Full Reviews of Daneshvar's
Playhouse
Publishers Weekly (September 1, 1989)
In five intriguing stories, the formal detachment of Daneshvar's prose reinforces
her subtle revelation of repressive features in Iranian society. The author,
one of the few wellknown women writers in Iran, is a feminist opposed to
both political tyranny and religious fanaticism, themes obliquely indicated
here. These seemingly simple stories disclose a rich culture in a time of
ferment and change, of women in chadors, held in contempt by the men who
control their lives. "Vakil Bazaar" seems innocent enough, an
everyday tale of an upperclass child let loose in the bazaar while her nanny
flirts with a shopkeeper. By the end, with the little girl lost and the
nanny passively peering around, the reader is sure that the child will never
be found, and nobody will care. In "To Whom Can I Say Hello?,"
a woman alternates between mourning the loss of her lover and her job and
worrying over her daughter, whose brutish husband has denied his motherinlaw
access to his house. The moving "Loss of Jalal" is a nonfiction
account of the death of the author's husband, a noted writer. This volume
is a valuable addition to our knowledge of Persian culture and the political
complexities of modern Iran.
Women Library Workers Journal (Vol.
14, #3, Spring 1991)
Beautiful flowing language gives these six stories a dreamlike quality.
In the author's letter, included in this edition, she says she is satisfied
with the translation. Simin Daneshvar is fluent in English but writes in
Persian. The language in each story differs depending on which character
is telling the story. In "Vakil Bazaar" the sentences are descriptive,
full of color and sound from the lost child's point of view and filled with
sensuality from the flirty maid's point of view. In "The Loss of Jalal"
the beautiful, insightful language is from the wife's point of view (the
author describes her husband's death). In the story of a lonely old woman's
memories the language is narrative, descriptive, and flowing. Each story
depicts an aspect of life in modern Iran and changes are shown through symbols
and narrative techniques. In "Traitor's Intrigue" the allegiance
of a colonel changes from Shah to Khomeini. "The Playhouse" is
a traditional Persian theatre where the actors act on many levels, real
and unreal. In "Vakil Bazaar" the wanderings of the little girl
through the bazaar is really a journey through life. Parody and humor are
found in "The Accident," a story about a young woman who forsakes
husband and children just to own a car. This is an unusual book that reflects
ideas from a rich culture written by the first published woman author of
short stories in Iran. It is a wonderful book to read.
Choice Magazine (July/August 1990)
Daneshvar (b. 1921) has a number of "firsts" to her credit. In
1948, her collection of Persian short stories was the first by an Iranian
woman to be published. The first novel by an Iranian woman was her Savushun
("Mourners of Slyavash," 1969), which has become Iran's bestselling
novel ever. The present work, a collection of five stories and two autobiographical
pieces, is the first volume of translated stories by an Iranian woman author.
It offers what translator Maryam Mafi emphasizes as a feminine perspective
in stories dealing with a little girl whose careless nanny lets her get
lost in a bazaar, a middleclass woman who ruins her family's life in her
passion for an automobile and driving; a retired army colonel who eventually
sides with religious opposition to the Iranian monarchy; a smalltime actor
hopelessly in love with a worthless young woman; and an old female servant
who has nowhere to go because her soninlaw hates her. Not tightly structured
nor stylishly told in the English translation, these stories give glimpses
of Iranian life and of the author's female perspective, and therein lies
their value. Daneshvar's autobiographical reflections on the death of her
husband Jalal Ale Ahmad and on her life as a woman writer are particularly
revealing. Appropriate for upperdivision undergraduates and general readers.
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World Literature Today (Vol 64, #4,
Autumn 1990)
Simin Daneshvar has long been recognized as one of Iran's most talented
women writers. She launched her literary career in 1948 at the age of twentyseven.
In 1969 she published the bestselling novel Savushun. Now in her seventies,
she has just completed another novel, "The Wandering Island."
Savushun will be out in English by the time this review appears in the late
autumn of 1990, but in the meantime the curious reader can sample Daneshvar's
Playhouse, a collection of short stories written over the years. The six
stories Maryam Mafi has carefully chosen and translated attest to the author's
preoccupation with realistic depictions of life in Iran.
Mafi's renditions make the stories accessible even to readers unfamiliar
with the social and cultural setting of Daneshvar's texts. Without losing
too much of the flavor of the original, Mafi has, when possible, found idiomatic
equivalents for Persian for terms and customs. Only in one instance-the
erroneous equation of the legendary bird Seemorgh and the phoenix-does her
practice become inconsistent.
The metaphor of the playhouse unites the first five stories of the collection.
Their protagonists, as in "The Playhouse," are at the mercy of
the social roles allotted to them. In the title story an actor dons a mask
every night and plays out a role that reveals nothing of his inner needs
and sufferings. His very name and identity have gradually become interchangeable
with the type he represents onstage.
The nanny of "Vakil Bazaar," the middleclass housewife of "The
Accident," the retired colonel of "Traitor's Intrigue," and
the lonely woman of "To Whom Can I Say Hello?" are all imprisoned
in metaphorical playhouses of their own. Their lives are determined by conditions
and norms over which they seem to have little control. Still,: Daneshvar
endows her characters with the ability to break out of the mold. In "Traitor's
Intrigue," for example, the colonel rejects a life of subordination
and acts according to the dictates of his own conscience. The freedom he
gains is, nevertheless, conditional and precarious.
