“How to Travel with a Salmon” at Iranian bookstores

TEHRAN –(Iranart)- Italian writer Umberto Eco’s book “How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays” has recently been published in Persian.

Ketabe Kucheh is the publisher of the book translated into Persian by Gholamreza Emami, who has previously rendered other works by Eco, including “The Bomb and the General” and “The Three Astronauts”.

This book is full of wisecrack jokes, defiance, weirdness and wisdom. It carries the series mini articles in this book that are a collection of various miracles of guidance: how to spend a fruitful holiday, how to eat and drink in the air, how to look out the window, how to discuss football and how to deal with taxi drivers.

A Persian translation of his 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism” or “Eternal Fascism” by Emami has also been published in Iran.

In this essay, cultural theorist Eco lists fourteen general properties of fascist ideology. He argues that it is not possible to organize these into a coherent system, but that “it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.” He uses the term “Ur-fascism” as a generic description of different historical forms of fascism.

Emami has also translated Eco’s “Three Stories” (“Tres cuentos”) that was introduced during a special meeting at the 32nd Tehran International Book Fair in 2019.

Tehran-based publisher Daf organized a meeting in February 2016 to pay tribute to Eco following his death at the age of 84.

In addition, Tehran’s Book City Institute also commemorated the philosopher at the same time by organizing a meeting to review his theory of semiotic processes and classification of signs.

Eco was the author “A Theory of Semiotics”, which was published in 1978.

In English, he is best known for his popular 1980 novel “The Name of the Rose”, a historical mystery combining semiotics in fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory, and “Foucault’s Pendulum”, his 1988 novel that touches on similar themes.

source: Tehran Times