Historiography of Translation of Novels of Resistance Literature from English to Persian

Resistance literature deals with concepts such as subjugation and deliverance. Translation of this type of literature has played an important role in transferring such concepts to other countries. The purpose of this study is to present a quantitative-analytical study of the novels of resistance literature translated from English to Persian during the four administrations which were in power in Iran between 1978 and 2005. To this end, historiography approach proposed by Pym (2014) was applied. Primarily, the themes of the novels were classified based on Harlow (1987) and DeShazer’s (1994) model of classification of resistance literature. The themes include race discrimination, class conflict, war, colonialism, post-colonialism, and totalitarianism. Then, the translated novels of each administration were examined to see which ones covered the above themes. The results indicated that only 6% of the published translations of the period under study was allocated to resistance novels. It can be concluded that translation of resistance novels was marginalized, and Iranians were basically reading novels covering themes other than resistance literature.