Mohsen Ebrahim, Iranian writer and translator who for many years translated the best of Italian fiction into Persian. This modest translator died unexpectedly at the age 58 less than a month ago. He had written this note on the globalization of literature for IBNA, not long before he passed away.

IBNA: Mohsen Ebrahim; translator of Italian literature: These days we hear of the globalization of Iranian literature and the reasons why the affluent Iranian literature has not been able to reach the status that it deserves in the world. Among the different reasons, one which is less important is the obsoleteness of Persian language in comparison to international languages such as English. But this is just an excuse since language is only the means for conveying meaning from one person to another and if those meanings are valuable they will go from one person to another like Hafiz's poetry.

In Hafiz's time we have had poets that now we know nothing about them, perhaps because they did not have that quality that would have made them everlasting. Even now there are poets and writers who are dead before they die, so we can not blame anything on language. The number of speakers on other languages, except for Chinese and Arabic, is not that many either. For example Italian has only 70 million speakers. French and German too are only spoken in a limited area. The number of the speakers of Spanish language is greater than the mentioned languages and is 250 million; whereas only in Iran we have 70 million speakers of Persian language. Persian is also spoken Afghanistan and Tajikistan.

Many of the languages are spoken only within the borders of their country of origin. For example Tosko is only spoken by 3 million Albanians. But the literature of all these countries can become global by passing through the medium of English language. So the language and the number of its speakers are not the only factor, publishers, translators and promoting the books are also very important in making the literature global.

The publishers of cultural-economic institutes should be able to invest on they cultural products, sell their books and reinvest the profit on other cultural products.

The translators of Persian language also play an important role. After the revolution many translators have been introduced who can translate from Persian into English and vice versa. They have translated many good works and the world also expect to read good Iranian literature since in the past 30 years there has been much negative publicity about Iran and now the western world is curious about our literature. I believe all the tools are ready for introducing Iranian literature to the world but we still do not do much about it.

There are two reasons:

The first one is that the Iranian literary atmosphere has been unable to rear writers with global viewpoints, and even if it could the inappropriate economic condition made those who had a global viewpoint produce popular works that are only to be used here. Before the revolution, to break the censorship the writer had to look for codes and metaphors to convey his meaning and such limitations were the reasons he could not get that global viewpoint that made his work everlasting.

It is no longer the time for being Hafiz. Complexities, conceits and far fetched metaphors that our literature experienced long time ago are no longer interesting to the free world. It is not important to the readers in the free world if our writer and poet want to talk in the language of codes. Today's literature is the literature of openness and of pure literary value even for issues that have been much written about like love, waiting and death. No reader is interested to decode the closed language of our writers and the age for such writings is over. So in the cycle of the production of a literary work which starts with the writer and goes through cultural institutes and people like the publisher and the translator to finally reach the reader, the one who makes the final decision is the reader. If the writer is writing for his own heart (which he is allowed to) he cannot ask why the world does not like his book. If he is writing for the international readers he should have global viewpoint and an understanding of the world.

By the first generation of emigrant writers, even though they were placed in the free world, no prominent work was written because of the limitations that had been placed in their minds and in their works that have been much welcomed the political aspect is stronger than the literary one. Not much can be expected of this generation. They have done their best within their experience and within the political atmosphere of the country.

Iranian literature will reach important values through the second generation, because this generation is free from the limited viewpoint of their fathers and has also inherited the valuable Iranian literature of the past. To have a global literature we must have a global viewpoint and not a global language.

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