Leo Tolstoy’s novel “Anna Karenina” translated into Persian: On Kazar Simonyan’s strategy

   Leo Tolstoy’s novel “Anna Karenina” has been translated into Persian several times. Such attention to the Russian classical text was (and still is) far from accidental. Among the many reasons for such a close interest in it by the Persian reader public, one can single out the “women’s question”. In a Muslim country, to which Iran officially belongs, the position of women in society is linked to the rules of Sharia – a codified set of legal norms, governing the diversity of social relations. A woman, according to Islam, is endowed with a large number of positive rights (contrary to the extremely popular opinion about her complete lack of rights, the inability to decide her own fate, which is caused mainly by regional traditions, called “adats” in Arab-Muslim theology). At the same time, the most important duty of every Muslim woman who is married is her respect for the spouse, loyalty to him, if he really keeps the family hearth and it is not proved in a certain order to the contrary. Hence, it is absolutely clear that the novel, which discusses the burning, ever-relevant issues of marriage and family vicissitudes, cannot but arouse a steady interest among enlightened Iranian readers. Of all the Persian translations, we focus on the translation of Kazar Simonyan, an ethnic Armenian who lived in Iran and spent a significant part of the 1950^s, when the translation of “Anna Karenina” was created, in prison for political reasons (participation in the nationalist antigovernment movement). Translated by K. Simonyan, the book was first published in 1956 in Tehran in in the publishing house “Gutemberg”, and then in a series of “Cheap Books for Everyone”. The article discusses some of the problems of this translation as a literary text: the ratio of accuracy and freedom of expression, semantic transformations, the adequacy of understanding and reflection of Leo Tolstoy’s ideas – in short, everything that somehow refers to the concept of “the originality of the translator’s interpretation”. Since it was impossible to present all the collected analytical material within the boundaries of one article, we have limited ourselves to the pointwise analysis of several episodes from Leo Tolstoy’s work.

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