Renarration through Translation: The Case of Islam in Iran

The present paper draws on narrative theory and the notion of “framing through paratextual devices” to focus on Persian translations of a history book entitled Islam in Iran and it examines paratextual material in one of its chapters in order to see how the translation renarrated the events elaborated in the original for the Persian-speaking readers through such devices. To do so, the original text and the paratexts in the translated version were compared and analyzed in the section in question to see how each of them had narrated the controversial events and how the translation renarrated such events. Here, new patterns of causal emplotment and consequently the new narratives in the translation were specified. The results showed that the translation’s paratextual material challenged the author’s viewpoints in four different ways: 1) questioning the author’s viewpoints and disputing their validity, 2) accepting the author’s opinions but justifying them differently, 3) correcting the author’s mistakes, and 4) providing additional information. Accordingly, the annotations added to the translation reject the narratives of the original text of some historical events and personages and it seems that the translation renarrates them in the Persian version from the perspective of Shia Islam, coordinating them with the public and the accepted narrative of Shi’ism.