamental cultural difference from Persian. This article critically engages Shafiʿi’s essay by outlining and analyzing the set of problematic assumptions embedded in its rubric of untranslatability. It places Shafiʿi’s view on translation in conversation with theorists of untranslatability in comparative literature and translation studies. Ultimately, it outlines why untranslatability is not a useful conceptual framework for the analysis of linguistic and cultural difference.
This note examines how an iconic Arabic phrase such as the basmala has been translated into Persi... more This note examines how an iconic Arabic phrase such as the basmala has been translated into Persian and English. These translations reflect different aesthetic, political and cultural aspects of this phrase. Outside of its Qur'ānic context, embedded within it, the basmala has extended cultural meanings. An equivalence-based approach to the translation of formulaic expressions would not suffice for the translation of the basmala in literary contexts.
Episodic approaches may point in the direction of general trends by examining the ideological pre... more Episodic approaches may point in the direction of general trends by examining the ideological presuppositions of dominant literary discourses. However, they necessarily reduce the aesthetic complexity of literary movements and fail to critically consider poets whose vision may not directly speak to common literary trends. Poets such as Bizhan Jalāli (d. 1999) have been rendered standalone figures whose visions of poetic modernism are understood only in the context of their " non-adherence " to the dominant literary discourse of their time or are overlooked altogether. This essay examines how the literary life and reception of Bizhan Jalāli intersect with the intellectual and aesthetic underpinnings of committed circles in the 1960s and 1970s. The twists and turns of Jalāli's poetics do not speak directly but rather laterally to committed articulations of modernism. The article returns Jalāli to his literary milieu by analyzing the way his work has been received by poets, anthologists and critics. As the contours of literary commitment drastically change in the 1980s and 1990s, another image of Jalāli emerges: once marginalized for his " non-commitment, " he is championed as an " apolitical " poet.
This paper considers the poetry of Khalilullah Khalili and Parwin Pazhwak as part the transnation... more This paper considers the poetry of Khalilullah Khalili and Parwin Pazhwak as part the transnational poetic movement known as "Shi'r-i muqawimat."
Books & Book Projects by Aria Fani
Iranian Studies, 2022
Persianate pasts die hard. Despite the birth of nation-states, advent of colonialism, rise of nat... more Persianate pasts die hard. Despite the birth of nation-states, advent of colonialism, rise of national literatures, and emergence of new global technologies, the Persianate connections defining the texts, idioms, and vocabularies that bound together large swaths of Islamic Eurasia throughout the early-modern period continued to shape and inflect cultural and literary production in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries established the high-water mark of Persianate transregionalism, then the following two centuries were defined not so much by the undoing of this world in toto, but by its redeployment, reimagining, and regeneration in new cultural guises and (trans)national contexts. Exchanges across borders and languages helped to articulate new meanings for Persian texts. Educational practices in British India and journalistic ones in Central Asia provided venues for Persianate norms to be preserved, contested, and consecrated. The internationalism of the Soviet East created a new avenue for dynamic conversations about the nature of Persianate heritage and traditions. While new national practices and political ecologies were taking shape across Afghanistan, the Caucasus, Iran, and Central and South Asia, refashionings of Persianate pasts persisted. It is an exploration of such refashionings and the people who participated in them that form the contents of this special issue.
by Rebecca Ruth Gould, Sarah Irving, Eylaf Bader Eddin, Moses Kilolo, Aria Fani, omid mehrgan, Brahim El Guabli, Sahar Fathi, Mehrdad Rahimi-Moghaddam, Manuel Yang, Michela Baldo, Bidisha Pal, and Partha Bhattacharjee
The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism provides an accessible, diverse, and in many r... more The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism provides an accessible, diverse, and in many respects ground-breaking overview of literary, cultural, and political translation across a range of activist contexts. This volume brings together case studies and histories of oppressed and marginalised peoples from more than twenty different languages, ranging across Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. Part One considers the theoretical foundations of translation and activism. Part Two examines the figure of the interpreter as an activist. Part Three examines the figure of the translator as an activist. Part Four is comprised of autobiographical reflections by translators and writers who bear witness to the stories of oppressed peoples. Part Five engages with translation and activism from a range of legal perspectives focusing on human rights. Part Six introduces a range of case studies of translations into vernacular languages. Part Seven situates translation and activism in the context of migration, with particular attention to refugee experience. Part Eight examines the role of translators in shaping revolution. As the first extended collection to introduce translation and activism from a systematically global perspective, this handbook will serve as a useful guide to translators, writers, scholars, and activists seeking to better understand the agency of language in bringing about political change.
Thesis Chapters by Aria Fani
In this brief review, I explain why The Pearl of Dari charts a new terrain in Persian literary hi... more In this brief review, I explain why The Pearl of Dari charts a new terrain in Persian literary historiography.
