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writer, journalist and translator.
“A room of his own” he never had, yet he was easily the most prolific and arguably the most widely read journalist and writer of modern Iran. He was a “cottage industry” unto to himself, churning out thousands of pages every year. It is estimated that for the Khandaniha magazine alone, where he worked for many years, he wrote more than thirty thousand pages.[1] Still, he died a poor man, with nothing but a small apartment—purchased through the journalists’ union—to his name. He wrote or translated, by his own reckoning, more than fourteen hundred books.[2] A journalist who tried to compile a complete list has not been able to come up with more than about one hundred fifty volumes.[3] Their subjects ranged from science fiction and mystery novels to the biography of the prophet Mohammad and the collected works of Maurice Maeterlinck.
His childhood was rather uneventful. He was born in 1895 (1274) in the city of Sanandaj to a lower-middle-class family. He was the oldest son and had a brother and a sister. His birth name was Zabihollah Hakim Elahi, and only later in life did he take the nom de plume of Mansuri. His father was a government official and led the nomadic life of a transient bureaucrat. He had no love for literature and certainly made no effort to encourage his son’s literary talents and curiosities. Zabihollah’s first school was run by French priests and thus began his interest in the French language. When the family moved to Kermanshah, a physician in the city tutored the young Zabihollah in French. He was nineteen when his father died and supporting his family became his responsibility. He was hired as a translator for a paper, and thus began the most enduring career in the history of Iranian journalism.
His most popular books were clearly the historical novels in which he mixed a dose of history with a lot of imagination to create novels that were always hefty in length and engrossing in style. At a time when new books by important writers had an initial run of three thousand copies, reprints of his historical novels sold at least a couple of hundred thousand copies. Although he was an avid fan of French history and had come to know many of its major and minor characters, he was also a nationalist with a deep interest and attachment to the history and culture of Iran. His four-volume history of Iran, entitled The Eternal Land, covered Iranian history from the earliest settlements of the Plateau to the present. In his own inimitable fashion, it combined fact and fantasy, rendering it unusable as a scholarly source, yet it was very popular as highly readable mytho-history.
Maybe the strangest twist in his strange career is the fact that he was known to have published books as translations that were actually his own creations. Their alleged authors were, like the narratives themselves, the figments of his rich imagination. There is also no doubt that on numerous occasions he took a short article and turned it into a book of several hundred pages. It is famously reported that he serialized a popular book called The Journals of Tamarlane, in His Own Words. He claimed that it was compiled and edited by a prominent French scholar and a member of the esteemed Academie Française. It recounted in great detail the daily exploits of Tamarlane, in his own voice. Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, the country’s prime minister at the time, developed a keen interest in the serial and became curious about the book. He asked the editor of the magazine that was publishing the journal—Sepido-Siyah (Black and White)—to loan him the copy of the original in French. For many a week, Mansuri prevaricated, dodged, ignored the request, and eluded the editor. Finally, he was left with no choice but to produce the book. The alleged great tome of scholarship, the basis for the story that had by then run for sixty consecutive weeks, turned out to be a small monograph of little more than twenty pages, printed in a large font usually used for children’s books.[4]
On another occasion, he took an essay by Henri Corban, the renowned French scholar, on the subject of Mullah Sadra—the great Persian philosopher of the Safavid era—and turned it into a bulky narrative. To his credit, he made the ideas of the mullah, known for the difficulty of his prose, easy and accessible. The book, like everything else he wrote, was a best seller. When Corbin heard of “his” best seller in Iran, he became interested in meeting Mansuri. When told of Corbin’s wish, Mansuri is purported to have declaimed in a tone of uncomfortable surprise, “That is strange. I thought he was dead.” The meeting, of course, never took place.[5]
One can suggest several possible cultural sources for this trope of self-effacement. In an interview, Mansuri was asked why he insisted on translating, or more accurately, why he insisted on calling his work translation. He responded by referring to his early encounters with some of the great classics and how, “Faced with so many major works of genius, I thought of myself as too minor in comparison.”6 In fact, he was unfailingly humble in demeanor and in his sense of his own importance. He never referred to himself as an author or writer but in self-deprecatory terms like “mere scribe” or “writing wage-earner.”
