TEHRAN -- A war does not end with the return of the soldiers to their homes and the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War is no exception. Numerous memoirs, novels and artworks have been created based on this eight-year national common experience, which are categorized under the title of the Sacred Defense, the name of Iran-Iraq war in Iran.
One of these, “Chess with the Doomsday Machine”, was written by Habib Ahmadzadeh in 1996 on the siege of the southwestern Iranian city of Abadan and published by Sureh-Mehr in 2005. The novella became a bestseller at that time in Iran, and in 2007, Mazda Publishers in the U.S. published an English version of the book, which was translated by Paul Sprachman, a celebrated U.S. expert on the Persian language.
The story is narrated by a young spotter named Musa, who has been assigned to locate the enemy’s “doomsday machine”, an advanced radar system that must be destroyed. He also has to provide certain services to some odd inhabitants of the war-torn city: two Armenian priests, a retired oil refinery engineer, and a woman and her young daughter.
The Tehran Times recently conducted an interview with Sprachman about the book and the feedback he received from English readers about the genre of Sacred Defense literature.
Q: Is an impartial look at the Iran-Iraq war (from now on: “the War”) on the part of the combatants possible? Did the writer maintain an even stance at the end of the book?
A: Treating the War as many historians treat other wars throughout history (not as a “holy defense,” or a religious or metaphysical struggle as it is viewed in Iran), one has to conclude that the Iranian understanding of the conflict is more consistent with what actually happened than the official Iraqi or Arab nationalist views. Iraq was indeed the aggressor, and Saddam was encouraged and/or aided by leaders of both regional and international states who saw the War as a way of weakening or neutralizing the Islamic Revolution in Iran. When I spoke of the book’s attempt at even-handedness, I was referring to the way Mr. Ahmadzadeh has always been careful not to demonize the Iraqi enemy. During our conversations in Tehran, he often spoke of how as a soldier he tried to see his adversaries as human beings engaged like him in a war they did not start. In the novel and in his short stories (Dastan`ha-ye Shahr-e Jangi, translated into English as “A City under Siege: Tales of the Iran-Iraq War”), we see how caprices of geography and economics determined the destiny of many of the combatants. For example, if a Kurd had been born in Erbil, a city in Iraqi Kurdistan, he would be fighting for Iraq against Iran, but if the same Kurd were born in Sanandaj, he’d be defending Iran. Likewise, Mr. Ahmadzadeh draws readers’ attention to the fact that a number of soldiers in Saddam’s army were guest workers in Iraq from places as far away from the conflict as Mauritania (on this point, see my introduction to the collection “A City under Siege: Tales of the Iran-Iraq War” [Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 2010, pp. xiv-xviii}). Mr. Ahmadzadeh is also very careful to distinguish between the common Iraqi conscript and the hard-core Baathist in the military, a point dramatized in Kiomars Pourahmad’s film “Night Bus” (“Otubus-e Shab”), which is based on Ahmadzadeh’s short story “Thirty-nine Plus One Prisoners”.
At the end of the book, Mr. Ahmadzadeh makes a case for free will in the mouth of Musa’s “good” mentor (morshed) Qasem. He also has Musa tell the priests that the holocaust memorial was not necessary. The young man gains an understanding of history that allows him to see the events of the War from a more mature, reasoned point of view. So, yes, I think Mr. Ahmadzadeh manages to write in a balanced way at the end of the book.
Q: Why were only 1000 copies of the book published? And what has been the “average” reader’s reaction to the book?
