Daryoush Ashouri (Persian: داریوش آشوری), born in Tehran on August 2, 1938, is one of the most influential Iranian intellectuals of the last half-century — and one of the least easily categorized. Trained at the University of Tehran’s Faculty of Law, Political Science, and Economics, he went on to hold visiting positions at Yale University, the University of Oxford’s Oriental Institute, and Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, while also lecturing on political philosophy and political sociology at the University of Tehran. From 1970 to 1978 he served as a member of Iran’s Academy of Persian Language. Since the 1980s he has lived in Paris.

Ashouri’s career resists a single label: he is at once an essayist, encyclopedist, lexicologist, literary critic, and translator. His most lasting contribution to Persian intellectual life may be linguistic rather than doctrinal — he has coined and adapted a substantial part of the modern Persian vocabulary used in the humanities and social sciences, work compiled in his Farhang-e ‘Olum-e Ensani (Dictionary of the Human Sciences). His book-length study of Hafez, ‘Erfān o Rendi dar She’r-e Hafez, is considered a landmark in modern Persian literary hermeneutics, and his essays on modernity — collected in Mā va Moderniyat (We and Modernity) — have shaped decades of Iranian debate about how a non-Western society absorbs, resists, or reinvents Western categories of thought.

It is precisely this long engagement with the problem of cultural translation that makes Ashouri’s second major legacy so significant: he is the principal Persian translator of Friedrich Nietzsche, having rendered Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morality, Twilight of the Idols, and, most consequentially, Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) into Persian. Translating Nietzsche’s Zarathustra into the very language whose ancient ancestor, Avestan, was spoken by the historical prophet Zarathustra/Zoroaster placed Ashouri in a uniquely charged position — one he used not simply to render Nietzsche’s German into Persian, but to correct a long-standing Iranian misunderstanding of what Nietzsche had actually done with the name.

The Misreading Ashouri Set Out to Correct

In his article “Nietzsche and Persia,” written for the Encyclopaedia Iranica, Ashouri identifies a recurring and, in his view, naive tendency among Iranian readers: the wish to treat Nietzsche’s Zarathustra as a faithful revival of the historical Zoroastrian prophet, and to receive Nietzsche’s choice of name as an act of homage to Persian civilizational greatness. Ashouri notes that this reaction has old........

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