History and Politics in Translation: Mirza Saleh Shirazi’s Safarnameh

This paper examines the relation between translation and the formation of the modern Iranian political and literary cultures through a reading of Safarnameh, a travel document written by Qajar statesman Mirza Saleh Shirazi. My analysis foregrounds translation as a historical and cultural practice that reaches beyond the linguistic transposition of texts and concerns the potentiality of linguistic and cultural traditions to open to and articulate difference and thereby reencounter and regenerate themselves. I situate Mirza Saleh’s travel writing within an emerging genre and in the context of the Perso-Russian wars of 1804-13 and 1826-28. I argue that Mirza’s travelogue demonstrates the relationship between the navigation of linguistic and textual boundaries in translation to the drawing of geopolitical borders of empires and nations, as well as the temporal boundaries between epochs and traditions. It paradigmatically captures how translation as a literary activity emerges in relation to, or at times as one with, a historical and political practice. Translation enters and reveals historical crises and deformations, as well as efforts of regeneration and renewal, in light of what can be recursively identified and traced as novel cultural and political forms. Through an examination of the travelogues within their historical context, my paper highlights the geotectonic historical and political forces that operate within the discursive use of language and come to surface in works of translation such as Mirza’s Safarnameh.