Composing a Persian Letter: Simin Daneshvar's Rendition of Hawthorne‪.‬

Introduction: From Boston to Tehran One of the defining features of Hawthorne's fiction is its interpretive ambiguity. The American's equivocal use of symbol and narrative voice, his partiality to "veils" and "twice-telling," have come to epitomize the enigmatic character of his novels and tales. Scholars continue to exposit the "instability" of Hawthorne's signs and symbols, marveling at the "indeterminacy" of his allusive prose. One of the most celebrated novels of nineteenth-century America--The Scarlet Letter--exemplifies well this penchant for ambiguity, refusing as it does to provide its readers with a stable explication of its eponymous "emblem." (1) While such hermeneutic complexity serves to endow Hawthorne's fiction with a rich potency, it also serves to problematize attempts to render his canon into other languages. One of the primary tasks of translation is to convey with precision the meaning of a given source, to render faithfully the significance of a textual original. (2) In approaching Hawthornean fiction, however, translators are confronted with narrative and symbolic ambiguity which seems to resist definitive rendition. How are translators to convey the precise meaning of a source text which itself evades semantic precision? Is the "undecidable" quality of Hawthorne's ambiguous prose communicable through other linguistic mediums?