Free The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books by Azar Nafisi Page B

research paper. “Why don’t you choose a typical American novel,” the head of the English department recommended. “Americans are in such vogue these days.” He himself was a Hemingway man, an extremely popular teacher who was also in vogue—for all the wrong reasons, of course, seeing how almost every day there was some call or demonstration against American imperialists and their domestic lackeys. Just three months after that conversation, no one but a few eccentrics like he and I would think of America in terms of Hemingway or Twain. The Americans everyone was talking about were the hostages held in the embassy, which happened to be situated not far from the university.
    How was it that in America I had been demonstrating in front of the White House, running away from tear gas and shouting political slogans, and now in Tehran, in the midst of a real revolution, under the threat of real bullets, I found myself in my bedroom, poring over Mark Twain into the early hours of morning and wondering how to teach the idea of beauty? Perhaps it was the very intensity of life during revolutionary times, its extreme and violent intrusions into each and every aspect of our being, that made us more sensitive to questions that just a year or two earlier might have seemed purely academic. My dilemma that evening was how to share with my students what I had so often experienced myself when reading a poem, a play, a novel: that immense sense of gratitude and joy, that spark of recognition that Vladimir Nabokov called the “tingle in the spine.”
    Research. From the beginning of their freshman year, my students would have been taught how to use the library, how to find articles and background information, to cite quotations and structure footnotes. I did not want to ask for more of the same. I thought it would be more exciting, and perhaps more fruitful, to treat literary research the way one would a treasure hunt, following a web of clues until one could piece together the genesis of the story, or the motive, or the crime. Parallel to all the mechanical aspects of writing a paper, and before using outside sources, I wanted the class to do another kind of research, to trace the book through its process of formation.
    “Just remember,” I told them, “the word ‘civilization’ is transformed on the very first page by Huck into ‘sivilization.’ That is a clue to the whole book—that slight change in spelling subverts the word’s meaning and implications. The key words in this novel—like ‘respectable,’ ‘conscience,’ ‘heart,’ ‘white’ and ‘nigger’—none of them have their conventional meanings. Remember the word ‘topsy-turvy,’ which we discussed last week? It applies to
Alice in Wonderland
and, in a different context, to
Huck Finn
.” I wanted them to feel the subversiveness of the text, to experience it as Twain’s first readers might have.
    Nima, one of my students who now lives in the United States, reminded me recently of the hue and cry I made, in one of the last classes I taught in Iran, over the mistranslation of the word “sivilization.” One day a student brought in the Persian translation of
Huck Finn
and showed me how the well-meaning translator had simplified matters for his readers by rendering “sivilization” in its correct Farsi spelling. This had led to a long discussion in class about the issue of integrity and the fact that in every novel, including this one—indeed, perhaps especially this one—words were flesh, blood and bones, as well as soul and spirit. You have a right to interpret them however you wish, but no right—
no
right—to mutilate them or to perform plastic surgery on the text for your own comfort and pleasure.
    I would be reminded of this exchangetwo decades later in Washington, D.C., when another well-meaning publishertook it upon himself to expunge another word, more inflammatory by far, from the text, arguing that he saw no reason to offend sensitive