Da’i Jan Napelon as a Comic Masterpiece
Da’i Jan Napelon as a Comic Masterpiece
Dick Davis
I have written elsewhere[1] about the pleasures and difficulties of translating Iraj Pezeshkzad’s Da’i Jan Napelon, so here I shall confine myself to more general reflections about the novel and its possible relationships with other literary works, together with a word or two about my virtually nonexistent relationship with its author.
The huge popularity of Iraj Pezeshkzad’s great comic novel Da’i Jan Napelon in Iran and in the Iranian diaspora is undeniable—I have never met an adult Iranian who didn’t have a knowledge of at least the television serial that was based on the novel, and most will claim to have read the novel itself even if, sometimes, “a long time ago”; but in spite of all this, it often seems to me that the book has received less than its deserved recognition.
When I wrote the word “great” near the beginning of the above sentence, I wasn’t using the word loosely. Simply by virtue of what it is, comic writing often seems to us a less serious affair than more weighty and sober-faced disquisitions, including solemnly momentous novels, and this includes for many readers their evaluation of the portraits of the societies that comic novels anatomize. But this is certainly selling the genre short. Looking only at the British culture in which I grew up, Chaucer’s largely comic Canterbury Tales is certainly a more accurate and penetrating portrait of the mores of 14th century England than is his tragic novel in verse, Troilus and Criseyde, set in an imagined mythical past, for all the latter’s charm and emotional force. The Canterbury Tales is “real” in a way that Troilus and Criseyde never attempts to be; it gives us a panorama of social classes, professions, and religious avocations in late 14th century England, and it’s possible to glean many snippets of social fact from its narratives—for example that the French spoken by the English aristocracy and middle classes was different from that spoken in France, or that a total of twenty books was considered an adequate library for an educated man.
Similarly, it’s clear that Shakespeare’s comedies are a better guide to the England of the author’s time than are his tragedies; for all their fantasy and whimsy, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Taming of the Shrew, and even A Midsummer Night’s Dream are obviously, at least in part, mirrors (even if often distorting funhouse mirrors) held up to contemporary 16th and early 17th English society in ways that King Lear and Othello, equally obviously, are not. The comedies take place in a real and recognizable England; King Lear takes place in an imaginary ancient Britain, and Othello in a travelers-tales’ Venice and a vaguely imagined Cyprus, an island which Shakespeare clearly knew almost nothing about. It would be easy to multiply examples—Fielding’s comic Tom Jones is at least as good a guide to 18th century England as Richardson’s po-faced Pamela, whose story is set in a kind of sentimental wish-fulfillment world, whereas Tom Jones almost rubs our noses in the muck and mire of 18th rural century England, as well as giving us a very shrewd portrait of relations between various would-be fixed but in fact dissolving social classes. And has there ever been a more penetrating portrait of middle-class England than that we see in Jane Austen’s largely comic novels? … and so on.
The modern European novel virtually begins with one of the greatest works of the genre, Cervantes’s comic Don Quixote. In creating Don Quixote, Cervantes gave us the archetype of any number of later literary misfits and non-conformists; he is the perpetual fantasist whose delusions are more real to him than the quotidian reality in which he exists, the man whose reading has given him a world to live in that is more solid than his own real experiences and memories. The mention of Don Quixote brings us to one of the major reasons for the comic novel’s social relevance, which is the endless opportunities the genre gives for satire—of, for example, Czech nationalism and militarism (The Good Soldier Schweik), or of Russian autocracy (The Master and Margarita). Iraj Pezeshkzad’s Da’i Jan Napelon belongs, it seems to me, in the same august group as Chaucer’s, Shakespeare’s, Fielding’s, Austen’s, Cervantes’s, Hasek’s and Bulgakov’s comic—and undeniably great—literary portraits. It’s not just a funny jeu d’esprit, a literary lark, it’s a masterpiece, and I would argue a profound one, like those of the authors I have just listed.
The Good Soldier Schweik brings me to Da’i Jan Napelon specifically. As I was reading Pezeshkzad’s novel I was often irresistibly reminded of its Czech forerunner, which I had read as an adolescent in Cecil Parrot’s (truncated and somewhat bowdlerized, though at the time I did not realize this) English translation. Hasek’s Czech hero, Schweik, is a trusting, naïve, good-hearted simpleton who gets drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army during the first World War, and who becomes the servant of a number of vainglorious, self-important, swaggering military officers, whose posturings, antics, and lies he tries valiantly to back up and abet.
