Razieh Araghi
PhD Candidate
Comparative Literature
University of Michigan, US

Abstract

Barbara Godard described feminist discourse as “an emancipatory practice, a political discourse directed towards the construction of new meanings [that] is focused on subjects becoming in/by language” (44). Godard explains that a feminist text should create space for new meanings and subjects that are marginalized in the society due to patriarchal oppression. Furthermore, she states that feminist discourse creates a radical space through disturbing the dominant language and discourse. According to Godard, translation, in this theory of feminist discourse, is production, not reproduction since the feminist translator creates new meanings. Thinking through this theory, I argue that Simin Daneshvar, the famous Iranian author, through her translation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter created a new space for the marginalized feminist discourse in the male-dominated literary canon of twentieth-century Iran. Through her own words in the preface and the changes she made in the process of translation, Daneshvar tried to produce an “ideal” woman.

Across the nineteenth century, translation was a growing industry in Iran. During the modernization period, many authors started translating a variety of books from different languages for the sake of participating in national modernization. Works of translation created new sources that disrupted the existing paradigms of originality and translation. Among these sources of narratives of modernity, women’s fictional writings, either in short story, novel, or translation, like that of Daneshvar offer us an alternative history of modernity that fulfills what was left unsaid by the male-dominated literary canon.

Bio

Razieh Araghi was born in Iran, Tabriz. She studied her Bachelor’s degree in English Language and Literature at the University of Tabriz. She moved to the United States in 2015 to continue her studies abroad. She finished her Master’s degree in English Literature at Texas State University. In 2019, Razieh started her PhD studies at the University of Michigan in Comparative Literature. Her research interests are in the areas of translation, gender, and genre studies in the 19th and 20th centuries in Iran and Turkey. She has presented her work at various conferences, including European Colloquium on Translation and Gender (5th edition). This summer, she will be learning Ottoman Turkish and exploring some archives on Turkish women writers in Istanbul.