Abdolhossein Azarang's History of Translation in Iran offers the reader of Persian with the first systematic account of translation in Iran. Spanning from antiquity to the dawn of tajadod (modernity), this ambitious history of translation is at once the history of the languages, nations, and empires that define the longue durée of Iranian civilization. It is a well-crafted and accessibly written text. It is based on archeological and historical sources as well as modern European and Iranian scholarship on Iranian history, languages, and discursive traditions. Azarang's conclusions reflect the kinds and availability of sources. For example, the book's observation about translation in the Achamenenid Empire (550–330 BC), which is based on inscriptions such as the trilingual (Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian) inscription of Darius I in Bisuton near present-day Kermanshah, are more tentative compared to depictions of translation in more recent times. The noteworthy translation movements of the Sasanid, Samanid, and Qajar periods are reflected in both the extensive bibliography of translation during these periods as well as the very conceptualization of “translation” in the book.

According to Azarang, “translation follows a need” (10). It is a means for the transmission of learning. The book advances a history of translation that is self-consciously a history of the social and political conditions that motivated the turn to neighboring languages and discourses for the sake of civil and social development. This approach is exemplified in locating the transmission of Greek, Roman, and Indian traditions in Sassanid Iran in the geopolitical and sociocultural expanse of the Empire. It is also evident in historicizing translation praxes of Qajar statespersons and a newly emerging public intellectual in relation to geopolitical and socioeconomic crises of the nineteenth century. The attention to the social location of translation, which no longer fits the pre-modern sovereign paradigm of translatio imperii, makes Azarang's study a history of the present and an indispensable read for students of contemporary Iran. It points to the historical-epistemological conditions and the attendant transmission of knowledge that defy both liberal models of exchange and narrowly construed anti-Western Islamic ideology of the Islamic Republic.