In the summer of 2022, the media company Namava, the Iranian equivalent of Netflix, premiered a series called Women’s Secret Network. The show, which mingles real-life and fictional characters in a way reminiscent of E. L. Doctorow’s work, is about a fictitious women’s organization created, in the show’s alternative history, in 1931 by the first Pahlavi government. The government advertises it as an effort to empower women, but it turns out to be a conspiracy to eliminate them from political life.
One of the show’s characters is a translator named Zabihollah Mansouri. He appears suddenly, talks about something he calls his “philosophy of expansionism” in translation, has an awkward interaction with another character, and then vanishes, never to be seen again. The screenwriters didn’t bother to provide an introduction for him because they knew it wasn’t necessary. Most people in Iran, even those who rarely crack open a book, know who Mansouri is, though he died almost forty years ago.
That’s odd, of course. Full-time translators are not typically national celebrities. But Mansouri has been so well-known for so long in Iran that Iranians barely pause to appreciate how unusual his fame is. And the story of what Mansouri achieved during his decades of work holds some important lessons for our times. The increasing automation of translation has made the figure of the translator seem to many like a quaint anachronism. But there is much more to a translator’s potential impact and responsibility than the accurate transmission of a text’s original meaning. There is no better illustration of this point than Mansouri’s exceptionally peculiar career.
i first encountered Mansouri’s work as a child. I grew up in Ahvaz, the capital city of Khuzestan, an oil-rich state in the southwest of Iran, near the Iraqi border. In September 1980, just months after I was born, Saddam Hussein declared war on Iran, his main objective being the annexation of Khuzestan. Thus began eight years of nonstop conflict. I spent my childhood hunkered down in bunkers and under staircases, hiding from the deafening roar of bombers and the hiss of missiles.
When the fighting finally ended in 1988, the people of Ahvaz emerged from several years of isolation, rubbing their eyes and groping around to relearn how to live a normal life. Some held parties, some took holiday trips, and some went to the movies. My family did very few of those things. But there was a small library near our house that had been built to serve the employees of the national oil company in Ahvaz. I initially went there to get my homework done away from my three boisterous younger siblings. But as a way to procrastinate, I picked random books off the shelves and read them for fun.
No one in my family or our neighborhood was into books, and there was no internet then. So when I looked at the shelves in the library, I had no idea what any of the books were about and knew nothing of the writers who had written them. I had no sense of good or bad literature, good or bad writing, accurate or inaccurate translation. In this total absence of guidance from the outside world, I took a quantitative approach to measuring the significance of writers: the more frequently a name appeared on the shelves, the more important the author must be. One day, I set out to survey the entire library. The result was undeniable: the most important literary figure in Iran was a translator by the name of Zabihollah Mansouri. Our little library carried far more of his titles than any other writer’s.
Mansouri aimed to entertain his least patient reader, and if he thought the writer he was “translating” had failed to do so, he would step in.
My impression of Mansouri’s importance was not off the mark. Toward the end of his life—he died in 1986—he became incredibly popular, and stayed so long after his death. His translations, which included works of fiction, science, and history written by authors ranging from Alexandre Dumas and Stefan Zweig to Henry Corbin and Maurice Maeterlinck, were almost as ubiquitous in Iranian households as the divans of classical Persian poets. Particularly during the war in the ’80s, when Iran was plagued by long power outages and many were desperate for ways to pass the time, massive tomes containing serialized translations that Mansouri had published in various magazines became huge bestsellers. At a time when the average print run for a book in Iran came to only a few thousand copies, Mansouri’s translations were published in the tens of thousands and sold out quickly. Demand for his books was so high that people would hoard copies of them and, after a title sold out, bring them to the market so they could sell them to hungry readers at a hefty markup. Several generations of Iranians, especially people like me who grew up away from the country’s literary center in Tehran, became readers on account of his work.
Mansouri was part of a tradition in Iranian culture that dates back to the early nineteenth century. In the wake of two disastrous wars with Russia that led to the losses of large swaths of Iranian territory (including modern Georgia, Armenia, and northern Azerbaijan), Abbas Mirza, then the crown prince, recognized that warding off Western aggression required the appropriation of Western knowledge and technology. The first step on that path was translating that body of knowledge into Persian. And so began a great translation movement in Iran. First, military catalogs and manuals were translated, then books about European history and politics, then Western literature and philosophy. Translators soon became a pillar of Iranian culture and have remained so ever since. And in his day, no translator was more important, or more prolific, than Mansouri.