A review of Rajeev Kinra's Writing Self, Writing Empire
PMLA, 2024
If the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries established the high-water mark of Persianate transregio... more If the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries established the high-water mark of Persianate transregionalism, then the following two centuries were defined not so much by the undoing of this world in toto, but by its redeployment and regeneration in new cultural guises and (trans)national contexts. This article begins by exploring the resonances of the Persianate world to assess how a cosmopolitan ecumene appeared in new guises in the modern era. The article then transitions to contemporary times to explore the entangled literary-cultural relationships between Afghanistan, Iran, and Tajikistan to ascertain the validity and possibilities of employing a Persianate/Persophone paradigm.
Philological Encounters, 2023
This article analyzes a little-known practice called iqtirāḥ-"test of poetic talent" or "poetic c... more This article analyzes a little-known practice called iqtirāḥ-"test of poetic talent" or "poetic competition"-that proliferated in twentieth-century Persian-language periodicals. It examines two case studies: one in Tehran in 1928, which mythologized Nādir Shah (r. 1736-1747), a Turko-Persian monarch, as a national hero, and one in Kabul in 1932, which eulogized Muḥammad Nādir Shah (r. 1920-1933), a ruling monarch at the time, for restoring an Afghan homeland imagined as unified. The article frames iqtirāḥ as an afterlife of Persianate modes of sociability that were reconfigured by modern periodicals to serve the demands of romantic nationalism in the twentieth century. By critically examining the ways in which poetic composition interacts with the formation of a national historiography, this article also shows that any clear-cut distinction between the two is arbitrary.
Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation, 2022
The early twentieth century was a period of monumental cultural and social change in Persian-spea... more The early twentieth century was a period of monumental cultural and social change in Persian-speaking lands. The proliferation of print culture and the rise of educational institutions set in motion a series of conceptual transformations of such central ideas as farhang, tārikh, and adabiyāt, notions that defy self-evident and clear-cut translations. It is widely acknowledged that translation played a vital role in trafficking ideas and practices that constituted a new literary culture centered on the ethos of colonial modernity. Yet, the operative assumption has been that translation as a concept remained unchanged. As a result, we know extremely little about the peculiarities of early twentieth-century translation culture in Persian-speaking societies. How did late nineteenth and early twentieth-century intellectuals understand and think about translation as a conceptual category? Early twentieth-century Persian-language journals from Afghanistan and Iran provide a particularly rich case for such an inquiry. This chapter aims not only to reexamine common assumptions about translation and multilingualism in this period, but also to produce more robust categories of analysis.
Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, 2021
This essay argues that literature as a conceptual category is not timeless or universal. In the c... more This essay argues that literature as a conceptual category is not timeless or universal. In the case of Iran and Afghanistan, the formation of literature, or adabiyat, was the outcome of early twentieth-century associational culture that introduced new ways of naming, understanding, and appreciating textual production. These new ideas became conventionalized in the framework of literary journals that flourished in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Briefly put, this essay provides an illustrative account for the historical process by which Persian literature, as a modern concept, became institutionalized.
Iran Namag, 2020
This article comprises three methodical vignettes centered on Mohamad Hosayn Forughi’s life, his ... more This article comprises three methodical vignettes centered on Mohamad
Hosayn Forughi’s life, his little-known Literary History, and the
broader cultural context to which it belonged. The brief biographical
section places the author in the emerging ecosystem of literary institutions
and journals in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, illustrating
his liminal position in the Qajar court and his role in creating a national
pedagogy based on which generations of Iranian students were
educated. The second section focuses on introducing his Literary
History by outlining its different sections, explaining what they mean
and why they were important to the formation of literary history as a
modern genre. The last vignette addresses the common historiographical
impulse of overestimating works of prominent intellectuals by
demonstrating how Forughi’s Literary History belonged to a much
broader social context in which similar ideas were in circulation.
Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism, 2020
This chapter examines the reliance of asylum as a legal category on a transnational social-scient... more This chapter examines the reliance of asylum as a legal category on a transnational social-scientific vocabulary since its codification into international law in 1951. It makes a case for the use of a vernacular, non-imported lexicon in order to directly speak to the cultural-linguistic register of claimants who are unfamiliar with asylum legal jargon. This chapter draws on my experience as a Spanish-language interpreter and translator for the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant (EBSC), a non-profit organization that advocates for the rights of asylum-seekers and refugees in the San Francisco Bay Area. I situate the EBSC's establishment within the broader context of theSanctuary Movement in the early 1980s which mobilized human rights advocates in California and Arizona in response to US-supported atrocities in El Salvador and Guatemala and in defiance of US asylum practices. I analyze the cases of two Central American asylum-seekers with whom I worked at EBSC to demonstrate the extent to which a transnationally imported legal lexicon fails entirely to connect with their lived trauma. To make a credible and compelling asylum claim is to be made visible within a legal category. In that vein, I argue that the field of translation and interpretation can help bring asylum as a legal category into closer alignment with the cultural-linguistic register of asylum-seekers who come from El Salvador, Guatemala, and many other countries.
