The question came up at an Infinite Jest translators’ panel, on a Second Life platform. A ٰvirtual tennis court was designed. Virtual bleachers, virtual audience, virtual copies of our translated books scattered across the court. Each of us, Wallace’s translators across the world, embodied in an avatar, pixelated, with delayed staccato flashes of movements. At some point, the host asked how Wallace was first translated in our respective countries. I said that his first translations had appeared on a government-funded website called Tarjomaan—a word that means both “translation” and “interpretation”. The first two pieces published were his famous commencement speech and All That, a fiction from The New Yorker, which, for some reasons, has been labeled as an “essay” in the Farsi version, both chosen—one would assume—because of their religious undertones.
“Wow,” the host said. “So your government is interested in Wallace?”
Well, yeah, except that they were both censored when it came to religious nuances, I thought.
I didn’t know how to explain such a delicate matter without oversimplifying, without overcomplicating. It’s something that needed to be told precisely or not at all. I looked at my avatar, the one I had deliberately chosen, with a mask shaped like a deformed casket—a nod to the Union of the Hideous and Improbably Deformed, the ones in Infinite Jest who veiled themselves to openly admit that they are hiding something, not comfortable with sharing but also exposing themselves to share that they are hiding something. In the Second Life panel, I was grateful for it – masking myself, admitting that I can’t get fully exposed. I could have tried to explain the impossible contradiction. But I didn’t. I shrugged— the avatar didn’t —“It’s complicated.” I said.
When I was in school, we would line up every morning, listen to a recitation of the Qur’an—Arabic, untranslated, stripped of context, just a pure form—before listening to the ideologies of Islamic Republic, then stomping on an American flag on our way to class. And yet, American stuff was everywhere, even in my relatively small town. The first American movie I ever watched was a worn-out VHS of Titanic. I didn’t know much about the story—the shipwreck, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet—nor did I care. What mattered, in my teenage years, was the kiss. The glimpses of passionate love, the flashes of nudity. ٰ
I had never seen my parents kiss. In fact, I had never seen anyone kiss. And there they were, Jack and Rose, in all their glitched VHS glory. Oh, they kissed (I didn’t quite understand why). Oh, they are beautiful, handsome (I vaguely understood why). Oh, they are American, like my cousin’s uncle who had allegedly moved to the US. Also, to double up my excitement, video players were banned in Iran in 90s, so watching Titanic, a samizdat, was an illicit pleasure, both exotic and vulgar, consumed in secret, silenced not to make my parents awake, always under the threat of getting exposed to my parents, or, as I was convinced, police officers.
Then there was Delta Force, the video game. You played as an American soldier, killing enemies in small towns, deserts, battlefields. You might have died, but then you respawned, gun in hand, ready to start again. Fighting for what? I never asked. I ran through pixelated landscapes, looked through my crosshair, clicked, shooting the bodies off. They spoke a language I didn’t understand, so why should I care? Until one day, in a new version of Delta Force, the enemies on the screen were speaking my language, Farsi. I hesitated. I moved around to find another enemy. Yet the men shouting in Farsi were running away.
At some point I was numbed to my language, it lost all of its meaning. I pulled the trigger. A man, his voice crying out in Farsi that they (meaning me) are here, dropped silently to the ground. The game wasn’t over. The war continued. If there was a war other than this pixelated one, a cultural war as our government constantly reminded us, I hadn’t known I was part of. And yet, there I was—stomping on a bleached American flag on the asphalt of my school, watching American films in secret, shooting Iranian fighters on a pixelated battlefield, shouting Death to America in the morning.
How do you translate your experience into a language that barely knows any context of your life? From whose experience are you writing? Are you just yourself, or a self-appointed spokesperson of a nation? Don’t flatten it, they say. Don’t generalize. Stay with what you’ve lived.
