THE STORY OF THE CHOPPED HEADS: MAHMOUD DOWLATABADI’S “THE COLONEL”
Abstract
The novel “The Colonel” by a contemporary Iranian author Mahmoud Dowlatabadi was published in the German language in Switzerland in 2009. Since then, it has been translated into several other European languages. In 2016, Tea Shurghaia published the Georgian translation of this novel.
The book was awarded Ian Mikhalski prize, Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters (France) and was nominated for the Asian Booker Prize.
However, it has not been published officially in Iran, because the authorities of the Islamic Republic of Iran consider the book “the most counter-revolutionary novel“.
The paper is an attempt to find out the reasons for the above-mentioned ambivalent attitude to Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s novel inside and outside Iran. Does the novel describe the events of the Islamic revolution, or is it a more global perspective?
The research has proved that the real situation described in the novel refers to the Islamic Revolution of Iran in 1979. The main characters – former colonel of the Shah’s army and his children - fall victim to the severe and merciless laws of revolution. Thus, it is natural for the Islamic government to term the novel as “counter-revolutionary“.
Yet, at the same time, the metaphorical layer of the novel, the inclusion of symbolic characters and events in the storyline, allow the perception of the novel on the universal plane.
The author draws the portraits of numerous national heroes. They perform a symbolic function and express the writer’s idea: the most outstanding offsprings of the country have never been appreciated. This is not a solely Iranian or solely modern problem.
Another aim of the paper is to analyze the Georgian version of the novel based on the principles of translation theory. With this aim, certain details of the Georgian translation are compared to other translations.
The research has yielded the following conclusion: in certain cases, the interpretation of the Georgian translator is more appropriate than the interpretations provided by the translators into other languages.
Key words: modern Persian prose, counter-revolutionary novel, the Islamic Revolution, title symbol.
