Negoziazioni linguistiche nell'editoria iraniana: Negarān nabāš di Mahsā Moḥebʿali

Published in Iran at the end of 2008, Mahsā Moḥebʿali’s novel Negarān nabāš (Don’t Worry) is suddenly acclaimed as the manifesto of a generation for the crude representation of a young Tehrani girl through a rude and anti-literary language. The novel, indeed, is characterized by the wide use of Tehran’s youth slang, but despite its explicit style, it has been legally published in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The discovery of a first draft in the author’s private archive allows us to outline a complex editorial genesis: the original manuscript of the novel was written in a completely colloquial style, even on the orthographical level, while the published version restores the correct spelling of the written language. Confronting the draft and the published text, this paper aims to investigate the editorial negotiation which led to the publication of the novel in the complex context of the Iranian book market and contemporary Iranian literature, where the use of the colloquial spelling in writing is still uncommon, and before Moḥebʿali had been experienced only once in the 1960s by Ṣādeq Čubak.