Once one has noticed it, the similarity of Pezeshkzad’s Mash Qāsem to Hasek’s Schweik is hard to ignore; they are both servants of vainglorious military figures, to whom their relationship seems distantly based on that of Sancho Panza to Don Quixote, and they share a kind of caricatured peasant naivety combined with flashes of equally caricatured native wit and canniness that bring them much closer to the realities of any given situation than the versions that obsess their self-important and self-deluded masters. Both simultaneously offer us a version of their circumstances that is much more simplistic, but also much closer to the truth, than that of the surrounding characters, and they share an unsophisticated propensity for telling the truth when this is the last thing their interlocutors wish to hear. They are presented as foolish but also often wise in their foolishness, so that they are, we can say, versions of that stock comic but also equivocally instructive mainstay of literature, the wise fool, as he appears in, for example, many of Iran’s Mullah Nasruddin stories. In English literature the most obvious examples of “wise-fools” are the fools in Shakespeare’s plays, who like Mullah Nasruddin often show themselves to be far more understanding and sagacious than the more sophisticated and supposedly cleverer social superiors with whom they interact.
Much later, once I had decided to attempt to translate Da’i Jan and I began reading everything I could find about the novel’s author, I learned that Pezeshkzad had in fact translated Hasek’s novel into Persian, which obviously accounted for the intermittent but still fairly frequent family resemblances between the novels. Just in case anyone thinks that I am mentioning this as some kind of diminishment of Pezeshkzad’s achievement, I would point out that this conscious or unconscious mining of others’ works for one’s own ends is something that has always been done by all authors without exception, including and perhaps especially, by all great authors. I have looked for Pezeshkzad’s translation of Schweik but been unable to find it; I presume, given Pezeshkzad’s impeccable French and (I would guess) his ignorance of Czech, that the French version of The Good Soldier Schweik, in the translation by Benoit Meunier, was the text from which he worked.
Da’i Jan is set in Iran in the second World War, and it’s instructive to compare it to another major Persian novel also set in the second World War, Simin Daneshvar’s Savūshūn. The major differences between the novels are not only those of genre (one comic and one indisputably serious), but also of setting; Da’i Jan takes place in Tehran, Savūshūn largely in the countryside near Shiraz, and while the representative of the peasantry in Da’i Jan (i.e., Mash Qāsem) is stereotypically comic, the peasants in Savūshūn are treated, like virtually all the novel’s characters, with a kind of fastidiously respectful compassion and empathy. Even so, we can say that the “realism” of Daneshvar’s novel is almost as equally literary as the comic caricatures of Pezeshkzad’s; Daneshvar’s villagers are drawn from life, but they are also drawn from literature, particularly Russian literature, and I would guess probably most particularly from Tolstoy. And as a novel Pezeshkzad translated, Hasek’s Good Soldier Schweik, can occasionally be discerned as a kind of ghost in Pezeshkzad’s narrative, so the presence of a novel Simin Daneshvar translated, Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country, which deals with the effects of apartheid in South Africa, can also sometimes be discerned in Savūshūn (this is especially true of the novels’ closing pages). Both novels depend heavily, for their techniques and effects, on literatures that precede them. As the novel was still a relatively new (at the outside a little over a hundred years old) genre in Iran when they were written, their debts to non-Iranian literature are fairly obvious, but equally obviously they also develop local Iranian literary traditions. In Da’i Jan’s case for example, the comic caricatures of rū’ḥawz̤ī performances, and also scurrilous satire like that by Obayd-e Zakani as well as the prose romances of the 19th century (Amir Arsalān is specifically mentioned in the novel’s opening pages). Comparatively, in Savūshūn, the tradition of pand / andarz literature, as exemplified by, for example, the Shirazi author (and Savūshūn is set in and near Shiraz) Sa’di informs much of the story-telling, and of course Savūshūn’s most obvious and compelling literary source is the Shahnameh, the legend of Seyavash, and the folklore that grew up surrounding it. A particular Iranian influence on both novels, one that has not been especially remarked on perhaps because it is so pervasive in Iranian novels of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, is that of Hedayat’s Būf-i Kūr, which was written more or less as one long feverish quasi-nightmare in which “truth” is revealed. A nightmare in which truth is obliquely or directly revealed became, for some decades, almost a sine qua non in any “serious” Iranian novel.
Savūshūn is in some sense written against the tradition Hedayat established (it is realist / literal where Hedayat is phantasmagorical / surreal, moral where Hedayat is at best amoral, and it deals with the realities of village and peasant life whereas Hedayat’s novel is about a déclassé disintegrating aesthete), nevertheless it includes the all but obligatory truth-telling dream towards its end, when the heroine Zari dreams of her husband’s death. In Da’i Jan, a novel that could hardly seem further from Hedayat’s preoccupations as they are displayed in Būf-i Kūr, the narrator’s confusedly surreal feverish nightmare towards the novel’s end is also a truth-telling dream that shows him the event he has long dreaded (his beloved Layli’s marriage to the odious Puri) as occurring before his horrified eyes. As in Savūshūn, this feverish sleep is the culminating moment that resolves the fraught emotional tension that has run through the whole work, and both Zari and Pezeshkzad’s narrator (in his case after a second bout of fever) awake to a quieter but for them far emptier world once the event their nightmares revealed is over.
