Two Themes in Bleak House (1962)

Surprise best seller fails to capture the triumph of azar nafisi's reading lolita in tehran (2003). This “memoir in books” recounting the cultural politics of postrevolutionary Iran—not exactly the subject matter that typically sends a book to the top of the literary charts—turned out to be “a bookseller's dream” (Burwell 143). It sold millions, was translated into thirty-two languages, and—perhaps most impressively—generated a critical lovefest that united neocon hawks like Bernard Lewis with progressive luminaries like Margaret Atwood. Far less surprising, however, was the familiar canard of “Oriental darkness” dominating the book's mainstream reception: the idea that non-Westerners have no literature of their own and know nothing about the Western canon. Many commentators refused to consider the radical possibility that Iranians may have already been acquainted with some canonical occidental texts. Nowhere to be found in this discussion was the name Ibrahim Younisi (1926-2012), whose fifty-year career in literary translation underscores that Iranians have long been avid readers and enthusiastic translators of world literature. Sadly, this ignorance is not limited to mainstream literary publications; John O. Jordan and Nirshan Perera's Global Dickens fails to mention that Charles Dickens's works have been in widespread circulation in Iran since the 1960s. Decades before Nafisi supposedly led her students to Western literary civilization, Younisi had translated not just Dickens but also Thomas Hardy, Henry Fielding, Shakespeare, and George Eliot. By the time of his death, Younisi's résumé included more than seventy translations, encompassing literary texts, criticism, memoir, and historical scholarship.