Najaf Daryabandari

Najaf Daryabandari
Born	(1929-08-23)23 August 1929 Abadan, Iran
Died	4 May 2020(2020-05-04) (aged 90) Tehran, Iran
Occupation(s)	Writer, translator
Spouses	Janet Lazarian ​ (divorced)​ Fahimeh Rastkar ​ (died 2012)​
Children	3
Awards	PEN Literary Award for Translation of Huck Finn

Najaf Daryabandari (Persian: نجف دریابندری; 23 August 1929 – 4 May 2020) was an Iranian writer and translator of works from English into Persian.^[1][2]

Najaf was the son of Captain Khalaf Daryabandari, one of the first marine pilots of Iran. The Iranian Merchant Mariners' Syndicate held a commemoration ceremony for Najaf Daryabandari and awarded him a replica of Darius the Great's Suez Inscriptions.^[3] He started translation at the age of 17–18 with the book of William Faulkner, "A Rose for Emily".^[4] He and his wife Fahimeh Rastkar, were also the authors of "The Rt. Honorable Cookbook, from Soup to Nuts" [literally in Persian "From Garlic to Onion"], a two-volume tome on Iranian cuisine that have collected the diverse dishes of the country.^[5] He worked as a senior editor at the Tehran branch of Franklin Book Programs.^[6]

Najaf Daryabandari died on May 4, 2020, in Tehran at the age of 90 after a long illness.^[7][8]

Persian Translations

• Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea
• Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day
• William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily and As I Lay Dying (novel)
• Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy, Mysticism and Logic and Power: A New Social Analysis
• Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot
• Edgar Lawrence Doctorow's Billy Bathgate and Ragtime
• Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Mysterious Stranger^[9]
• Will Cuppy's The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody, 1972 under the title of Čenin konand bozorgān (چنین کنند بزرگان, Thus Act the Great).
• Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of the Enlightenment and The Myth of the State
• Isaiah Berlin's Russian Thinkers
• Sophocles's Antigone
• Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet and The Mad Man

Original works

• The Rt. Honorable Cookbook, from Soup to Nuts, [literally, from garlic to onion, in Persian] co-authored with his wife Fahimeh Rastkar.^[10]
• Selflessness pain: Review of the Concept of Alienation in the Philosophy of the West (1990)^[11]
• The Myth Legend (2001)^[12]
• In This Respect (2009)^[13]