The last piece in the collection, although autobiographical, also conforms
with Daneshvar's understanding of literature as a fusion of the real and
the fictional, the private and the public. "The Loss of Jalal"
is Daneshvar's personal account of the sudden death of her husband, the
writer Jalal Ale Ahmad, in 1969. Her private grief becomes a very public
mourning for a man who was an outspoken social critic and writer.
The volume ends with a letter from Daneshvar to her readers. At times the
letter reads like a political manifesto, spelling out the frustrations she
has had to face as a writer a university professor, and a woman living in
a patriarchal society. Her social criticism is equally directed at the West,
whose decadence she observes with horror. Nevertheless, she ends the letter
on an optimistic note: "I have great hope that my dreams will come
true, if not for my generation, then for the next." With the publication
of Daneshvar's Playhouse, her message of hope might find a larger audience.
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Journal of Iranian Studies (Vol 28,
#1-2)
There has been a growing interest in the discussion and translation of Simin
Daneshvar's works in the last few years. Maryam Mafi's translation of six
short stories and a monograph is a welcome addition. It is noteworthy that
in this selection the English reader is introduced to the works of a Persian
woman who has enjoyed recognition unknown to most male Persian writers.
Aside from the historically and socially significant place of such an author
in the gamut of Persian contemporary literature, this translation once again
exposes those crucial and controversial issues that will remain at the heart
of the practice of translation, namely, loyalty to the source text as well
as commitment to the intelligibility of the translation. Mafi's work, for
the most part, is a faithful one. It swerves from authenticity and loyalty
in those instances where an English translator has to make a crucial decision
between Anglicizing a culturally Persian element or Persianizing the English
language in order to open room for the reception of a foreign phenomenon.
Mafi often is capable of doing both, but there are instances where she makes
a simplistic choice. By doing so, she diminishes the native environment
and flavor of Persian culture for that of a clumsy and short-sighted rendition
into English. The examples of such carelessness are numerous. I will only
cite a few cases in the hope that these examples will point out the deficiency
of this translation. When Mafi confuses simorgh, the mythical Persian bird,
with the phoenix (p. 68), she chooses to bring the Persian element into
English, but fails to explain or clarify its significance. It is true that
both the simorgh and the phoenix are mythic birds, but they share little
else. Sigha has been translated as "temporary wife" (pp. 17, 103);
marriage through sigha, however, is of particular significance, and such
a translation does not impart all its religious and cultural implications.
The same is true with the translation of a "dervish's kashkul"
as a "basket" (p. 18). Though a dervish's kashkul may be used
as a basket, it is not in fact one. The kashkul has a particularly cultural
and ethnic aspect that cannot be understood without directly bringing it
into the target language. In "The Traitors' Intrigue," Mafi translates
khoms and zakat simply as "Islamic taxes," while they are, more
specifically, the Islamic version of alms and tithes. When such precise
vocabulary exists in English, a more faithful translation is possible without
footnotes. In these instances, it would have been advisable to use the Persian
noun and explain its fuller significance to the work. The translator has
done this in other places, for example, when she uses the Persian "Khanum"
in the English text, explaining its meaning in a footnote (p. 310).
There are other errors of a simpler nature which mainly point to a misunderstanding
of the literal meaning of the Persian text or a mistake in finding parallel
words in English. The error in the title of "The Traitors' Intrigue"
("Traitor's" instead of "Traitors"') could be typographical,
but considering the fact that the translated text is nicely free of such
errors, one could assume that it is a mistranslation of kha'enin (plural
of kha'en). Nakhlestanha-ye Bahmani is translated as "Bahman orchards"
(p. 34), whereas "Bahmani palm groves" would have been more accurate
and appropriate. Tigh-e khod-tarash is a razor blade, not an "electric
shaver" (ibid.), while mafatih means keys and not "clues"
(p. 36).
Questions of translation aside, the reader expects Mafi to explain the basis
of her selection of stories in the Afterword, but she does not provide one.
She speaks of the different works written by Daneshvar, but leaves unmentioned
why she has selected these six stories and the monograph. The only common
bond apparent among the six stories, with the exception of "The Playhouse,"
is that all contain central women characters. Is this the primary criterion
for the selection of these particular stories? One is left to speculate.
Instead, the Afterword gives a biographical account of the Persian author's
life and works, and in broad terms mentions the thematic concerns of Daneshvar's
stories in which are included "the lifestyles of the lower classes,
the traditional middle class, and the bourgeoisie," "the social
factors contributing to the unfortunate situation of women," and "folklore
and traditional Persian customs." The collection also includes a monograph
and a letter by the author addressed to the reader, as well as four photographs-three
of which are pictures of ancient Iranian figurines and one of the author
with her late husband, Jalal Al Ahmad. It is not clear what the relationship
is between the pictures of the female figurines and the stories selected
for this book, other than the fact that both the writer and the translator
are female and, as mentioned before, gender seems to be an issue here.
Daneshvar's Playhouse is elegantly published, its prose style captures most
of the flavor of the original text, and is above all a notable introduction
to the works of Daneshvar in English. It carries with it the sanctification
of the author.
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