From the British Drama to Persian Storytelling: Aliasqhar Hekmat's Translation of Shakespeare's Plays

The plays of William Shakespeare were translated into Persian in the proceeding years of Iranian Constitutional Revolution. But Ali Asghar Hekmat in his Five Stories by William Shakespeare introduced a quite different translation. The play form, in the process of translation was substituted with the story form. Although of the principle aims of translation at that era was to build strong relations with the cultural horizons of the Europe, the new form of drama found storytelling form as its classical correspondence in Iran. The conventions of classical Iranian storytelling have dominated in Hekmat's translation. Such domination of old form to the new one can be deemed to be rooted in the despotic cultural context of lterary history of Iran at that time, since all the dialogic components of the plays are substituted with indirect quotations of the omniscient narrative voice. Devoid of dialogic verbal interaction of characters, the narratives of Hekmat are highly dominated with the omniscient monologic voice. The present paper is to study the components of storytelling in Hekmat's translation and investigate the discursive cultural and political context which manipulates a mimetic dramatic text into diegetic text of storytelling.