What Did Jamālzadeh Do with The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan?

In the republishing of the Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, Jamalzadeh made changes so that the language, expression, tone and writing style of Mirza Habib Isfahani were altered. His changes in the “fragments of old phrases” and “morphology and syntax of sentences” aroused the reaction of the literary community of that time. While Jamalzadeh retained the main framework of the book, his method does not correspond to any of the technical terms for critical correction of texts. In order to understand the whys and wherefores of his method for republishing the book, the present study compared and analyzed three works: Mirza Habib Isfahani’s manuscript, Phillott’s edition, and Jamalzadeh’s reprint. Twenty percent of the volume of the book was selected for analysis: the author’s preface and fifteen chapters (five chapters from the beginning, middle and end of the work). The results indicate that the changes can be subsumed under three categories: 1. reduction through deletion or replacement; 2. expansion and finding equivalents; 3. transposition of parts of speech. The largest volume of changes in the text were created by expansions and finding equivalents for words, phrases and sentences and transpositions of parts of speech while deletions and replacements were used the least. These changes serve two main purposes 1. strengthening the fictional elements of the book and 2. bringing the story closer to the understanding of the common people based on the capabilities of the popular language, in the continuation of the simple writing movement of the Qajar era. However, Jamalzadeh inflicted irreparable blows on the prose rhetoric of Mirza Habib’s translation.