Reza Seyed-Hosseini, who has died aged 83 after many years of illness, worked indefatigably to bring western literature to an Iranian audience. He translated numerous works of foreign fiction from Turkish, French and English into Farsi, including novels by Albert Camus, André Gide, Jack London and Marguerite Duras. Equally convinced of the need to translate the works of emerging Iranian authors for a western readership, he once said: "It is indigenous literature than can become global. It is only through this literature that new things can be told to people."
Modern Iranian society, he argued, had lost its historical appetite for literary fiction, and concomitantly, the art of analysis and evaluation. The tendency of the authorities to embargo publications, often after having seemingly approved of them; the stringent censorship of elements considered undesirable; and the proliferation of black-market copies of imported novels, combined to produce an incoherent literary scene that lacked integrity and, perhaps mostly importantly, a critical readership.
"Since people don't trust books anymore, it is the journals that are keeping literary culture alive," Seyed-Hosseini wrote. As editor of the magazine Sokhan for many years, he presented an amalgam of critiques, essays and sketches and occasional contributions by members of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature. His most important contribution to the emerging Iranian canon during the latter half of the 20th century was Literary Works, published in 1955. A two-volume compendium on western literature, translated into Farsi, the book was amended over time, running to 13 editions. He was equally committed to compiling the exhaustive Contemporary Encyclopaedia, aided by a team of Italian and French researchers and professional translators. The reference book contains brief summaries of 20,000 seminal works of literature selected from a host of countries.
Born in 1926 in Turkish-speaking Ardabil, in north-west Iran, Seyed-Hosseini studied distance telecommunications at Tehran's College of Post and Telegraph before moving to Paris to continue his higher education. For six months he took classes at the University of Southern California in filmmaking before returning to Iran, where he worked for more than 50 years. For five years he taught at the Theatre School of the Niavaran Cultural Complex in the Shemiranat district of Tehran.
Reza Seyed-Hosseini was born in 1926, and died on May 1. His wife, a son and a daughter survive him. One son died in 2003.
* The National