So you outgrow PC games. You start reading what your brother read as a teenager—Salinger, Faulkner, Iranian writers. You see yourself more in Holden Caulfield than in the old man of The Blind Owl. You become embarrassingly aware of your body—this awkward, fleshy thing that sweats, grows, disappoints. You start chatting with girls online, veiling yourself behind words and emoticons. You write blogposts to impress them. And you do. But you remain an ID, a username, a smiling yellow face in their friends list on Yahoo! Messenger. You fall in love, out of love—both perfect material for writing. Though, in truth, you write more about an image of being in love than experiencing it.
You try to find your voice, imitating translated writers—Hemingway’s clipped restraint, Nabokov’s exquisite exile, Proust’s telescopic elaboration. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t resonate. It’s not yours. Still, you keep writing. For someone, for a presence you can’t pinpoint—a shadow of yourself, maybe, living in the space between you as a writer and what you were writing. You want to carve something meaningful out of the mess of your mind, to untangle your emotions. That’s all that matters. And sometimes, you do.
A story about a relationship that loops without breaking—not because it’s perfect, but because the alternative is unbearable. You write it after a fight with your first real girlfriend—the first one who jumped out of the world of avatars and usernames, the one with whom you try to be real. You think: This is it. This is writing. This is real. She doesn’t like it. It exposes you both too much. You send it out. A literary magazine publishes it. You get some feedback, lots of congratulations. You collect your stories. A prestigious publisher slides a contract across the table. The Author, it calls you. You are thrilled. After navigating censorship, the book makes it out. You hold it in your hands—years of writing, thin, weightless. It’s not what you expected. You feel exposed. And fraudulent. It holds too much of you, and yet it doesn’t sound like you. A veil.
How do you translate your experience into a language that barely knows any context of your life? From whose experience are you writing? Are you just yourself, or a self-appointed spokesperson of a nation?You hide yourself even more, now armed with literary devices to obscure what’s too revealing. You cling to the voice you’ve found—or at least the one you think has worked. But you realize it lacks substance. You’ve grown. You’re not just an individual floating through loss and isolation anymore. You are part of a society. You dig deeper, write another collection, this time about longing for connection. Shame. Shame of the body, shame of desire, shame of failing to connect, shame of silence, of veils you slowly acknowledged, through writing, you were wearing. You initially call the book The Real Life. It gets banned. Not everything in your real life can be expressed publicly, they tell you. And suddenly, you understand what the shame was about—the veils have been imposed systematically. You are actually part of a cultural war, dictated ideologies. You are ashamed that you recognize this too late.
You take a break. You tell yourself literature is about bridging cultures, not waging battles. You remind yourself you are also a translator. You translate books, then dive hesitantly into Infinite Jest, doing extra acrobatics to keep Wallace’s rhythms intact while dodging censorship. You choose words, tweak them, slip them past the The Ministry of Cultural and Islamic Guidance. No one at the office is paid enough to comb through a thousand-page novel, you tell yourself. Just make sure the sex scenes don’t show up with a single click in MS Word’s search function. And you succeed. And then you are disgusted with yourself. You’ve forgotten why you started writing at all. You’ve developed unnecessary muscles for movements that aren’t aesthetically relevant—to Wallace, to yourself, to anyone except the ones who cut the books. You have a writerly deformed body. You haven’t written anything in a long time, anyway. You’ve just fled.
You tell yourself it’s time to come back to writing, but your skin has hardened. Your lexicon has calloused. You anticipate erasure before words even form. You write with that hard skin. You repeat yourself in iterations, circling the same themes, trying to find a way to pierce through repetition. You haven’t caught up with your age—you’re not 20 anymore, not 25. But your voice hasn’t changed. The exhaustion of a cultural war has dissociated you from yourself, from your writing, from your real life. You realize you are numb to your own language. A shooter firing aimlessly, with an empty gun.
