Bootleg Copies of my Book are Available in Iran, and I’m Okay With That
For all the divisiveness of global politics, books have the power to connect.
A few days ago, a journalist friend of mine, Assed Baig, posted on Twitter to share a news report on Iran’s booming book trade. According to the report broadcast by Al-Jazeera, due to the stringency of international sanctions, European and American publishers are reluctant to deal with Iran. As Iranian publisher Mehdi Sojoudi Moghaddam put it, his irony deadpan, publishers in the West are reluctant to get involved with Iran thereby risking “selling millions of copies of their books.” And this means that in the absence of any international agreements, Iranian publishers enterprisingly step up to publish their own unauthorised translations of Western books.
I have long been interested in questions of translation, and how words, ideas and literature move between cultures. So I replied to Assed’s tweet, saying I’d be delighted if one day I discovered that any books of my own were translated into Persian, available in a bootlegged edition in the streets of Tehran. I’d take it as a win, I said.
A few moments later, somebody replied to say that actually one of them already had been: a small philosophy book I wrote several years ago on the subject of…
