Linguist, specialists in Iranian letters, translator of It’s me who turns off the lights by Zoya Pirzad and The man who killed his desire of Sadeq Hedayat, Christophe Balaÿ died at the age of 73.
Linguist, eminent specialist in Persian language and civilization, Christophe Balaÿ was a Persian teacher [lien en persan] at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (Inalco), in Paris. His death, which occurred on July 31 following a long illness, deeply pained generations of French students who learned the language of Hafiz and Omar Khayyam under his aegis, in his essential Persian Manual, published by Editions de L’Asiathèque. More recently, he published a volume 2 entitled Persian Readingscomposed of literary texts and press texts written in Persian, from the middle of the 19th century to the present day.
Professor Balaÿ was not content to teach the language. If his death was felt with so much emotion, it is because, as his former students explain, the man had known how to make the teaching of the language a true initiatory art, the initiation to the complexities of a society and a civilization, in this case the Persian civilization that the deceased considered ” the most cultivated in the Middle East “.
Resident at Ifri
Born on August 12, 1949, Christophe Balaÿ recently told a journalist from the Dauphiné liberated (1) how in 1979, his Persian diploma in hand, he left for Iran, a year after the Islamic revolution, in order to improve his knowledge of the Persian language and civilization. He was a resident of the French Institute for Research in Iran (Ifri), between 1979 and 1983, in the midst of the Iranian-Iraqi war: “ The war with Iraq broke out in 1980 and, during the three years that followed, I made encounters that would have been impossible in times of peace. Life is complicated, the food distributed by means of coupons, however, by upsetting the strata of society, this conflict gives me access to the big bourgeoisie as well as to the more traditional environment of the bazaar, businesses often run by mullahs. I also have the invaluable chance of being able to meet the most prestigious professors, happy to find a foreign student wishing to continue their studies in literature! » (1)
It must be believed that the Persian encounters of the young student Christophe Balaÿ were fruitful since on his return to France in 1983, he defended his state thesis at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, before being recruited in stride by the Langues O ‘ as a teacher of Persian language and literature. In 1998, fifteen years after his first stay, he returned to Tehran, this time as director of Ifri, where he was a former resident.
“ And so death was something else »
Retired from O’ Languages since 2014, Professor Balaÿ has also left his mark on the reception of Iranian literature by translating into French nearly thirty literary works, in particular the short stories of Sadegh Hedayat, the works of Houshang Golshiri, novels by Shahrnush Parsipour, Zoya Pirzad, Fariba Vafi and Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, all great names in contemporary Persian literature. “ It is difficult to imagine what the knowledge of contemporary Iranian letters in France would have been without the contribution of this great connoisseur of the Iranian world. “, told me a manager of the Asiatheque (2).
Christophe Balaÿ has also translated poetry, in particular the volume signed Yadollah Royaï with the evocative title: And so death was something else… It was, however, contemporary Iranian fiction which was the privileged field of exploration for this 20th century Champollion, who had found in the evolution of modern Persian prose his Rosetta Stone, which he had tried all his long life to decipher the secrets and the nuances in order to make read the boilings of contemporary Iran. ” The genesis of the modern Persian novel was the title of his state doctorate thesis, defended in 1989.
(1) “ Aubenas: the day Christophe Balaÿ discovered Iran in the midst of a revolution », by Carole Dumas, in Le Dauphiné released on January 3, 2021
(2) Iranian novels and short stories translated by Christophe Balaÿ are available from Zulma, L’Inventaire and Buchet-Chastel.