TEHRAN -- The Iranian writer, painter and translator Mehdi Sahabi died of heart attack in Paris on Monday. He was 66.

His funeral ceremony will be held in Tehran but the exact date has not been specified yet, one of Sahabi’s relatives Ali-Asghar Haddad told ISNA.
Born in 1943 in Qazvin, Sahabi is best known for his brilliant translation of Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”. He left his studies at the Fine Arts Faculty of the University of Tehran and Rome University of Fine Arts unfinished.
He introduced several world-renowned writers to Iranian readers with his translations, enabled by his proficiency in Italian, French and English.
He has translated many famous works into Persian including Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” and “Sentimental Education”, Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield”, “All Men are Mortal” by Simone de Beauvoir, Stendhal’s “The Red and the Black”, “The Baron in the Trees” by Italo Calvino and Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s “Death on Credit”.