TEHRAN -- Erich Kästner’s Fabian, translated into Persian by Azdar Angoshtari, has won the ninth Abolhassan Najafi Prize for literary translation, while Narine Abgaryan’s Three Apples Fell from the Sky, translated by Yalda Bidokhti-Nejad, received an honorable mention.
The winners were announced Saturday night at the closing ceremony of the ninth Abolhassan Najafi Prize at the Central Book City in Tehran, where the jury selected the winning translation from 11 finalists.
The ninth edition examined translated works published in the Iranian calendar year 1403, with 162 books considered before 11 works were selected for the final stage, according to Ali-Asghar Muhammadkhani, secretary of the prize.
Muhammadkhani said the quality of the finalists was closely matched and that the final decision had therefore been difficult, adding that the call for the 10th edition would be issued within two or three weeks.
The Abolhassan Najafi Prize is awarded annually in memory of the prominent Iranian translator and linguist and recognizes outstanding Persian translations of novels and short-story collections published during the preceding year.
Muhammadkhani said the prize had become an important force in improving the quality of literary translation while serving its broader purpose of honoring Najafi’s legacy and encouraging younger translators.
He also paid tribute to Musa Esvar, one of Iran’s leading Arabic-to-Persian translators and a longstanding figure in the prize, 
Muhammadkhani compared Esvar with Najafi, saying both were highly selective and meticulous in their approach to translation.
Discussing the winning translation, Muhammad Reza Tork-Tatari said literary translation requires the translator to make continuous choices over vocabulary, tone, rhythm and the degree of closeness to the original, ultimately bringing a work from one language and literary world into another without damaging its character.
He praised Angoshtari’s Persian rendering of Kästner’s novel for avoiding both excessive literary ornamentation, which could conceal the sharpness of the original, and an overly harsh or colorless prose that could erase the author’s distinctive style.
The translation, Tork-Tatari said, successfully conveys the two apparently opposing but deeply intertwined dimensions of Fabian: the profound tragedy of a world in which the ground continually shifts beneath its characters and Kästner’s cold, bitter and sometimes ruthless humor.
That humor does not simply make the novel’s suffering lighter, he said, but instead serves to make its tragic dimension more pronounced.
The novel, first published in Germany in 1931, is widely known in English as Fabian: The Story of a Moralist, while a later English edition appeared under the title Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist.
Angoshtari said the prize played an important role in raising the standard of translation, while arguing that translators should not regard one another as rivals.
“Our rival,” he said, is the translator’s previous work, because each new translation should represent a step forward.
He described Fabian as a story set in Germany a century ago, amid economic difficulties and stagnation, anxiety over war and cultural turmoil, where crisis had gradually become part of everyday existence.
Life in such a society, he said, resembled a sprint in which people pushed one another aside in pursuit of money, status, employment, love and survival, while morality became a luxury and the possibility of a better future increasingly disappeared.
The ceremony also paid tribute to Musa Esvar, whose career included major translations from Arabic and whose work had made him a longstanding presence at the Abolhassan Najafi Prize.
Ali-Asghar Jafarabadi, chief executive of Book City, said nine editions of the prize had created a strong institutional foundation through the expertise and commitment of those who had sustained it.
He said Book City organizes five literary prizes and described the Najafi award as part of a broader effort to combine literary tradition with renewal, pointing to the emergence of a new generation of writers, scholars and custodians of Persian language and literature.
Among the 11 finalists were translations of works by Janet Lewis, Narine Abgaryan, Erich Kästner, Magda Szabó, Thomas Bernhard, Miguel Delibes, Yusuf Idris, Seray Şahiner, Alberto Moravia, M. B. Galt and Shehan Karunatilaka.
For internationally established titles, the English versions include Fabian: The Story of a Moralist, Three Apples Fell from the Sky and The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.