Translating Rumi through the Prism of Ideology Amir Artaban Sedaghat School of Continuing Studies, University of Toronto Introduction All became my companion out of their own conjecture None searched for my secrets from within me1,2 Distich 6 of Neynāme neatly summarizes one of the main problems of hermeneutics: that of interpreting the author’s intentions. This article will show how this is also a central issue in translation, which is a tex- tual process of interpreting the linguistic discourse, eliciting its mean- ing, and recreating the discourse in a different linguistic system. More often than not, readers, interpreters, commentators, and translators in particular tend to look for and find what they want in the text, rather than letting the text speak for itself. A work’s reception is of long-stand- ing interest to literary critics. Critical theories on reception range from 1Rumi, Masnavi-e Ma’navi (Tehran: Enteshārāt-e daneshgāh-e Tehrān, 1966), I:6. 2All translations are mine. Amir Artaban Sedaghat <
[email protected]> holds a PhD from the Sorbonne in sciences du langage, with a specialization in transcultural communications. He currently teaches French translation at the University of Toronto. A multilingual scholar, he focuses his research on the reception of Persian classical literature in the West. He has published articles about the semiology of Persian prosody and Iranian music and the ideological and ethical dimensions of translation. 4 Iran Namag, Volume 5, Number 2 (Summer 2020) epistemological approaches from the scholastic exegesis of sacred texts to the school of Constance’s Erwartungshorizont (horizon of expec- tations), Jakobson’s linguistic theory of communication, Roland Bar- thes’s la mort de l’auteur (death of the author), and the hermeneutic theories of Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer.