Agency in the Translation and Production of The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan into Persian

There is increasing interest in the “sociology of translation”, agents of translation, and the agency of translators in Translation Studies. But more research is needed on the actual people involved in the production, distribution, and reception of translation, and also on the factors affecting these inter-relations. In this article, the focus is on the role of intermediaries involved in the process of the Persian translation and circulation of James Morier’s picaresque novel, The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824). Drawing on the political, social and cultural milieu of the 19th century Persia, the researcher contextualizes both the English and the Persian texts and shows how Mirza Habib Isfahani, the exiled interpreter, has intervened in the text in order to exercise his exilic agency. The translator’s interventions in the text show that for him the ethics of political progress was more important than the ethics of fidelity to the foreign text. The article also examines the agency of other translation agents: the English Major in charge of the editing and publication of the Persian translation in Calcutta; and a Persian dissident and copyist whose tragic death transformed his posthumous agency from a cross border copyist to a misidentified translator for more than 50 years.