TEHRAN -- He never finished high school. He never received a diploma. Yet Najaf Daryabandari became one of the most revered translators in Persian literary history — a man who learned English by watching films in Abadan and produced some of his finest work while serving a life sentence.
Daryabandari was born in the winter of 1928 in Abadan’s German Bath neighborhood, though his identification papers would later list 1929. He dropped out of school as a teenager but possessed an unusual determination to master English. His classroom? The cinema. He listened carefully to the dialogue, absorbing pronunciation and phrasing. When he later applied for a job at the oil company, the British recruitment officer was astonished. “Where did you learn to speak English like this?” he asked. Daryabandari explained. The officer was even more surprised to hear that his English was not merely fluent but more refined than that of many native Britons, who often spoke with local dialects.
His political awakening came in 1948-1949 when he joined the Tudeh Party. Following the 1953 coup, he was arrested on charges of party membership, sentenced to death, and then commuted to life imprisonment. He did not despair. Instead, he surrounded himself with books inside his cell. It was there, in prison, that he translated Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy, along with plays by Oscar Wilde and stories by Mark Twain.
One of his most celebrated translations, however, predated his imprisonment. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway was published in 1952. Daryabandari received the book from Ebrahim Golestan, read it, and decided to translate it immediately. When he was arrested, the manuscript was confiscated along with his belongings. He later said he remained indebted to Golestan for the lost work.
His other famous translation — The Old Man and the Sea — was one he never loved. He admitted he did not enjoy the book and felt his translation had failed to capture what he had hoped. Yet Muhammad Dehghani, a translator and university professor, once argued that if Hemingway had been Iranian and had written the novella in Persian, he could not have produced a better version than Daryabandari’s.
After his release, Daryabandari worked at Franklin Publications for 17 years as cultural deputy and editor-in-chief. He later supervised dubbing for films at National Iranian Radio and Television until the 1979 revolution. He continued translating until a stroke in 2014. In 2017, Iran’s Cultural Heritage Organization named him a Living Human Treasure. Columbia University awarded him a special medal for his outstanding translations.
He died on May 5, 2020, leaving behind an extraordinary body of work: Faulkner, Twain, Gibran, Doctorow, Ishiguro, Cassirer, Lorca. And, unexpectedly, a celebrated cookbook — The Comprehensive Book of Cooking, From Garlic to Onion — co-authored with his late wife, Fahimeh Rastkar, much of which was conceived during those long prison years.
Najaf Daryabandari took the path of politics and was imprisoned for it. He never received a diploma but became a great translator. He left behind not just books but proof that a curious mind needs no classroom.