VIENNA (Dispatches) -- At a symposium in Vienna devoted to the life and legacy of the Austrian scholar Robert Adam Pollak, an Iranian cultural official offered an expansive reading of the Shahnameh: not simply as an epic of Iran’s past, but as a work that can still ask one of literature’s oldest questions — how human beings might understand one another across the boundaries of culture, ancestry and geography.
Reza Gholami, professor of political philosophy and cultural and civilizational studies and Iran’s cultural counselor in Austria, made the argument during the fourth Iranian Studies Symposium, titled “Professor Robert Adam Pollak: Life, Works and Legacy,” held at the House of Iranian Wisdom in Vienna.
Gholami said he was less interested in the familiar readings of Ferdowsi and nationalism than in another possibility contained within the Shahnameh: its capacity to open a conversation between cultures, deepen an understanding of the other and move beyond rigid ethnic and cultural boundaries.
For Gholami, the distinction between multiculturalism and interculturalism is crucial. The first may describe cultures living alongside one another; the second demands something more active — dialogue, mutual influence and recognition of the other as an equal subject. Such dialogue, he argued, requires a shared horizon. In Ferdowsi’s epic, that horizon can be found in the idea of wisdom.
“If intercultural thought means seeing the world from another’s perspective, engaging critically with that perspective and searching for a shared truth beyond the boundaries of blood, ancestry and geography,” Gholami said, “the Shahnameh can be regarded as one of the important literary works through which to reflect on the possibility of understanding between human beings and cultures.”
The epic, he added, speaks to more than Iran’s distant past. It can still inspire conversations about coexistence, human dignity, peace and mutual cultural understanding in the modern world.
The symposium also brought together Robert A. Patzner, grandson of the Austrian biologist Robert Adam Pollak, and Nosratollah Rastgar, former deputy director of the Institute of Iranian Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and a former lecturer at the University of Vienna’s Department of Oriental Studies.
Speaking in German, Patzner offered a portrait of his grandfather that moved between family history, professional life and literary curiosity. Pollak developed an interest
 in Oriental studies while still a student and attended classes related to the Quran, even translating passages of the scripture into German.
But his most extensive undertaking in the field was his work on a German translation of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. According to Patzner, Pollak completed the translation between 1948 and 1952.
The work was carried out with the painstaking tools of another era. Pollak typed the extensive translation himself, using carbon paper to produce additional copies at a time when typewriter ribbons were scarce.
The story of Pollak’s engagement with the Shahnameh thus became part of a larger story at the Vienna symposium: the long and sometimes arduous journey by which Persian literature entered the German-speaking world.
Rastgar devoted much of his German-language presentation to the Shahnameh, its German translations and the place of the epic in the transmission of Iranian culture to German-speaking audiences.
Drawing on decades of scholarly work connected with the Shahnameh, Rastgar highlighted the translation of Friedrich Rückert, the prominent 19th-century German poet and Orientalist. What distinguished Rückert’s work, he said, was its poetic and verse form, combined with an avoidance of the dense, dry language often associated with academic translations.
Rückert’s command of Persian language and literature enabled him to translate substantial portions of Ferdowsi’s epic while attempting to preserve its rhythm and heroic tone in German. For translation studies, Rastgar said, this is particularly significant: carrying a monumental poetic epic from Persian into another language while retaining its meter, music and literary atmosphere is an unusually demanding undertaking.
Rastgar also challenged familiar assumptions about the place of women in Eastern societies by pointing to the range of female figures who inhabit the Shahnameh.
Women in Ferdowsi’s epic, he said, are not merely peripheral figures confined to domestic life. They appear as rulers, artistic figures, wise advisers and even participants in battle, often exercising an active and decisive influence over the course of events.
His own academic career, he noted, had included roughly 25 years as the sole lecturer in his field. He expressed regret that Iranian studies in Austria had subsequently received less attention within the university system and that its institutional position had weakened.