At the same time, his attempt to emphasize the Western authorship of his works may well be related to the social malaise of the time that afforded undue value to all that was Western and denigrated as inferior and insignificant anything that was “native.” It mattered little whether the subject was a refrigerator or a short story. If it was made in the West, it was superior. Mansuri’s proclivity for claiming European authorship for works that were primarily his creation was, in this sense, a form of packaging and promoting his native commodity. He was apparently ready to “camouflage his self”[7] in order to cater to the society’s penchant for purchasing “imported” goods.
Finally, his self-denial might well have resulted from the conspiracy of silence that was in force about his work. In spite of being the most widely read writer in modern Iran, or, in the words of one critic, Iran’s sole “best-selling author,” he was not taken seriously during his lifetime. The few essays that were written about him were invariably critical, if not condescending.8 The only exception came from the Union of Iranian Journalists—an organization he had helped create and whose first president he had been—which dedicated a hall to his name and a night to celebrate his journalism. He lived to be ninety, and of those years seventy-two were spent in journalism. To the Iranian intellectual elite he was an oddity, a subject of ridicule, rather than an object of intellectual or artistic curiosity. Furthermore, Iran’s postwar culture of criticism had an almost obsessive preoccupation with what it called “high” or “committed” art. What people actually read—the authors, the magazines, all of popular culture—was virtually never discussed. Mansuri was at best merely an author of “pulp fiction.”
His peculiar style of translation, where he read a chapter or an essay then put it aside and began to re-create it in his own words and from his prodigious memory, afforded a certain legitimacy to this policy of silence about his work. On a couple of occasions, when his translations were subjected to rigorous examination, they were found lacking in precision or any pretense of fidelity to the original.9 Although French was his main language, he also translated from English, Arabic, even German. When translating from these languages, it was apparently enough for him, and for his readers, to give a general sense of what the original was about. He gave new meaning to the age-old dictum that all translations are acts of treason.
Mansuri, magnanimously oblivious of this conspiracy of critical silence, continued to write relentlessly until the last few days of his life and created what can only be called a gargantuan opus. He was a writer of ascetic habits. He woke up around four in the morning, and after a couple of hours for breakfast and dressing, walked to his work. He was an avid walker; even when he lived far from the magazine office where he worked, he insisted on walking there. He never had a briefcase and instead used a nylon shopping bag in which he put not only his papers and manuscripts, but his lunch or fruit as well.
For much of his life, he was a vegetarian. He was of middle height, with a boxer’s nose. He had indeed boxed in his youth and claimed to have been a national champion. Although he had a balding head and tiny eyes that hid behind his heavy eyelashes, for decades he insisted on using a photo taken during his youth when he seemed ensnared in the aura of the James Hadley Chase gangster novels he had been translating. In his beloved though belabored photo, he sports a homburg, tilted slightly to the right; he wears the dark suit that remained a habit of his lifetime, and a white shirt, another permanent fixture of his attire. A shadow on his left gives the photo an ominous air of mystery. Although he wore his dark suit to work everyday, once he arrived at the office of the magazine for which he worked, he took his pants off and sat behind his desk in his pajamas pants, white shirt, and an old threadbare tie. He had few friends, and even in that small circle he never talked of his private life. Few of his colleagues had ever met his wife or their two children.
He proudly declared that for forty-two years he had never set foot in a theater. Films are vapid, he said, because the quality of the writing is poor. He was an uncompromisingly private man, with no passion except writing. Writing seemed to be the elixir of his life, the ultimate refuge from all the difficulties and indignities daily life offered him. Nor was he ever a government employee, he proudly declared.[10] He once lamented, “I have never fallen in love,” since writing left no room for love.[11] In a culture where Bacchanalian excess and indulgence seemed like a requisite part of a writer’s life, no one had ever seen him drunk, or even drinking. He even refused coffee or tea. He once admitted to a colleague, however, that in his youth he had not only drunk but dabbled in opium as well. Soon, however, he realized that both were impediments to his work, and he quit.[12]
At work, he hunched over his creaky wooden desk, invariably piled high with magazines of different kinds and languages, and worked incessantly for fourteen to sixteen hours. All his life he wrote with a traditional metal-tipped pen that he dipped in his trademark blue ink. Editors who had worked with him for many years talked of never having seen him cross out a word or a sentence he had written. Since he was usually paid by the page, he developed a habit of writing in large letters, using just three to five words per line, and between ten to fourteen lines per page. Even his paragraph breaks were invariably arbitrary, driven less by grammar than by increasing the number of pages. Large letters and more than ample distance between words did not help to make his notoriously illegible handwriting easy to decipher. It was rumored that he wrote in a cipher that only typesetters could decode!
