The Role of Intellectual-translators in the Reception of Sartrean Existentialism in the Pre-revolutionary Iran

Abstract

Existentialist discourse is one of the major foreign discourses that dominated the intellectual life of Iran for decades. In pre-revolutionary Iran, Existentialist discourse, itself a dynamic, complex and sometimes contradictory discourse, served different and sometimes contradictory purposes in different political and social contexts. From the very beginning, when Sartre was introduced to Iran, his multifaceted figure attracted a variety of intellectuals, writers, and translators with different purposes. The translators of Sartre's works during this period were mostly intellectuals or professional writers who actively engaged in translating Sartre's works or works on Existentialism as a form of political activism to challenge or support the dominant political ideology of their time. Among the translators of Sartre's works, two translators, Sadeq Hedayat and Mostafa Rahimi, respectively, played an effective role in the reception of Existentialism as an absurdist philosophy in the 1940s and as a political ideology in the 1960s. This paper aims to examine the professional profile of these two translators and their translations in order to explain their role in the reception of Existentialism in pre-revolutionary Iran, especially in the 1940s and 1960s.