Native name سید محمود حسینیزاد Name Mahmoud Zad Citizenship Iran | Nationality Iranian Language Persian | |
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Born 8 April 1946 (age 78)
Firuzkuh, Iran ( 1946-04-08 ) Occupation Translator, writer, interpreter, literature jury member Period late 20th-early 21st century | ||
Mahmoud Hosseini Zad: vom Deutschunterricht bis zur Goethe-Medaille
Mahmoud Hosseini Zad (Persian: محمود حسینیزاد) (born 8 April 1946) is an Iranian translator of the contemporary German literature. He is also writer, interpreter, literature jury member and docent.
Contents
- Mahmoud Hosseini Zad vom Deutschunterricht bis zur Goethe Medaille
- Invitation by the Centre Drrenmatt Neuchtel
- Translations
- Own works
- Awards
- References
In the early 70s, Hosseini Zad graduated from the university of Munich in political science. Then he came back to Iran and began to work as a translator for the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, IRIB, and also began to teach German language in the University of Tehran, Azad University, Tarbiat Modares University and language institutes in Tehran. At the same time he published two collections of short stories.
He has translated the works of Bertholt Brecht, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Judith Hermann, Ingo Schulze, Uwe Timm, Peter Stamm, Julia Franck. He also wrote some plays, for which he was awarded.
Invitation by the Centre Dürrenmatt Neuchâtel
In April 2015, the Centre Dürrenmatt Neuchâtel organized a reading and a discussion circle with Mahmoud Hosseini Zad as part of the Printemps culturel. He spoke about the Dürrenmatt's popularity in Iran, his own activities as a translator and he read from his translations. He said about the Dürrenmatt's works in an interview with Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen:
Dürrenmatt is really famous and popular as a pessimist philosopher, who has a ironical bitter look to life...the government of Iran has a talent to interpret everything in his own way. In Dürrenmatt, it sees a critic of western capitalism, especially when he writes about the atomic bomb. Dürrenmatt criticize the West. The government and its censorship agency consider Dürrenmatt's works as a criticism of the west, as a criticism of capitalism.... These wicked and fighting the wicked. These are Dürrenmatt's themes. Humans and history and the philosophy. These are in the Dürrenmatt's works, but we iranians are mostly fascinated by the Dürrenmatt's philosophical aspect. Iranians love philosophy
Hosseini Zad said about the censorship in Iran:
The limits of censorship are not clear in Iran. We have unfortunately censorship agency or control agency. They give us no catalogs or lists at all about what we as translators are allowed and what we are not allowed. they have themselves no control on these controls... When you bring a book to a control agency, you don't know, whether it will be allowed or will not be allowed to be published. For example the words about sexuality or eroticism. Maybe it seems funny, but these words are in the first priority of censorship, then the political words are in the second priority. After that on the third place come the words about alcohol drinks.
In an interview with Deutschlandfunk Kultur, he said about some sort of censorship lifting in the Rouhani's era:
Well, I can give an example: The publisher, which publishes my translations, had 70 forbidden books in the Ahmadinezhad's era, but according my recent informations the number of forbidden books has been reduced almost to 10 or 13. It is obviously a censorship lifting.
– Mahmoud Hosseini Zad: Deutschlandfunk Kultur He said about the cultural policy changes after Ahmadinejad:
There are already movements. A simple example is that the publisher of my translations in the Ahmadinejad's regime had 17 totally forbidden works. These works didn't receive any publish permissions but nowadays there are some freedom and hope, but there is also a gap and we hope it will be removed soon.