Iranian Studies, 2020
How could one translate into any European language a Persian poem as culturally and aesthetically... more How could one translate into any European language a Persian poem as culturally and aesthetically embedded as this hemistich by Hāfez: beh may sajjādeh rangin kon garat pir-e moghān guyad. This is the central question Mohammad-Rezā Shafiʿi-Kadkani addresses in his essay titled “On Poetic Untranslatability.” For Shafiʿi, translation is primarily a function of cultural—and not linguistic—affinity. Therefore, he argues that Hāfez’s poem is all but untranslatable in European languages given their fundamental cultural difference from Persian. This article critically engages Shafiʿi’s essay by outlining and analyzing the set of problematic assumptions embedded in its rubric of untranslatability. It places Shafiʿi’s view on translation in conversation with theorists of untranslatability in comparative literature and translation studies. Ultimately, it outlines why untranslatability is not a useful conceptual framework for the analysis of linguistic and cultural difference.
This note examines how an iconic Arabic phrase such as the basmala has been translated into Persi... more This note examines how an iconic Arabic phrase such as the basmala has been translated into Persian and English. These translations reflect different aesthetic, political and cultural aspects of this phrase. Outside of its Qur'ānic context, embedded within it, the basmala has extended cultural meanings. An equivalence-based approach to the translation of formulaic expressions would not suffice for the translation of the basmala in literary contexts.
Episodic approaches may point in the direction of general trends by examining the ideological pre... more Episodic approaches may point in the direction of general trends by examining the ideological presuppositions of dominant literary discourses. However, they necessarily reduce the aesthetic complexity of literary movements and fail to critically consider poets whose vision may not directly speak to common literary trends. Poets such as Bizhan Jalāli (d. 1999) have been rendered standalone figures whose visions of poetic modernism are understood only in the context of their " non-adherence " to the dominant literary discourse of their time or are overlooked altogether. This essay examines how the literary life and reception of Bizhan Jalāli intersect with the intellectual and aesthetic underpinnings of committed circles in the 1960s and 1970s. The twists and turns of Jalāli's poetics do not speak directly but rather laterally to committed articulations of modernism. The article returns Jalāli to his literary milieu by analyzing the way his work has been received by poets, anthologists and critics. As the contours of literary commitment drastically change in the 1980s and 1990s, another image of Jalāli emerges: once marginalized for his " non-commitment, " he is championed as an " apolitical " poet.
This paper considers the poetry of Khalilullah Khalili and Parwin Pazhwak as part the transnation... more This paper considers the poetry of Khalilullah Khalili and Parwin Pazhwak as part the transnational poetic movement known as "Shi'r-i muqawimat."
Iranian Studies, 2022
Persianate pasts die hard. Despite the birth of nation-states, advent of colonialism, rise of nat... more Persianate pasts die hard. Despite the birth of nation-states, advent of colonialism, rise of national literatures, and emergence of new global technologies, the Persianate connections defining the texts, idioms, and vocabularies that bound together large swaths of Islamic Eurasia throughout the early-modern period continued to shape and inflect cultural and literary production in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries established the high-water mark of Persianate transregionalism, then the following two centuries were defined not so much by the undoing of this world in toto, but by its redeployment, reimagining, and regeneration in new cultural guises and (trans)national contexts. Exchanges across borders and languages helped to articulate new meanings for Persian texts. Educational practices in British India and journalistic ones in Central Asia provided venues for Persianate norms to be preserved, contested, and consecrated. The internationalism of the Soviet East created a new avenue for dynamic conversations about the nature of Persianate heritage and traditions. While new national practices and political ecologies were taking shape across Afghanistan, the Caucasus, Iran, and Central and South Asia, refashionings of Persianate pasts persisted. It is an exploration of such refashionings and the people who participated in them that form the contents of this special issue.
