Reading Lolita in Lebanon

The other day I delightedly came across the novel 'Lolita' in Persian translation at an illegal bookseller's on an overhead pass on the streets of Iran (and yes, it was in Teheran). The young lad had arrayed the selection of Persian and English classics on offer on two open sheets of newspaper. The copy of Lolita he had appeared to have been professionally printed and bound and, as such, to date back at least to the seventies (picture to the right; someone who reads Persian better than me will be able to make out the editor).

And this will get me to blog quickly about my favourite author's most famous book and its incarnations in the Middle East.

Now, according to what my research yielded, Lolita was first rendered in Persian by Zabihollah Mansouri in a weekly journal called “Art and Cinema” around 1958, almost immediately after the novel's publication in the US. Since then no other complete legal or illegal translation of Lolita has appeared, although parts of it are translated in translation journals and books. Today of course, the book is only available on the black market.
Mansouri’s translation is almost always considered as an example of unfaithful translation by Iranian translators and critics.

As for the Arabic translation of Lolita, it seems to have actually been published in Iraq, before (in 1988) being published in Beirut, Lebanon, which would have been my first guess. That gives a clear message about the degree in which Iraq was progressive in the Arab world after one-and-a-half decades of paradoxical Ba'ath dictatorship, by the way.
The terminus ante quem for first publication in the Arabic language thus can be given as 1984, when 'Lulita' was published by Baghdadi editor Maktabat al-Nahdah.

The Arabic version is not based on the English original, but on the first and flawed French translation.

And after all those technicalities, let me quickly slap a thought about something quite obvious onto the page....

Is it permitted to wonder to what extent the Islamic world gets the perversity of this story at all?

In the book Humbert Humbert is twenty-five years old (and of "brutal good looks"), when he meets Lolita of twelve.

Now, one of my Pakistani friends, the lovely Sajjad from Lahore, was thirty when he married his wife of fifteen. A group of Iranian Azeri women with whom I spent a few days this summer had been married off by their families in the years before the revolution each of them at the tender age of 13, and saw nothing strange about that now, thirty years later on. Roya, one of the daughters of one of these women, had been married to one of her cousins two years ago at the age of fourteen, and is now a housewife. (The second daughter, Yasaman, is twenty and studying agricultural engineering. Which was the decisive difference in the fate of these two sisters? "Well, Roya at a young age already was a beautiful girl, and since it was a member of our extended family proposing we could not refuse her hand", her mother explained to me. What a curse it is in those countries to be pretty...).

A few years ago, at the age of 22, I was hitchhiking through Mauritania with my two friends Kati and Kinga, when a group of men around fifty-five or sixty years of age took us on. One of them proudly let us see a photograph of his youngest son, born to him by his sixteen year old wife of three years, the last in a row of three spouses. I remember how all I could think of, with suppressed disgust, was that nothing worse could possibly happen in my life than to have to sleep with a guy like that.

Examples, in the rural areas of Middle Eastern countries, abound, I believe. The primeval precedent of course was set by the prophet Mohammad himself, when he married nine-year old Aisha.

Stating the fact that these practices are common, is not to banalize them. Women greatly suffer under them. This article gives "age difference in marriage; premature marriage" as the second reason for female suicides in North-Western Iran, where these kind of suicides are especially common.

[EDIT:] Interesting addendum. I did not know I would be so timely, but apparently this blog post hits right into somewhat of a vein of Nabokov publications in Iran (legally, thus):

As of the 5th of September, the short story "The Vane Sisters" was released. I do wonder how any translater into any language is going to handle the acrosticized last paragraph, but I think that was a tough nut especially for the Persian alphabet... !

As of the 17th of September, Vladimir Nabokov's "Pale Fire" appeared, as translated into Persian by Bahman Khosravi.