We don’t have an accurate estimate of the number of translations he produced over the course of his long career. For years, he worked for little-known magazines that serialized novels, and in many cases, no issues of those magazines survive today. In a rare interview he gave toward the end of his life, he claimed to have translated fourteen hundred books. I never took that claim seriously, as Mansouri was prone to exaggeration. But in an essay in Meeting Zabihollah Mansouri, a collection of pieces about and interviews with Mansouri, Ali Behzadi, a well-known magazine editor who serialized many of Mansouri’s translations, estimates that throughout most of his career, he submitted up to one hundred and forty thousand words per month to his various magazine editors. Given that Mansouri was an active translator for almost sixty years, fourteen hundred books is not an entirely implausible claim.
There is, though, a catch. I have been referring to Mansouri as a “translator.” But by contemporary standards, the most popular translator in the history of Iran translated hardly anything at all. Most of his works are a hodgepodge of source text mixed with his own additions and musings, which he offered so generously as to sometimes overwhelm the original. In some cases, the author of the book Mansouri was supposedly translating didn’t even exist. He would write something of his own, then make up a French name and publish his work under the fictive author’s byline. Many would say that one of the most popular literary figures of twentieth-century Iran was a full-blown charlatan.
born in 1897 in Sanandaj, Zabihollah Mansouri was the eldest of three children. His father was a government employee, and his mother came from a highly respected clerical family in Guilan. He studied at the Alliance Française, a chain of schools that the French established in multiple Iranian cities to promote their language and culture. When his family moved to Kermanshah, the young Mansouri befriended a local doctor who was fluent in French, and under the doctor’s tutelage, he excelled in the language. Shortly after his family relocated to Tehran, his father died suddenly, and Mansouri had to give up his dream of becoming a sailor to find some means of providing for his mother and younger siblings. For this, he fell back on the main skill he possessed: his fluency in French.
In 1929, Mansouri joined the staff of Koushesh, a newly launched newspaper. He was assigned to translate crime and romance novels from French for serialization, which set him on the career path he followed for the rest of his life. After one of his serialized crime novels became a hit, he received work offers from other publications, and it appears that he accepted all of them. In the many years that followed, he seemed to do nothing but translate from French and English for a wide variety of magazine and papers, working ten to fifteen hours a day and generating thousands of pages of serializations. The books I found on the shelves of our local library were collections of that fecund magazine work.
While Mansouri began by translating potboilers and romances, his body of translations soon expanded to include science and history and, later on, philosophy. He became a household name thanks to his popular science books, above all his serialized translation of Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Bee. The magazine installments of that translation grew so popular that people lined up at newsstands every week to buy the latest issue, which was very unusual in a country that had, at the time, a very low literacy rate. Mansouri claimed that once, when he got sick and failed to publish an installment in the series, he received a call from the offices of Reza Shah, the king of Persia, inquiring about why it hadn’t appeared and when His Majesty should anticipate the next part.
At the height of his productivity in the 1970s, Mansouri worked simultaneously for as many as twenty publications. For many of them, he did more than two columns per issue. Much of his output was published in Khandaniha, which ran lengthy columns of his translations every week. Its owner allowed him to use as his office an attic space on the fifth floor of the walk-up in downtown Tehran that housed the publication.
Mansouri occupied this space over the last few decades of his life. By all accounts, it was tiny, stuffy, and packed with French books and magazines, as well as large sacks of paper. Mansouri sat down at his desk at 8:00 a.m. on the dot every morning, always in a suit, and save for lunch and a short walk, he spent his time there writing. He wrote with French ink pens, the same tools he used from the beginning of his career, because he could hold the top of a pen without having to press his fingers around the tip, which helped him conserve his energy. He wrote on lined paper, cut in half because this allowed him to write across the width of the paper without lifting his wrist and enabled him to move his hand in only a vertical direction, another ergonomic strategy.
Mansouri was obsessively private. Only a few pictures of him publicly exist. Next to nothing is known about his wife, whom he married late in life, and their two children, born when he was in his sixties. For most of his life, he lived in a small rented apartment south of Tehran, and only in his last decade did he move to a gated community in the central part of the city that offered special mortgages to writers and artists.
