TEHRAN – A book containing 10 stories by the renowned Iranian novelist and short story writer Jalal Al-e Ahmad has recently been published in the Bengali language in Bangladesh, the Islamic Culture and Relations Organization (ICRO) has announced. 

The book has been published by the Pendulum Publications, and has been translated by Muhammad Abdus Sabur Khan, who is a faculty member at the Department of Persian Language and Literature of the University of Dhaka. 

Born in 1923, Al-e-Ahmad was a prominent Iranian writer, scholar, and social and political critic.

Some of his works, including his most popular polemical essay “Plagued by the West” and his most popular novels “The School Principal”, “By the Pen” and “Lost in the Crowd”, have appeared in English translation.

An English translation of his story “A Stone on a Grave” by Azfar Moin was published by Mazda Publishing in the U.S. in 2008.

The book also contains an in-memoriam essay entitled “Jalal’s Sunset” by his wife, Simin Daneshvar, who was a prominent writer.

In this book, Al-e Ahmad investigates the recesses of his own psyche to explore the roots of his identity as an Iranian male, his manhood. Consciously, he tries to uncover why having children to continue one’s name and legacy, not unlike one’s gravestone, should signify that he had existed.

Al-e Ahmad spent his childhood in relative comfort. Many members of his family, including his father, older brother and a brother-in-law, were all Muslim clerics.

Early in the 1930s, when the Ministry of Justice under Reza Pahlavi, the Iranian monarch who ruled 1921–41, began to regulate the activities of the clergy, Al-e Ahmad’s father went into voluntary retirement. His decision forced young Jalal to leave school and work at various jobs in the marketplace such as watchmaking and selling leather goods.

He was a member of the Tudeh Party, an Iranian Communist organization, and also translated works by French writers André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus into Persian.

In 2008, Iran established the Jalal Al-e Ahmad Literary Awards in memory of the writer, who passed away in 1969.

Photo: Cover of the book containing 10 stories by Jalal Al-e Ahmad published in the Bengali language,

RM/YAW