Censorship Evasion and Fiction Translation in Afghanistan
Date and Time
Location
PERSIAN AND PERSIANATE STUDIES
SPEAKER: Bezhan Pazhohan, Harvard University
As one of the dominant discourses and a repressive act, censorship is articulated and manifested in everyday practices; however, diverse strategies have been used to escape censorship or repression since ancient times. The following questions were answered in this paper: How has censorship been practiced in Afghanistan? Were there cases (if any) where translators avoided censorship in translation? How and in what domains have translators avoided censorship in translation? What were the strategies adopted, and how frequent were they? What were the motivations behind the evasions?
To that end, translations during 1933–2021 were analyzed using the researchers’ developed taxonomy for detecting translation strategies and censorship evasion instances. It seems that the types of censorship imposed vary and shift as the governmental administrations changed. In addition, censorship evasions have occurred in different domains of Afghan society. Moreover, Clause Structure Change was used frequently, and Cultural Censorship Evasion overrode other censorship evasion types that were identified from data. It is concluded that state codes and the types of regimes have prompted censorship evasions to a great degree.
About the Speaker
As a linguist and scholar of Persian language and literature, Dr. Pazhohan's work bridges the fields of language teaching and the politics of literary translation. With graduate training from Allameh Tabataba'i University, and over a decade of teaching experience at Yale University and Kabul University, he has developed a research focus on the intersections of language, culture, and power in contexts of conflict.
Dr. Pazhohan's dissertation, "Eluding Censorship in Translations of Contemporary Fiction into Persian in Afghanistan," explores how Afghan translators creatively navigate sociopolitical constraints, revealing the cultural and political dimensions of translation in a conflict zone. His is now working to expand this research into a book that delves deeper into the role of translation in shaping cultural narratives and identities under censorship.
Co-sponsored by the Aga Khan Fund for Iranian Studies.