Banned book, digital edition
Censorship, publishing permits and Persian literature beyond the borders
This event is part of a demonstration of what Lera offers for running knowledge events. Its content is written with care and draws on real sources, but the conference has not taken place, and apart from the convener its participants are fictional.
Every Persian-language author who has published a book in Iran knows the 'corrections list': the pages and lines that must be cut or changed before the book can receive its permit. Sometimes it is one word, sometimes a whole chapter. Sometimes a book waits for years and no answer ever comes. The result is not only books that were never published; it is a literature that censors itself before it is written. The writer learns which sentence not to write.
In the last two decades, Persian publishing outside Iran has opened another road. Small publishers in Europe and North America, and above all digital editions and messaging channels, bring readers books that could not be published in Iran. But this road is not free of problems. A writer who publishes abroad often loses readers at home, or puts themselves at risk. A digital edition multiplies quickly, without any income reaching the author and without a reliable text surviving.
The less visible consequence is that the literature itself splits in two. Many Persian works now circulate in two texts: the licensed text and the complete one. Readers often do not know which one they are reading. Scholars do not know which to cite. And if nobody records the differences, literary history will hand the censored version to the future under the name of the original. In Censors at Work, Robert Darnton showed that censorship is always a complicated collaboration between the state, the publisher and the writer; the traces of that collaboration have to be looked for in the texts themselves.
This is where knowledge infrastructure becomes a literary matter. If a work has a stable identity, and its different versions, from the licensed text to the complete text and the translations, are all versions of the same work with a clear history, then censorship can no longer silently take the place of the original. The difference between two versions becomes a historical document in its own right. Neither the state nor the market will do this; publishers, librarians and writers inside and outside the country have to do it together.
I propose a shared archive of Persian works in which each work is identified once and for all, and each version stands beside the others with its origin and its date: an archive under the control of neither a publisher nor a state, and one that readers inside Iran can still reach.
Questions for discussion
- Does publishing abroad set a writer free, or cut them off from their real readers?
- How can the difference between a licensed text and a complete text be recorded without putting the author at risk?
- In a digital market where copies change hands for free, how are an author's rights to be protected?
References
Darnton, Robert. 2014. Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature. W. W. Norton.
Coetzee, J. M. 1996. Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship. University of Chicago Press.
'Censorship (sānsūr) in Persia.' Encyclopædia Iranica.