A: I have been asked these questions many times. To know the answer to the questions, one has to understand several things. First, Americans (both in the U.S. and Canada), generally, do not read translated fiction. Even some of the best European authors’ books rarely sell more than 3000 copies. Second, the appetite for books that present a neutral or nuanced or even positive view of anything related to Iran is very limited. Iran has replaced the former Soviet Union as the American enemy. The reason why many American students want to learn Persian or “Farsi” is that knowing the language will help them get into the CIA or rise in the military. Third, the audience for this book is not the “average” American reader. People who buy and read Mr. Ahmadzadeh’s books in English are students of Middle Eastern Literatures (assigned the book in class) or specialists in such literatures who don’t have a reading knowledge of Persian, a very tiny proportion of the limited population of readers of translated works in the United States. For a small publisher like Mazda, printing only 1000 copies of the book makes perfect economic sense. One must realize that such books are as unknown or as unpopular in the U.S. as they are in Iran, where, as you know, they are seen as “commissioned” by the governmental and semi-governmental agencies. But unlike Iran, there are no state organs in the U.S. to sponsor the publication or bolster the sales of books related to the War (on this point, see the introduction to the recent English translation of “Da”, Mrs. Zahra Hoseyni’s dictated memoir, called “One Woman’s War”).
Q: Does the Christian or ecumenical or anti-war message of the book resonate with Christian readers?
A: As I said above, the number of people who know about Mr. Ahmadzadeh’s book is very small. I haven’t seen any comments about the book’s ecumenical message. I don’t think any Christian book stores carry the book, so I have no way of knowing how Christians view such messages.
Q: What attracts you as a translator to books about the War?
A: As I have said several times, I did not participate in the Vietnam War; instead my wife and I served in the Peace Corps in Afghanistan. Be that as it may, I have always been interested in the literature of war. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Camoes’ Lusiads, Tosltoy’s War and Peace, Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, etc. have been on my re-reading list over the years. I am not saying that Mr. Ahmadzadeh’s writing is comparable to those masterpieces, but it does give a picture of one of the bloodiest wars of the 20th century. Mr. [Ahmad] Dehqan’s and Mrs. Hoseyni’s works likewise contain graphic accounts of that War. Though I am familiar with the literature of war in European languages, the literature of war in Persian presents interesting challenges to the reader and the translator. Trying to meet these challenges has been very fascinating to me.
Q: How difficult is it for the Western reader to grasp some of the imagery in the book?
A: It is difficult for the average Western reader to understand the image of the 7-story building without some explanation. This is why I have written about the symbolism of this image in the introduction to the translation. This point raises the larger question of the difficulty of understanding a book that speaks about war in religious and metaphysical terms. To many Western readers this is obscure, having gone out of fashion with the end of the Crusades.
Q: Has the author been evenhanded in his treatment of Musa as opposed to the people left in Abadan?
A: Clearly the sympathies of the author are with Musa. He is the narrator. We see the War through his eyes. Mr. Ahmadzadeh has based the novel in large part on his own experiences as a Basiji [volunteer paramilitary]. He has told me that some of the other characters in the book still live in the city. But I don’t think he was trying to present an impartial version of what had happened. In “Chess with the Doomsday Machine,” he turned the War into a philosophical drama about maturity and self-discovery under very trying circumstances.
Q: What does the issue of determinism and free will have to do with an event like war?
A: For obvious reasons, a great deal of war literature contains philosophical discussions of life and death. Authors often ask the question: Must a soldier kill when his enemy tries to kill him? Mr. Ahmadzadeh’s fiction grapples with questions that all war literature must raise. Answering such questions is another matter. Perhaps the art of combat fiction resides in how the author raises the questions rather than answers. If we had a satisfactory answer to the question of whether we are compelled to do what we do or whether we have a choice in the matter, the art of asking the question would be diminished.
Q: To what extent do you believe in the sacredness of the Iranian defense of the country?
A: As I said above, I look at the War as a historian in the West would, as an event in human history rather than one with religious dimensions. Translating some of the books about the War — both fiction and non-fiction — by Iranian authors, however, has opened up aspects of the conflict that I had not considered before I read such literature. I came to understand how belief and faith helped many of the Iranian forces endure the onslaught of a better armed and well-funded aggressor.
SB/YAW
END