Language: Persian

Jane Eyre translation: 1950

An Iranian journalist who became director-general of the former National Iranian Radio and Television, the first director of The Iranian Trade Union of Writers and Journalists, the cultural coordinator in the Indian Embassy in Tehran, the general director of the Iranian Queen’s Public Relations Office. He also translated Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, several books about Indian culture, Gandhi and his non-cooperation movement. He edited a glossary of journalism in Persian.

Masʿūd Barzīn’s 1950 translation is interesting as a prototype to the numerous retranslations of Jane Eyre into Persian. It is also interesting in that, although abridged, it remained the only translation available to the Persian readership for around three decades. In his brief introductory note, the translator explains that ‘he has abridged and then translated the work for several reasons. It should be noted that nothing of the matter of the story is lost; I only omitted secondary and tertiary subjects in this masterpiece which are not interesting to the Persian reader’ (p.4).

Text by Kayvan Tahmasebian