Surprisingly, Mansouri died a poor man, even though thousands of copies of his books were being sold in bookstores and on black markets. Throughout his working life, he lived paycheck to paycheck. He never received a dime in royalties, because he was constantly strapped for cash and sold his columns, including the right to republish them in book form, to provide for his dependents. He wasn’t even insured until very late in life, and when he finally did obtain this security, it came through the syndicate of print workers, who perhaps more than anyone appreciated his contribution to print culture in Iran.
the central question of Mansouri’s career, though, is this: What, exactly, was that contribution? It certainly wasn’t providing Iranian readers with accurate translations of Western texts. Consider, for example, his translation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.
Here are the first few lines of the novel in the original English:
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
And this is my retranslation into English of Mansouri’s version:
You, Lolita—light of my life, giving strength to my feet. Without you, I can barely move my arms—Lolita—when I try to say your name, the tip of my tongue trembles three times and hits my teeth and every cell in my body shakes up—oh, you (Lo-lee-ta), where are you? Why can’t I see you anymore?
My Lolita had a new name at each hour of the day. In the morning she was called Lo, which means a short girl, for without shoes she was 148 centimeters. Later in the day she wore pants, and they called her Lola, because somewhere in America they use the word Lola to refer to pants. In school, her classmates called her Dolly. I have no idea why they chose this nickname for her. Americans tend to pick nicknames for no apparent reason. For example, no one really knows why Eisenhower (former American president) was nicknamed Ike. But in my arms, she was Lolita and she had no other name.
Mansouri cavalierly expands and waters down Nabokov’s painstakingly constructed sentences, explaining everything without even bothering to fact-check his own explanations. His goal here seems to have been to make the text accessible to all of his readers, including the least sophisticated, by providing far more information than the original text does. In the process, he all but ignored what Nabokov set out to accomplish. (Unusually for him, Mansouri acknowledged he was doing this, writing in a preface to the text that if he committed himself to a close translation, “the Persian-speaking reader would not understand a single page of this book.”) This is the strategy he followed throughout the book, which is why he ended up producing a bloated seven-hundred-page tome that’s almost double the length of the original.
This is what Mansouri did consistently across the span of his career. He regarded himself as the provider of a unique service to his readers. He cared so much about being read by the undereducated that he frequently used colloquialisms and slang to simplify his prose and even included deliberate errors in his texts to mimic the speech of those with less formal educations. He sometimes noted to his editor in the margin of a piece: “I know this is incorrect, but this is a commonly used phrase, so I’d like to keep it.”
Indeed, by Mansouri’s standards, Lolita is a rather mild case of translator’s interference. In other translations of his, he set loose his imagination far more freely. When translating Dumas’s work, for instance, he tapped into his lifelong obsession with French court gossip and would sometimes go off on twenty-page-long digressions before returning to the novelist’s text. As a result, his version of The Three Musketeers, which is some six hundred pages long in the original French, weighs in at more than six thousand pages, published in ten volumes. When I was in middle school, I spent a whole summer reading it from cover to cover.
When he was translating novels, Mansouri was, at least, piling fiction atop fiction. But as it turns out, he took the same approach to history and science. Take his translation of Isaac Deutscher’s Stalin: A Political Biography, which the translator and editor Karim Emami highlights in his essay “The Phenomenon of Zabihollah Mansouri.” Deutscher begins the book with a pivotal moment in the life of Stalin’s father as he departs his hometown:
Perhaps in 1875, perhaps a year or two before, a young Caucasian, Vissarion Ivanovich (son of Ivan) Djugashvili, set out from the village Didi-Lilo, near Tiflis, the capital of the Caucasus, to settle in the little Georgian county town of Gori.
In contrast, here is the opening of Mansouri’s rendition:
On December 21, 1879, in a modest house in a small town near Gori, located in Georgia, a twenty-young-year-old woman began to experience labor pain.
The only thing these two openings have in common is the name of the town. In Deutscher’s account, Stalin’s father moves to a bigger city to start a shoemaking business. He marries the fifteen-year-old daughter of a poor peasant, and together they move to a small apartment on the outskirts of Gori. The girl gives birth to three children, all stillborn. The fourth one survives. At his baptism, they name him Joseph.