Whilst I was working on my translation of Iraj Pezeshkzad’s novel, I was living in the United States while he was living in France, and our relationship, if it can be called that, consisted almost entirely of emails, postcards, and the odd phone call. I wrote initially to ask him if I could have his permission to translate his novel and he answered granting me this permission with two conditions. The first was that I complete the work within two years (I later learned that this was because a French translation had been begun but never finished, but although it wasn’t finished the translator was unwilling to say that it wouldn’t be finished at some point, so that Pezeshkzad was left unsure of whether he should accept someone else’s offer to do the work, or not). The second was that I should send him my translation seriatim as I completed each chapter; this I later learned was partly to “check” the translation for accuracy, but also to see that I was in fact working on the book as I had said I would. It turned out that the “checking” part of this condition was something of a sleight of hand, as Pezeshkzad’s command of English, though I didn’t know this at the time, was certainly not adequate for such a task. When I learned this, I realized that the “checking” had been something of a joke on his part, one I perhaps should have expected from an author famous, precisely, for his jokes. I sent him chapters for a while, as he had stipulated, and each time I received in return a laconic postcard saying he was satisfied with what I’d sent. After a while I sent chapters at wider intervals (two or three or four at a time) and always received virtually identical responses. Eventually I stopped sending chapters altogether until the whole work was completed.
Once I had started work on the translation, one thing soon became plain: Pezeshkzad was very keen that the novel “work” in English, that it have as much impact as possible, and to this end he was quite happy to have parts of the manuscript tweaked in order to suppress specifically Iranian details so that comic moments could come across more forcibly, “unfiltered” through a non-English reference. A minor example of this occurred in my translation of the very first sentence when the narrator says he falls in love on the 13th of Mordad which, it is implied, is an unlucky day. Pezeshkzad was aware that Friday the 13th is considered to be an especially unlucky day in anglophone cultures and he asked me to insert “Friday,” which isn’t in the Persian, into the sentence in order to emphasize how very unlucky the day was, and he was also happy for me to turn Mordad into August despite the fact that the two don’t wholly overlap. Later on, he suggested I turn all the references to mullahs to references to ayatollahs, as the word ayatollah was at that time a well-known word in English and one with very negative connotations, but for some reason I baulked at this. In general, I tried to hew as closely as I could to the Persian, and not take such liberties except at his express suggestion. I also learned that he had been present at the making of the television series based on his novel, and as anyone who knows both is aware, there are quite important differences between the novel and the series, especially as the work comes to an end. It turned out that all these changes were sanctioned by Pezeshkzad (either suggested by him, or agreed to when they were suggested by the director or actors), and this seems of a piece with his advice to me that I bring features or moments into the translation that would make it work better in English, though I should emphasize that I hardly ever did this, as I wanted the work to be as much as possible just as it was in Persian. Just occasionally I would add in a phrase that clarified something that might otherwise be unclear to an anglophone reader (for example, I added a sentence to the effect that Assadollah Mirza’s frequent interjections of “Moment!” were pronounced in the German way, with the accent on the second syllable, rather than in the first as in English), and Pezeshkzad said he was more than happy for me to do this kind of thing, indeed encouraged me to do it.
It turned out that we met only once, at a symposium on his work, and my admiration for him, together with the fact that, naturally, many people crowded around him monopolizing his attention, meant that we didn’t exchange many words—mostly expressions of mutual regard as far as I remember, and not much beyond that. One thing the translation did give me though was that it marked the beginning of my relationship with Mage Publishers; Mage have published all my translations from Persian since this moment, and my great good fortune in this regard is not the least of the many pleasures that engagement with Iraj Pezeshkzad’s novel has brought me.
Dick Davis is emeritus Professor of Persian at Ohio State University. He is the English language translator of Iran Pezeshkzad’s Da’i Jan Napelon (Mage Publishers, 1996; Random House, 2006) as well as of numerous volumes of Persian poetry, the most recent being Nezami’s Layli and Majnun (Penguin Random House, 2020; 2021) and The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women (Penguin Random House, 2019; 2021).
[1] The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation, ed. Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi, Patricia Higgins and Michelle Quay (Routledge, London and New York, 2022), 16-19.
