TEHRAN – A new Persian translation of Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s book “White Castle” has recently come to Iranian bookstores.

Published by Cheshmeh, the translation is from Einollah Gharib.

From the Nobel Prize winner and the acclaimed author of “My Name is Red” comes the dazzling work of historical fiction and a treatise on the enigma of identity and the relations between East and West.

From a Turkish writer who has been compared with Borges, Nabokov and DeLillo, a young Italian scholar in the 17th century sailing from Venice to Naples is taken prisoner and delivered to Constantinople. 

There he falls into the custody of a scholar known as Hoja— “master” — a man who is his exact double. 

In the years that follow, the slave instructs his master in Western science and technology, from medicine to pyrotechnics. But Hoja wants to know more: why he and his captive are the persons they are and whether, given knowledge of each other’s most intimate secrets, they could actually exchange identities. 

Set in a world of magnificent scholarship and terrifying savagery, “The White Castle” is a colorful and intricately patterned triumph of the imagination.

An English translation from its Turkish edition by Victoria Holbrook was published in 1998.

Qoqnus, a major Iranian publishing house in Tehran, has previously published a Persian translation of “The White Castle” by Arsalan Fasih, who is Pamuk’s favorite translator in Persian.

Photo: Copies of a new Persian edition of Orhan Pamuk’s novel “The White Castle”.

MMS/YAW