Mansouri, though, ignores Deutscher’s beginning and goes straight to Stalin’s birth. In his translation of a thoroughly researched biography, he writes in totally fabricated detail about Stalin’s mother’s labor pains, the arrival of neighbor women, and the conversations that took place. Stalin’s mother asks for a midwife, and the neighbors ask who should be summoned. “Martha,” she tells them. The name of Stalin’s midwife is nowhere mentioned in Deutscher’s book, and chances are it is not recorded anywhere else either.
From this, we can see how Mansouri’s mind worked. He understood his audience well enough to know that they would be bored by reading about the struggles of Stalin’s father, while an extensive, suspenseful scene of a woman giving birth after having lived through three miscarriages would hold their attention. He aimed to entertain his least patient reader, and if he thought the writer he was “translating” had failed to do so, he would step in.
How did Mansouri get away with this for so long? It’s not that no one noticed the liberties he was taking with his texts. In fact, he was accused of mistranslation many times. But he developed his own defenses. His most commonly deployed strategy was one of delay. It was not easy to access Western texts in twentieth-century Iran. If one wanted to see an original copy of something Mansouri had translated from French, one needed to know someone in France with the time and energy to comb through bookstores for it, and since he often chose obscure writers, it might be difficult to track down the work. So whenever anyone contacted him about helping them get ahold of an original text, he would respond warmly to the inquiry, promising to deliver the book but then never following through. The person would get in touch with him again, and Mansouri would repeat his promise, patiently protracting this back-and-forth until the inquirer gave up.
This was, for instance, how Mansouri put off the inquiries of Amir Abbas Hoveyda—the prime minister of Iran at the time—when Hoveyda, a cultured man who read French, had one of his deputies contact a magazine editor to get the French original of a Mansouri translation that the magazine was serializing. On another occasion, after Mansouri “translated” a book about a Shia imam, someone asked for the original, and when Mansouri demurred, the inquirer threatened him with a lawsuit. Mansouri then sent over a short article and some other books in German and Russian, which the inquirer couldn’t read.
There were moments when Mansouri’s charade seemed to have been revealed. The historian Mohammad Ebrahim Bastani Parizi tells the story of Mansouri’s translation, in 1982, of a four-hundred-page book about Mulla Sadra, the seventeenth-century thinker who is widely considered to be the greatest Muslim philosopher after Avicenna. The book, which became a bestseller in Iran, had supposedly been written by Henry Corbin, a French philosopher who was at the time the leading authority in the West on the Shia tradition of Islamic philosophy and mysticism.
Many of the Iranian literati can’t quite bring themselves to call Mansouri a forger or a plagiarist or even directly attack his legacy.
A few months after Mansouri’s translation was published, Corbin traveled to Iran. After one of his lectures, several attendees told him they had greatly enjoyed his book on Sadra. When the perplexed French thinker said he had never written such a book, they handed him a copy. Corbin leafed through it, astonished. By way of a network of acquaintances, he tried to track down the translator. Bastani Parizi agreed to deliver a message from Corbin. He went to the translator’s legendary office, that dingy fifth-floor attic in a ramshackle building on Ferdowsi Avenue, and informed him that Henry Corbin wanted to meet him.
“Is Mr. Corbin alive?” Mansouri asked, visibly shocked.
“Of course he is. Didn’t you know that?”
“I wish you told him that Zabihollah Mansouri is dead.”
One might imagine that this whole affair would have put an immediate end to Mansouri’s career, but he ultimately emerged from it unscathed, as he did from other efforts to examine his methods. The most plausible explanation is the simplest: his readers didn’t care. Any questioning of his knowledge of the French language or his commitment to maintaining the integrity of original works hardly made a dent in his popularity, and the editors who worked with him knew that.
mansouri died in June 1986. Despite, or perhaps because of, his outsize influence, the reckoning with his legacy was often fraught. “I can’t reference any of his historical works,” Parizi said, “but I can’t stop consulting them.” Parizi then drew a dubious distinction between a historian and a teller of historical anecdotes. According to him, the historian is in the business of facts, the teller of anecdotes in the business of entertainment. Mansouri was the latter, and the best at what he did. Similarly, though the poet and critic Reza Baraheni expressed anger at Mansouri’s approach to translation, he also couldn’t help but praise him: “With his unique genius, Mansouri leads his perplexed readers towards a nowhere in which they can satisfy their suppressed desires.”
