The Substitution of the Mimetic Play with a Diegetic Narrative: A Cultural Materialist Reading of ‘Alī Asghar Ḥikmat’s Translation of Shakespearean Plays

Post-Constitutional Revolution, one of the more significant undertakings to facilitate the process of modernity in the literary sphere was to translate the marvel classics of Western literature into Persian, among them Shakespeare’s plays. The early translations of Shakespearean plays had largely conformed to the original mimetic structure of drama. In 1942, ‘Alī Asghar Ḥikmat offered a distinctive translation of Shakespearean plays in his Panj Ḥikāyat az Āthār-i Viliyām Shikspīr (hereinafter, Panj Ḥikāyat). He replaced the mimetic dramatic structure with a diegetic narrative form and employed the conventions of Naqqālī (an ancient Persian storytelling form) in his Shakespearean tales. The old residual literary discourse of Naqqālī is supposed to be in opposition to the emergent modernist drama in the early−twentieth-century Iran. The residual discourse indeed played a significant part in the sustaining of the dominant power that hindered the modern manifestations of social justice and democracy. Having examined the manifestations of Naqqālī in Ḥikmat’s work, the present work is aimed at studying the discursive reasons that underlie Ḥikmat’s manipulation of mimetic plays into diegetic stories. The essay behooves Raymond Williams’s study of functions of “dominant, residual, and emergent cultures” in the presentation and reception of Western drama in Iranian cultural discourse.