10 The Linguist Vol/65 No/3
ciol.org.uk/thelinguist
FEATURES
How the translators of a prison memoir rendered the
sprawling text, smuggled out on scraps of paper, in English
Mahvash Sabet is an Iranian prisoner of
conscience. First arrested in 2008, she was
given a ten-year sentence because she was a
Bahá'í, together with her six colleagues on
the Yaran-i-Iran – an ad hoc group caring for
the Iranian Bahá'í community. The Bahá'ís are
the largest religious minority in Iran, and the
most persecuted.
In 2022, Sabet was sentenced to another
ten years, and although she was granted
medical furlough for heart surgery in 2024,
she remains a prisoner at grave risk. Her first
collection of poetry, Prison Poems, was
published in English in 2013, winning her
recognition as the 2017 PEN Pinter Poetry
Prize Writer of Courage. She has also
published Raha ('More Prison Poems') and
Hekaya-e Asheghi ('A Tale of Love') in Persian.
Her prison memoir, Open Wide the Doors,
was translated by Azita Mottahedeh and
Bahiyyih Nakhjavani over five years from 2018
to 2022. They had worked together previously
on translations of Bahá'í writing, and
Nakhjavani had also translated Prison Poems.
They discuss the process of translating and
editing the lengthy Persian text, and the
linguistic and emotional challenges involved.
Azita Mottahedeh: We did not know what
we were getting into when we began.
Mahvash had been scribbling on scraps of
paper for at least seven years in prison and
had accumulated a mountain of notes and
notebooks. When she was freed in 2017, she
began transcribing these because she knew it
was only a matter of time before she might be
arrested again. She sent the Persian text to me
page by page, and I forwarded the English
draft to Bahiyyih in the same way. By the time
I reached the last of the 750 pages, five years
had passed and Mahvash was back in prison.
Bahiyyih Nakhjavani: Once Mahvash found a
pen, about three years after her arrest, she
wrote on anything she could find: gossamer
thin tissue paper spliced in half, pages from
poetry books and margins of torn-up
newspaper used in the toilets. To hide these
from the guards, she stuffed them inside her
bra, slept on them, and finally managed to
smuggle them out of Evin Prison bit by bit.
AM: While we were working on the text,
Covid happened and there were many
interruptions. We were also facing a moral
dilemma: how to reconcile our responsibility
towards Mahvash with our consciousness of
the danger this book might pose for her and
other Bahá'ís. And so it was not until she was
arrested again in 2022 – not until she had
nothing left to lose – that the work resumed
in earnest.
That year, the 'Women, Life, Freedom'
movement erupted on the streets of Tehran,
and a separate campaign was launched to
honour the Bahá'í women who were hanged
From prison to page
©
SHUTTERSTOCK