Five years after Mansouri’s death, the magazine Payam-e Ketabkhaneh asked several luminaries to write notes on him, which were published under a title that neatly captured the conflicting sentiments about him: “Zabihollah Mansouri: Service or Treason?” The short columns didn’t really answer the question. Jalal al-Din Kazzazi, a scholar and translator in his own right, praised Mansouri’s books, which he had read as a schoolboy, but in the same breath stated, “I find these types of translations harmful for our culture and for the Persian language.” Lili Golestan, a prominent translator and gallerist, recalled Mansouri as a “lovely, hardworking man” who turned many Iranians into readers, while also stressing, “I wish he introduced himself as a writer, not a translator.”
As the years passed, the controversy over Mansouri’s work faded but never fully disappeared. Some twenty years after he died, the journalist Ali Akbar Ghazizadeh, in a piece for Shargh newspaper, suggested that the only way to grapple with the legacy of Mansouri was to acknowledge that he was three different people: He did translate some books, however inaccurately, which makes him a translator. He forged some books under the names of real people, making him, in Ghazizadeh’s words, an “adaptor” (which, interestingly, is the term that Mansouri sometimes used to refer to himself, on occasion describing a book as a “translation and adaptation by Zabihollah Mansouri”). And he wrote other things under invented names, which makes him a writer.
In other words, many of the Iranian literati can’t quite bring themselves to call Mansouri a forger or a plagiarist or even directly attack his legacy. Almost everyone confesses that they read him avidly at some point in their lives, spellbound by his unique voice. And I understand why. In rereading some of his work decades after my first encounter with it, I find myself appreciating Mansouri’s prose more than ever. His writing voice, which remains the same across all of his translations, has a soothing, avuncular quality. His prose offers a unique blend of melodramatic eloquence and colloquialism, replete with easily digestible phrases and comforting clichés. He also has a great sense of drama and rhythm, knowing when to ramp up the tension and when to deflate it, when to move away from the original text and when to return to it.
But his prose alone doesn’t quite explain the strange grip that Mansouri maintained on Iranian readers, elite and ordinary alike, for so long. What, then, made his translations, which often have an archaic and even mythological air, so addictive and irresistible to twentieth-century Iranians?
The most perceptive essay on Mansouri that I have read in Persian is Emami’s “The Phenomenon of Zabihollah Mansouri.” In it, Emami tries to explain what made Mansouri tick:
Through trial and error, Mansouri had learned how to keep his magazine reader engaged by summarizing the events of the last installment in the new one, just as a naqal prepares his audience for the new episode of his performance. Without a doubt, Mansouri’s greatest strength is his uncanny ability to weave a story.
The key word there is naqal.
Naqali is the live performance of stories from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, Persian literature’s greatest epic poem. The naqal is an actor-storyteller who adapts tales from that old book of kings and warriors into more prosaic and dramatic stories, then performs them before an audience, often in coffeehouses around the country.
In Iran, oral storytelling became the dominant form of entertainment in the seventeenth century, during the Safavid dynasty. This was a time of rapid urban expansion, and the formation of neighborhoods in big cities like Isfahan, Shiraz, and Tabriz led to the emergence of modern public spaces in Iran. The most popular of such spaces was the coffeehouse. Just as people today return home and put on a Netflix show, men then would retreat into coffeehouses after a day of work to drink tea, smoke hookah, and chat. Many of these places employed a naqal, who would show up in the evening to entertain the crowds with adaptations of the ancient epic.
In the cultural imaginary of those past audiences, the heroes of the Shahnameh occupied a space similar to the one Marvel superheroes occupy today. During the day, people discussed the naqal’s tales with their friends, and on the nights when their favorite warriors were to be killed, they sobbed and screamed in the coffeehouses, begging the naqal to postpone the tragedy, sometimes even offering him bribes to keep their heroes alive. This kind of theatrical performance was the most popular form of entertainment in Iran until radio and TV drove it to near extinction.
Naqali was not the same as the recitation of the text of the Shahnameh, which was an art performed by more cultured men in courts and elite circles. Naqals performed for general audiences, and since Ferdowsi’s verse is loaded with antiquated vocabulary and complex imagery, they adapted the text to contemporary prose. Most naqals wrote down their adaptations in documents known as toumar, or scrolls. Some of them have been published over the last fifty years. Close comparison with the text upon which they are based has revealed that the adaptations are quite loose; the tenth-century verse was translated to colloquial Persian, and the original stories were expanded and dramatized.
