Translating Ulysses into Persian: A Century of Censorship

Translating a work that employs inventive literary techniques is an already arduous task, however, negotiating with a system of imposed censorship makes the process of translating and publishing increasingly more intricate. In this talk, Akram Pedramnia explores the challenges of translating modernist works, like Lolita, Tender is the Night, as well as Ulysses, under a system of imposed censorship and discusses the methods she employs to evade it.

Akram Pedramnia is an Iranian-Canadian author and translator. She has published three novels in Persian. Among others, she has translated F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (2009), Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (2013), and James Joyce’s Ulysses (2019). She is a recipient of the Friends of the 2019 Zurich James Joyce Foundation Scholarship and the 2020 Joyce Translation Scholarship and Looren Residency. Her translation of Ulysses received a Literature Ireland Translation Grant. She has been a guest speaker in the English Literature Department of New York University during the academic years of 2019 and 2020 and a lecturer at University College Dublin in 2018. She is an active member of the International James Joyce Foundation.

Event is in Persian/Farsi. If you need a disability-related accommodation for this event, please contact us at iranianstudies [at] stanford.edu (iranianstudies[at]stanford[dot]edu). Requests should be made by April 12, 2021.