And then you remember translation, how liberating it was to live in the space between languages. You start translating again—this time, translating your life in Farsi into English. A life too unsettled to be called life. Here, there is room for discovery. More audience. No scrutiny. And yet, you are less equipped to say what you really mean. You stumble through. You miss writing in your language. You miss the ease of thoughts spilling onto the page. When you didn’t have to explain, or overexplain, or justify contradictions—because everyone around you shared them. You all knew the rules of the game. You all had lived through watching a forbidden kiss on TV. You had all been torn apart in the cultural war. You all have learned the vocabulary of dating from Friends, only to find it lacks substance in a world of sexual suppression. You know, thanks to years of translating English into Farsi, that translation always comes with guilt, shame, grief for what is lost. Except this time, you don’t know what will be lost. But then again—who are we? And who are you to speak of a collective experience? Who are you to decide what is lost and what is gained?
Let’s start again. With me. I’m best known—whatever that means—as the translator of David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest in particular. I wrote in Farsi for fifteen years, until one day, I didn’t. Until the weight of censorship made every sentence feel like an act of futility, a puzzle with missing pieces, a sentence scattered by dotted lines. So I started again, in English. I wrote essays and fiction in English. But it always felt like I was reporting from Iran, an exotic country far away, rather than writing about myself. I was overexplaining, overloading every piece with context, as if Iran itself needed footnotes.
Whenever I translated an English book into Farsi, I resisted the urge to simplify, to smooth things out. I wanted the text to be as accessible—or inaccessible—as it was meant to be. Quirks intact, tweaks preserved. I refused to interpret, to explain, to insert apologetic footnotes about cultural gaps that may or may not need bridging.
With Infinite Jest, this was an especially fraught decision. There was too much. Too much context. Too much America. Too much inside tennis and media culture, ostensibly foreign to its Farsi readers. But then, America, although far away, was never really foreign. America had always been omnipresent—an enemy, a glitch VHS, a smuggled CD of a forbidden movie, a translated novel. Either people knew the context, or they didn’t. And if they didn’t, they could accept that not everything in a novel needs to be grasped like an instructional manual. Some things just exist. You also can’t just import context wholesale—its lineage, its native soil, the air it was meant to breathe. Infinite Jest exists in Farsi, but it’s been uprooted, rehomed, severed from its original genealogy. And translation, at its best, is about opening up a space, finding new aesthetics, a common ground to explore inside. That is, if the reader is willing to read. But a totalitarian regime isn’t a reader. It dictates.
Every regime, especially a totalitarian one, requires an enemy. Wallace understood this—Johnny Gentle of Infinite Jest reflects this. The Islamic Republic, from its inception, positioned itself in opposition to imperialism, to the forces that propped up the Shah, most specifically, the United States. We are the ones who rose against corruption, against empire, they declared. The champions of the weak. The Mostaz’afain. The inheritors of the earth, as promised in the Qur’an. And for that to hold, the enemy had to be absolute. The Kafir, the infidel, the decadent West, the poison threatening Iranian prosperity, Islamic culture. The battle had to be waged—Jihad, or Cultural Jihad, in this case.
If you have an enemy, you are at war. And if you are at war, then anyone who complicates the narrative—who dares to add nuance—is a liability. The omnipresence of an enemy, as our history has bloodily taught us, justifies everything. Turning inward. Suppressing your own people. Even, or especially, when you once positioned yourself as the voice of the weak, the righteous force against power. Unlike video games—where things (actually people, the ones without language or whose words dissolve into nothing meaningful) simply blow up—literature inherently opposes any ideology. requires plots, characters, contradictions. It resists simplification. It cherishes life. It offers individual stories, alternative ways of being. It creates a space where writer and reader meet—not to recite doctrine, but to explore, to imagine. And to another layer to the paradox: the government, for all its ideological rigidity, still had to contend with a rising cultural class that no longer bought into the ideology that had made the Revolution possible in 1979.
Whenever I translated an English book into Farsi, I resisted the urge to simplify, to smooth things out. I wanted the text to be as accessible—or inaccessible—as it was meant to be.And so, the government needs to find new rhetoric. It adapts. Any thinker with a whiff of anti-imperialism, no matter how complex, is warmly welcomed—so long as they can be reshaped. Some don’t need any adjustment, so enthralled by the rhetoric of resistance against power—imperialism as the ultimate villain—that they entirely forget ideology intertwined with power can be a tool of oppression, silent violence against domestic people, making no fuss on the global stage. For ideologues, translation is never about the dynamics between two cultures; it is about bringing back a souvenir from farang—that old Farsi word for foreign lands, from the 19th century, when elite Iranians first wandered off to France, or Europe in general, dazzled by Western splendor—stripping it of context, turning it into raw material for yet another form of propaganda.
