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چکیده
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Literary translation is often understood as a deliberate and rational transfer of meaning from one language to another. The present paper challenges such conventional assumptions by adopting the philosophical framework developed by the Poststructuralist French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to analyze D. B. Costello’s English translation of Sadeq Hedayat’s modernist novella The Blind Owl. Known for its non-linear narrative, surrealistic imagery, and fragmented discourse, The Blind Owl tends to resist fixed interpretations, thus offering fertile ground for understating translation as a site of desiring production. The study explores how this literary translation functions not simply as a linguistic endeavor but rather as a dynamic process shaped by virtual forces and disruptions, namely as becoming-text. Two Deleuzeoguattarian concepts, in particular, guide this analysis: desiring-machine and deterritorialization. The former refers to the basic units of production within the unconscious, constantly generating connections, flows, and disruptions rather than clear, stable meanings, and the latter signifies the process by which fixed structures, whether linguistic, cultural, or conceptual, are dismantled and reconfigured in new, unexpected ways. These ideas help us understand how The Blind Owl, with its ruptured narrative and Kafkaesque ambiance, resists conventional translation practices. Through close reading and comparing selected passages from this Persian novel with Costello’s English rendering, the study shows how translation can become a space of continual transformation. Rather than simply conveying content, the translator engages in an unconscious interaction with the text’s shifting logic, reworking its meaning in unpredictable ways. The findings of this study imply that literary translation can be viewed not as a mere reproduction of the “original” content but as an open-ended process shaped by complex forces beyond conscious acts and intentions.
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