The Linguist

Chartered Institute of Linguists AUTUMN 2026 The Linguist 11 FEATURES for their beliefs in 1983. The time was clearly ripe to play our part in bringing Mahvash's story to an English-speaking audience. BN: We followed our established work patterns. Azita is the Persian expert and I the English, but she was educated in the UK and I understand Persian too. So we work as a team, filling in each other's gaps like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Azita is a transparent translator. She doesn't intervene a hair's breadth from the original and is so faithful that she sometimes even retains the Persian syntax, in order not to interpret or interpolate. She usually provides a word for word translation, often with several synonyms to see 'around' the meaning. She sends me recordings in Persian, too, because although I understand the language I do not read or write it. AM: Bahiyyih took this mass of material and turned it into a story. Some of it was too general to carry the story forward, some too repetitive to retain (and how could it not be in the circumstances?). And much of the material had to be reorganised and restructured to follow not only a chronological but a dramatic narrative line. She did everything possible to maintain the style, sentiments, thrill and especially the humour of Mahvash's writing; I could often hear Mahvash's voice as I read the English! BN: Mahvash surely guided us. The first part of her memoir was written differently, because she was recording her arrest and early prison experiences almost three years after they occurred – not in diary form, but in retrospect, looking back over her shoulder. Since she was almost entirely alone during this period, her first-person point of view turned this narrative into a very personal story. The resulting book is based on the first two volumes of five that cover her initial 10-year imprisonment. AM: We couldn't see that five-part structure until we had read through the whole. We couldn't distinguish her voice either, until we had heard the full story. Mahvash has certain characteristic stylistic traits. Her prose is usually spare and colloquial, like much contemporary Persian writing. But she also uses a more classical style at times, with patterns of paired words, rising repetitions and mixed metaphors typical of Persian poetry. When she combines the two, it can be effective, as in her description of spring: "Music was in the air, an exquisite symphony was playing, and all the branches in their shimmering silks were dancing for this prisoner wrapped in her smelly old chador in the back of the car." At other times she repeats rhetorical questions to build the sense of injustice she is experiencing. BN: Asking questions is a really important trait of Mahvash's style, given that her only communication was during her interrogations and the rest of her time was spent in strict isolation. She questions herself. She questions the ants in her cell and conducts an unspoken dialogue with the cockroaches. She often mocks her pedagogical habits, while teaching pretend classes and addressing an imaginary auditorium filled with her compatriots. AM: There is so much in this book which we found ourselves experiencing as translators, in far less grim circumstances of course. We had to question ourselves, too, about what to keep and what to leave out, about how explicit or implicit to be. But before her second arrest, we were lucky enough to speak to Mahvash on Skype about some of our dilemmas. She was very patient about explaining certain words and phrases. For example, she deployed the same word ب ن د (band) in reference to a section or a ward, and occasionally a passage or a corridor, so we had to choose the 'right' English word to reflect a consistent mental architecture. We learned to respect her avoidance of specifics for security reasons, while keeping the text from becoming overly vague – for example in her remarks about her interrogator. At other times, she candidly confessed that she did not know how to convey certain experiences and gave Bahiyyih carte blanche to find solutions. One of the more difficult passages was the experience she describes in the dog kennel in Mashhad, where despite being kept in darkness, she finds herself 'looking' into the very heart of light. This episode feels mysterious yet familiar, unique and oddly universal. It is also replete with particular meaning for Bahá'ís, who associate the experience with events in Bahá'í history. Mahvash wanted the book to be accessible to all readers, whether they knew about the Bahá'í Faith or not, so she allowed Bahiyyih to begin with the universal and only gradually hint at the historical associations of this episode. Her humility was a real lesson in artistic detachment. It made us all the more aware of our obligation to protect her voice from being hijacked in translation. BN: This was a real challenge for me when I was looking for the blunt English equivalents of the more decorous Persian circumlocution. One example was in the sequence describing physical torture: Mahvash's memoir made reference to the vulgar curses that her torturers threw at her, but in the English dialogue these came across as too graphic. Azita and I went back and forth several times before we found a compromise between the English need for the proverbial spade and the Persian preference for hints and approximations. The Persian language loves ambiguity; it privileges inference over specificity. And while this may be appropriate for poetry and mystic experience, it doesn't always work in PRISONER OF CONSCIENCE Mahvash Sabet, author of Open Wide the Doors (right), during a visit to France in 2018 (centre), before she was imprisoned (left) for a second time

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