These were the things my avatar never said. On Second Life, in English, at a literary event celebrating cultural exchange, I shied away from the real answer. The honest answer would have been: I play on a completely different field. Except they pulled me back in.
As I pulled myself aside—as both writer and translator—trying not to navigate censorship but to resist it, to carve out new ways to pursue literature in an entirely different ecosystem, Infinite Jest was published in Farsi. It gained momentum, it sold well, it was read—hopefully. The translation was criticized, praised, the usual routine of the book of that magnitude. I was asked, again and again, about censorship. I alluded vaguely to our efforts, acknowledging concerns without drawing too much attention to what had been salvaged.
Then the very office that had let the book slip through shortlisted it for Best Translation of the Year. Nothing to be happy about. For context: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children had won the same award four years before the fatwa was issued in 1989. Of course they did, I thought. Wallace is the perfect shiny new toy. A literary beast, already sanctified by serious book-readers, thoroughly engaged with America’s cultural contradictions. He was ideal—an American who is also skeptical of America’s cultural machinery. Perfectly suited to be extracted —not just from American culture, but from literature itself. I wouldn’t attend this ceremony anyway, I thought, I am done with that office, I am no longer in the game, even if it meant I became a pixelated version of myself, pushing me further away from my language. Then the turmoil of thoughts of deep-buried (hi)story.
How odd it is to feel angry when your work is actually acknowledged, feeling shameful, regretful of how you have been dragged in the game again, feeling responsible for getting involved involuntarily in a battle you avoided. “I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.” Pessoa once wrote and I recalled. Shame still resided in my body, and anger, and memories. I went on reading the book on my laptop – I still don’t dare to look at the print version – to check what was cut away. Three lines of a sex scene that Hal imagines. Then I stumbled on a sketch of a house that one of my characters lived in, with comments on every piece of furniture and how he obtained them. He was a part of me—not a veiled one, but an embodiment of something I thought I had finally find a voice for. It was all before the home got invaded by governmental ideology. I had other translated books that were never published, somewhere in my previous laptop – now set up for downloading movies, mostly American ones.
I was reminded how, in the Iranian panels of Infinite Jest, I was introduced merely as a translator, not a writer, as it had been long since I had published anything. They had forgotten that I once wrote in Farsi. I had forgotten what writing felt like. What had been lost, unconsciously, was part of me that was finally embodied in Farsi. Part of me was – and still is – stuck there, in the words, yet to find a break out. It was past midnight. A dim lamp cast light in a corner of my flat, and the familiar ever-present hum of Tehran streets suddenly felt muted. I was recoiling, re-imagining my past self, trying to hear my voice, this time though, unexpectedly, in English, maybe because the Farsi version of angst felt like an anti-government statement—a voice that, however unlikely, could still possibly cause real harm.
This time, the silence was not like watching the kiss in Titanic, but boldly standing against the ones who both praised and silenced you at their will. I felt that if the floodgate of words opened, they would flood. English words though were just tickling rather than flowing. I could not connect the dots of a map in way that I used to do in Farsi. Yet I felt unveiled, unpixelated – the shame of writing in another language; the rage of losing touch with an old home in Farsi; the memory of old good days not yet settled into narrative in English, trying to stir themselves up in a language that would always remain like a second life; the sense of loss of the first life – once a real life, that you have been told you cannot narrate it. And then, slowly yet suddenly, dawn appeared. A thin seam of light. The words had found a kind of rhythm—not in English, not in Farsi, but in the space between the one who had lived in Farsi and what was to be written in English. I realized I could never run away from Farsi, never live outside it. My life, my memories, are in Farsi; my recollection of them, perhaps not. I had lived in it. I live in it. I write in English. And I yearn to build a life somewhere in between.
