John Wayne in Farsi

Abou Farman writes about the art of the “Persian dub” in movies of the 1970’s. Western movies would get creative embellishments in translation from the Farsi version of John Wayne’s voice. “The glory of Persian dub, while it lasted, was that it didn’t hide the artifice of film or its theatrical, scripted element. On the contrary, by showing that the original lines were just as made up as the dubbed ones, it seemed to acknowledge something even more postmodern: that social roles, like acting roles, depend on artifice, and that perhaps all cultural forms develop through acts of mistranslation.”