The Discordant Purdah: A Study of Textual Manipulations in Two Persian Translations of The Play “Salomé”

This paper is a critical study of two Persian translations of Oscar Wilde’s playscript “Salomé”, which brings under study the issue of textual manipulations in translating the mentioned playscript from a textological viewpoint. It is to be said that the selection of the two translations under study, one by Abdollah Kowsari and the other by Abolhasan Tahami, has been based on the feature of the popularity of either the translator or the publisher and the choice of the typological items included in this study has been made on the basis of comparing the texts of both Persian translations with the original English version of the playscript “Salomé” published in 1894. The central question in this study addresses the ways by which the source text of the playscript has been manipulated in the two Persian translations, a question whose answer has been sought in three overall patterns of 1) elimination of certain parts of the English text in translation 2) addition of certain parts to the translated text and 3) distorting the stylistic patterns of the text, by looking into a sample of problematic items detected in the texts of both translations. Examining the samples drawn out in this study is suggestive of translational manipulation in both translated texts, and supports the finding that the effort by the two translators at rendering this literary playscript has made the Persian versions of the work undergo a range of undue distortions in the textual level as compared with the English text; what has brought about the textual transmogrification of the work in translation.