The Historical Overview and the Reception of the Translation of William Shakespeare’s Sonnets in Contemporary Iran

The present paper deals with the historical overview and the reception of William Shakespeare’s Sonnets in contemporary Iran. The authors examine the chronology of Persian translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (both scattered and book-length ones) during a century which is a considerable period of time in the examination of the reception of any author in another culture. As poetry is not the most popular genre in Persian translation, the Persian translations of William Shakespeare’s Sonnets suffered from a lot of fluctuations. It was in the latter part of the nineteenth century, a turning-point in the history of the country, that Shakespeare was introduced into Iranian audience for the first time. It started with scattered translations and ended in book-length ones. This study indicates early Persian interest in Shakespeare’s Sonnets which was followed by a lull. The reason behind it was two-fold: the translation of foreign poetry was dominated by French and Russian languages, and the rich tradition of Persian poetry does not feel the need to translate foreign poetry. The reception of Shakespeare’s Sonnets was followed by renewed interest in 1998-2017 and finally book-length translations began to thrive. All in all, Shakespeare’s Sonnets did not have a great influence on Persian poetry, as it was expected.