by Rebecca Ruth Gould, Sarah Irving, Eylaf Bader Eddin, Moses Kilolo, Aria Fani, omid mehrgan, Brahim El Guabli, Sahar Fathi, Mehrdad Rahimi-Moghaddam, Manuel Yang, Michela Baldo, Bidisha Pal, and Partha Bhattacharjee
The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism provides an accessible, diverse, and in many r... more The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism provides an accessible, diverse, and in many respects ground-breaking overview of literary, cultural, and political translation across a range of activist contexts. This volume brings together case studies and histories of oppressed and marginalised peoples from more than twenty different languages, ranging across Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. Part One considers the theoretical foundations of translation and activism. Part Two examines the figure of the interpreter as an activist. Part Three examines the figure of the translator as an activist. Part Four is comprised of autobiographical reflections by translators and writers who bear witness to the stories of oppressed peoples. Part Five engages with translation and activism from a range of legal perspectives focusing on human rights. Part Six introduces a range of case studies of translations into vernacular languages. Part Seven situates translation and activism in the context of migration, with particular attention to refugee experience. Part Eight examines the role of translators in shaping revolution. As the first extended collection to introduce translation and activism from a systematically global perspective, this handbook will serve as a useful guide to translators, writers, scholars, and activists seeking to better understand the agency of language in bringing about political change.
This symposium features emerging literary scholarship working across and beyond the framework of ... more This symposium features emerging literary scholarship working across and beyond the framework of national literature in order to examine the histories of literary modernity that took place under different names and yet drew on shared vocabulary across the Persianate world around the turn of the twentieth century. The past decade has witnessed the emergence of a growing conversation around the 'Persianate world,' an expanse of Eurasia defined by shared Persian aesthetic, literary, and moral forms (adab) which served as a field of connection and exchange from roughly the ninth to the nineteenth centuries. Some have conceived of the Persianate as a zone of connectivity tied to the cultural/literary capital of Persian language, while others have taken adab and a shared Persian literary canon to be the locus of the Persianate. Bringing together scholars working across Persian, Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Urdu, Armenian, and other languages, this symposium moves the conversation around the Persianate forward in time to address questions of literary modernity. How can the shared textual traditions of the Persianate offer an alternative model to the framework of comparison rooted in European national literatures? What happened to the interconnected, multilingual Persianate zone and its shared intellectual vocabulary in the wake of modern literature? How did the politics of disaffiliation and national distinction shape literary form and language ideology in the Persianate long nineteenth century?
شیرازه, 2024
بيشترِ پژوهش هايي كه به دگرگوني ها و تحولات سياسي، فرهنگي و اجتماعي ايران در يكصد وپنجاه سال اخير... more بيشترِ پژوهش هايي كه به دگرگوني ها و تحولات سياسي، فرهنگي و اجتماعي ايران در يكصد وپنجاه سال اخير پرداخته اند، آنهـا را در چـارچوب نظريـة مدرنيزاسـيون مورد نقد و ارزيابي قرار داده اند. كتاب حاضر با پرداختن بـه دولـت ملّـت سـازي از طريق گشودنِ بحث ملّيگرايی، استثنايي است بر اين قاعده. اگر به هنگام اهتمام براي مدرن كردن سازوكارهای حكمرانـی كـشور، نگاه فعالان بيشتر به سمت بيرون (عمدتاً به سمت كشورهاي غربي و گاه به تجربه كشور ژاپن ) و الگوبرداري از تجارب ديگران بود، تـلاش و تكـاپو بـراي دولـت - ملّتسازی نگاهی درونی بود و بيش از هر چيز منوط به تمركز بر داشته های كشور و به آن عوامل و عناصری كه توانسته بودند پيوند هـاي ملّـت را مـستحكم سـازند. تلاش و تكاپويی كه مستلزم تمركز بر ميراث بود به معنای يادمانهـا و سـازه هـای تاريخی و همزمان منوط به توجه و تأكيد بر ميراث فرهنگي و برجسته كردن آن از طريق بزرگداشت حاملان تاريخي اش و نهايتـاً جـد وجهـد بـراي تبـديل تجـارب همزيستي ملّت به يك ميراث. موضوع كتاب حاضر بررسی تبعات پويايي های ايـن نگاه به درون است با بررسي حوزهٔ زبان و ادبيـات فارسـي در ايـران و افغانـستان. حوزهای كه نه تنها ميراث مشترك فرهنگي اين دو كشور كـه تمـامي سـاير جوامـع فارسی زبان به شمار می آيد. معمول آن است كه الزامات ملّی گرايـی همـه جوامـع را به سوی پشت كردن به بيرون و روی آوردن به درون ترغيب كنـد. كتـاب حاضـر از طريق استناد به مراودات گسترده و گفت وگوهاي انتقادي ميان ادبـا، روشـنفكران و صاحبنظران دو كشور افغانستان و ايران نشان می دهد كه از قـضا ملّـی گرايـان دو كشور بودند كه بيش و پيش از همه در اين برههٔ سرنوشت ساز به استقبال شناسايی نقطه نظرات يكديگر شتافتند.
University of Texas Press, 2024