Iranian veteran translator Ebrahim Yunesi dies at 85

TEHRAN,Feb.12(MNA) -- Renowned author and translator Ebrahim Yunesi died on February 8. He was 85. Due to his suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, he stopped translating and writing two years ago when he remarked that “he could not remember the appropriate words”. According to his will, Yunesi was laid to rest at his hometown Baneh, his son Azad told . He was buried at the Soleymanbag Cemetery in his hometown Baneh, Kordestan Province. Despite the cold and snowy weather, numerous people and artists from different parts of Kordestan attended the ceremony. His funeral ceremony will be held on February 14 at the Nur Mosque in Tehran. Born in Baneh in 1927, he moved to Tehran when he was 17 to attend Tehran’s military school and graduated from the Faculty of Military Basic Sciences in 1949. In 1955, he was imprisoned after the collapse of the Mosaddeq government due to his political activities and he learned his translation skills from some of his friends when he was in the prison. After he released, he continued his studies in economics and got his Ph.D. from Paris’ Sorbonne University. Yunesi translated several books on literary criticism including “Aspects of the Novel” by E.M. Foster, “The Complexion of Russian Literature: A Cento” by Andrew Field and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “A Writer’s Diary”. “My Mother Has Cried Twice”, “The Stranger’s Cemetery”, “A Winter without Spring”, “Dada Shirin”, “Welcome” and “Pray for Arman” are some of the books he has written during his career. He also translated a number of world literary classics into Persian including Miguel de Cervantes’ “Don Quixote”, Alexandre Dumas’ “The Three Musketeers” and Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations”.