These scrolls, then, correspond to the original epic in the same way that Mansouri’s translations approximate his source materials. This is particularly notable in his translations of Dumas, who, among all the Western writers that he translated, was perhaps most similar to Ferdowsi, and whose proclivity for melodrama and larger-than-life characters provided Mansouri with ideal material. Like a naqal, Mansouri transformed Dumas’s nineteenth-century French prose into colloquial twentieth-century Persian, amped up the melodrama and the adventure, and, whenever he felt the author lost pace, raised the stakes by inserting a tense scene of his own creation. In the process, he also made sure to explain anything that might be even remotely obscure to Iranian readers, and he frequently departed from the original to rhapsodize on the salacious affairs of French royalty. He managed to intrigue readers who would have had no interest in French society or even novels generally by turning those stories into something they could easily recognize.
In this sense, Mansouri’s methods of “translation” connected him to the oldest tradition of storytelling in Iran. That is the deep chord he struck, the corner of our collective psyche he touched. He arrived on the scene just as the last generation of great naqals were on their way out, and, perhaps unwittingly, kept their art alive and attracted their audiences by using their long-honed techniques in his translations of Western literature. Reading him was, and is, akin to listening to an old man spinning tales of dead warriors and unrequited love, telling one high-stakes story after another until the listener loses track of the passage of time.
in iran today, especially in more elite literary circles, mentioning Mansouri almost always sparks a smirk. The reading culture has shifted, and his books are no longer bestsellers. Many simply laugh at his work and marvel at how a man who did what he did never got caught.
We should leave room for unorthodox philosophies of translation.
It is easy to forget, though, that before the nineteenth century, Mansouri’s methods were by no means unusual. Throughout history, many translators have concerned themselves more with broadening the horizons of their native tongue or lucidly communicating ideas they themselves found helpful than with faithfully translating a given text. The Romans translated from Greek with the express purpose of enhancing their own literature and, in doing so, showed considerable disregard for accuracy, much less for the stylistic and aesthetic qualities of the original. As Cicero said of his translations from Greek: “I did not think I ought to count them out to the reader like coins, but to pay them by weight.” This would have been music to Mansouri’s ears. A striking parallel can be found in the work of the seventeenth-century French writer François de Malherbe, who translated the letters of Seneca. Hardly anything of Seneca’s style survived in Malherbe’s work, yet his translations marked the rise of a whole new kind of French prose, a transition from the colorful, baroque style of Rabelais to the more precise and polished prose of Enlightenment writers.
It was not until the nineteenth century, thanks to a new wave of translation theory in Germany, that faithfulness to the original text became the predominant virtue for a translator. Friedrich Schleiermacher famously argued that the ideal translator “leaves the writer in peace as much as possible and moves the reader toward him,” rather than the other way around. A good translation, in other words, is one that remains as true to the original text, and its author’s intentions, as possible. In our times, we of course accept that translators will inevitably inject some of their own sensibility into a translation. But faithfulness remains the predominant virtue. As Lawrence Venuti has put it, a translation is most likely to be judged successful—“by editors, publishers, reviewers, readers, by translators themselves”—when it “gives the appearance that it is not translated, that it is the original, reflecting the foreign author’s personality or intention or the essential meaning of the foreign text.”
As machine translation grows increasingly pervasive, this emphasis on accuracy is arguably becoming even more entrenched, since machines are, or will soon be, more adept than humans at delivering word-by-word translations. And from one angle, this might seem like an obvious victory. But it’s worth wondering what we lose when all translation is strict rather than loose, and when we give up on the kind of Ciceronian idea-by-idea (or Mansouri-style story-by-story) translation that cares less about accuracy than about finding the most enlivening ways to introduce to a culture ideas, and entertainment, from other parts of the world.
In this light, Mansouri’s career, his ethical flaws and outright plagiarism notwithstanding, is more than just the story of a Borgesian character who got away with a decades-long literary scam. It is also evidence that blurring the boundary between translation and authorship is sometimes a good thing, and that we should leave room for unorthodox philosophies of translation. Mansouri, after all, provided a great service to a population that had little connection to books. Millions of Iranians, myself included, started with the easily digestible products he so abundantly produced, which enabled us to develop the taste and the appetite for richer and more complex foreign works. This was an invaluable service to our culture, and it was one that no translation machine could have ever delivered.
