I Ran to Write: Travel, Translation, and Journalism on Persian Spaces

This thesis depicts three different modes of travel-writing on Iran: journalism, literary translation, and travelogue. With a comparative mindset that relates these modes of writing in the span of fifty years, I conceive of travel-writing in a broader sense, in order to think outside of its being a mere “genre.” Each mode of writing is a discipline on its own right, which is why each undergoes a distinct set of inquiries that suits their specific experience. The corpus chosen for this study are: fifteen journalistic reports on the uprising before the 1979 Iranian revolution, by Michel Foucault; two poems translated by Basil Bunting before and during World War II; and a travelogue by Robert Byron, published in 1937. These seemingly non-correlational discourses are lesser-studied works on Iran, and the inter-linkage between them will run concurrent with the individual study under question. In chapter one, Foucault’s reports will be studied in dialogue with his own philosophical evolution. Also, the reverberations of his “travelled ideas” will be traced in both his defenders and his critics, who praise or criticize him based on the aftermath of the events, not on his actual writings. In chapter two, I will turn to theories of translation to study Bunting’s political and poetic missions. These sometimes overlap, and therefore an in-depth analysis of his translated works are analyzed in relationship to his role in Iran as a British spy. While this chapter studies Bunting’s aesthetic and political missions in both his poetics and profession, I argue that literary translation functions as an aesthetic, ‘other’ place where he can freely write as a cultural double-agent. In chapter three, I explore Byron’s Road to Oxiana in relation to the ethics of travel, and his aesthetic and synaesthetic musings on the architectural sites of Central Asia. For Byron, Iran is not a site of exploration and appropriation; but is instead a way to escape from the banalities of the West and its then-looming collapse into World War II. On the other hand, his writing provides an ironic worldview whereby various forms of double standard in the culturally and politically contingent region are criticized