Iraj Pezeshkzad’s popular novel “My Uncle Napoleon” was published for the second time in France.
It was originally published in Tehran in 1973 and the French translation by Iranian novelist and translator Sorour Kasmai was first released in 2011 in France. The publishing House Actes Sud in Paris released the novel and has recently brought out its second edition, IBNA reported.
The French translation “Mon Oncle Napoleon” is in 496 pages. It is the story of a delusional man, who fantasizes that he is Napoleon Bonaparte, the French military and political leader who rose to prominence during the French Revolution (1789-1799), and becomes obsessed with a British plot against him. The novel gripped the Iranian imagination to such an extent that since its publication it has sold millions of copies and has been made into a popular TV series in Iran.
In 1996, the English translation of the novel was undertaken by British poet and translator Dick Davis, 71, and was published by US-based Mage Publishers. The English version evoked the richness of the original text and remains faithful to it without being literal. In a speech at the University of California in Los Angeles in 2005, Pezeshkzad traced the origins of Uncle Napoleon’s character to his own childhood. When listening to seniors he was baffled by the way they indiscriminately rejected most politicians as “British lackeys”.
The novel is rooted in an important Iranian literary tradition, one that traces its roots 700 years ago to the satiric poetry of Obeyd Zakani (1300-1371). Since the beginning of the 20th century some of the best Iranian writers and poets have used satire and farce to articulate the dilemma of modern Iranian society, among them Sadeq Hedayat (1903-1951), Ali Akbar Dehkhoda (1879-1956) and Iraj Mirza (1874-1926).
Born in Tehran, Pezeshkzad, 90, was educated in Iran and France where he received a law degree. He was a judge in Iran for five years prior to joining the Iranian Foreign Service.
He began writing in the early 1950s by translating the works of Voltaire and Molière into Persian and writing short stories for magazines. He has also written several plays and articles on the 1905-1911 Iranian Constitutional Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution. He lives in Paris.