If the dictates of economy and the necessity of providing for his family drove his penchant for prolonging his narratives, it also cost him a fortune in the long run. He was forced to sell his books and stories by the page, forfeiting all future royalty claims on them. Furthermore, much of what he wrote was for the pages of Khandaniha, and in return for a monthly pittance, he relinquished all future rights to them.13 During the years after the revolution, when for reasons that have yet to be fully studied there was a frenzy of interest in all he had written, his royalties could easily have provided him with luxurious comfort. Instead, he received nothing from them, and thus until the last days of his life, even when his hands could no longer hold a pen, he was forced to work.[14]
Another of his famous tropes for making the narrative longer was explaining the obvious. Again, in the words of an editor who worked with him for many years, “if he wrote Paris, he would invariably add, usually in a parenthesis, capital of France, and if he wrote France, he would for sure add, a country in western Europe, a neighbor of Germany, where once the Gaelic nations ruled and de Gaulle was its president for a while.”[15] Of course, the range of his information and thus the variety of what he wrote about was truly encyclopedic in nature. In fact, encyclopedias were his constant companions. He read them voraciously and wrote about everything from the land reform in Guatemala to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin to the life of a platypus.[16]
In all he wrote, what mattered to him most was narrative suspense, the ability to pull readers in and keep them interested in the next issue. Like Scheherazade, whose life depended on her ability to keep the king interested in the next night’s story, and who succeeded in keeping him guessing and anticipating for “a thousand and one nights,” Mansuri’s livelihood depended on his ability to bring readers back to the magazine or paper the next day or the next week. Brevity was not the soul of wit for him, but the wages of sin. By all accounts, few in the modern history of Iran can match his success. Many a magazine owed its very existence to his serials and essays. Rumor had it that Khandaniha, Iran’s equivalent of Reader’s Digest, was so totally dependent on his stories that the magazine publisher, Aliasqar Amirani, in anticipation of Mansuri’s death, had accumulated three sacks full of his unpublished manuscripts to run after he passed away. Before that eventuality, the revolution came, the magazine was confiscated, and the publisher was sent to the firing squad.
When he wrote on topics like science, medicine, or philosophy, or when he was creating his historic characters, Mansuri’s work was surprisingly well informed. In the words of a contemporary historian, “I could never quote his works, but I could also never do without them.”[17] His photographic memory allowed him to marshal an impressive array of minutiae that enriched his narratives and afforded them fascinating, highly readable backgrounds.
In the last three decades of his life he stayed clear of politics, but he had been an active nationalist in the aftermath of World War II. As he proudly declared, when Tehran was occupied, the Iranian radio station often read on a daily basis three of his political analyses. During the 1940s, he worked with several political papers. Among them was the controversial paper, Bakhtar-e Emrooz, edited by Dr. Hoseyn Fatemi. Contrary to his image as a man constitutionally averse to risks and confrontations, Mansuri worked with Fatemi all the way to the coup of August 1953, when Fatemi, who by then was also Iran’s foreign minister, was arrested and later executed. If in the early phase of his career he concentrated on mysteries and crime stories, and if in the next phase he became more interested in politics, the third and most productive phase of his career was given to writing historical novels and translating scientific tracts. He developed a keen interest in medicine, magic, and voodoo. It was in the heyday of his preoccupation with magic that he predicted the exact time of his own death. “I shall die when I am eighty,” he declared with the certainty of someone who knows the mysteries of “that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.”[18] He missed his own prediction by ten years.[19]
from:eminentpersians
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Vedat Günyol
manouchehr hezarkhani
fereydoun badrei