Yussef Etessami

Yussef Etessami

Yussef Etessami or Etessam-ol-molk (* 1874 , † 1938 ) was an Iranian journalist, civil servant, publisher, translator and author. His father Ebrahim was from Ashtian and was the head of finance in the Iranian province of Azerbaijan . Yussef was the older brother of the architect and painter Abolhassan Etessami and the father of the poet Parvin Etessami .

In the 1890s, Yussef Etessami founded the first typographic publishing house in Tabriz . From 1909 to 1912 he was a member of the Iranian Parliament or Majles . In 1910 he founded the magazine Bahar (The Spring). At various times he served in the Ministry of Education and headed the Royal and Majles Libraries.

The Bahar was published as a 64-page monthly magazine in the years 1910-11 and 1921-22. As stated in the first edition, the purpose of the paper Bahar was "... to provide the professionally educated readers with a forum for various important topics of scientific, literary, ethical, historical and artistic interest, and to bring valuable information to the public." Most of the contributions were written or translated by Yussef Etessami, and much of it was devoted to Western culture. Bahar appeared to Edward Granville Browne (1928, 489) "very modern and European in tone;" and in the Encyclopaedia Iranica , Heschmat Moayyad points to the “liberal and humanist” attitude.

In addition to the contributions in Bahar , Yussef Etessami prepared around forty volumes with translations. Particularly noteworthy are some Persian translations by Qasim Amins Tahrir al-Mara , Les Misérables by Victor Hugo , and Kabale und Liebe by Friedrich Schiller . He is also the author of a commentary in Arabic on Abolqassem al-Zamakhshari's Atwaq ad-Dahab and a three-volume catalog of manuscripts in the Majles library.

literature

• Browne, Edward G. 1928. A literary history of Persia , vol. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Dehkhoda , Ali-Akbar. 1977. Biographical note. In Poems of Parvin Etessami , ed. Abolfath Etessami, p. 342. Tehran: Abolfath Etessami.
• Etessami, Abolhassan. 1958. Biographical note. Tehran University News Bulletin 374, pp. 34-7.
• Moayyad, Heshmat. Etesami, Mirza Yusof Khan Ashtiani, Etessam-al-molk. In Encyclopædia Iranica online.
• Yusofi, GH Bahar. In Encyclopædia Iranica online.