By translating the work of the Persian
scholar Abdolkarim
Soroush, the dissident journalist
Akbar Ganji and many other censored
Iranians, my friend Nilou Mobasser gave
voice to a complex culture, particularly
in the US, where these authors were
published in English for the first time.
In 1997, she translated Ghazi Rabihavi's
Look Europe, a play based on a 16-page
fax smuggled out of Iran by
the detained journalist Faraj Sarkohi.
The play was performed that year at the
Almeida theatre, produced by and
starring Harold Pinter. Nilou, Rabihavi
and Pinter also appeared on stage at the
Southbank Centre with Salman Rushdie and
Doris Lessing, discussing freedom of
expression for Index
on Censorship, a publication Nilou
translated for until her death from
heart failure at the age of 52.
From 1988, Nilou worked for the BBC
Monitoring Service at Caversham Park, in
Reading. As a Persian media monitor, she
translated the official pronouncements
of the regime. She also served as an
editor for the Arabic monitoring team
during the Arab spring. It was
intensive, technical work, highly
regarded by the news agencies and the
Foreign Broadcast Information Service of
the CIA, now the Open Source Centre.
Nilou once admitted to me that she had
tired of the political speeches of
Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
and the Friday sermons of Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, and that she preferred
translating the essays, reportage and
fiction of a frustrated generation that
Maziar Bahari and I featured in the 2009
anthology Transit Tehran: Young Iran and
Its Inspirations. She also translated
Ehsan Naraghi's memoirs From Palace to
Prison: Inside the Iranian Revolution,
from the French (1994).
Nilou was born in Tehran. She attended
Tehran international school and became
fluent in English and French. In 1977
she moved to Portland, Oregon, where she
earned a BA in political science from
Reed College and published Liberty: A
"Good" or a "Right"?, a critique of the
American philosopher John Rawls. By
1984, she had obtained an MA in
economics from Manchester University,
and soon after she published the essay
Marx and Self-Realisation in the New
Left Review.
She met Soroush in 2002, when he
lectured at Oxford University, and
translated his interviews, lectures and
his 2009 book The Expansion of Prophetic
Experience: Essays on Historicity,
Contingency and Plurality in Religion.
She was working on his autobiography at
the time of her death.
Softly spoken and intensely private,
Nilou was "freedom's translator", said
her brother, Bahman: "Translating was
more than a job for her. It was her
passion."
She is survived by Bahman and her
sister, Soussan.
• This article was amended on 28 March
2012. The original said that Nilou
Mobasser worked for the BBC Monitoring
Service from 1997. This has been
corrected.
|