Cecilia Banu

Cecilia Banu (Russian:Цецилия Бенциановна Бану; also known as Cecilia Banu-Lahuti; born Cecilia Bentsianovna Bakaleishchik in Lyubech, Chernigov province on 13 March 1911; died in Moscow, 11 January 1998) was a scholar of Iranian studies, a poet and a translator from the Persian language to Russian.

She is best known for her multi-volume translation of the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi.

Cecilia Bakaleishchik was born in a Jewish family in Lyubech, Chernigov province, in Ukraine in 1911.

She graduated from the University of Kyiv with a degree in Iranian Studies.

Among Persians, she became known as Selsela banu, or Cecilia Banu, which then became her nom de plume.

Cecilia moved to Samarkand at the age of eighteen, where she met Abolqasem Lahouti, a Soviet litterateur of Iranian origin, who was a professor of classical Persian literature there and a correspondent for Pravda and Izvestia.

They married when she was 19 or 20 years old.

They had a daughter, Leili, who became an Iranologist; their older son, Dalir, a philologist, philosopher and translator; and their younger son, Giv, a journalist and translator.

Their granddaughter Maya Lahuti was an art restorer, and their grandson Felix Lahuti was a composer.

Lahouti and Banu initially lived in his one-bedroom apartment in Moscow.

After the birth of their first two children, it became difficult to manage in the small flat.

When, in 1934, Lahouti was made executive secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers, they were offered a larger apartment.

Fierce opposition from residents being evicted prevented them from taking up the property.

Lahouti wrote in some anguish to Molotov that he was unable to concentrate on the work assigned to him by the State, and that his family was falling ill.

It took a year and Stalin's intervention for a larger flat to be granted.

She became one of the founding members of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934, on Maxim Gorky's recommendation.

She was named as an Honored Cultural Worker of Tajik SSR.

The complete translation of the Shahnameh was instigated by Lahouti, who with Banu, chose the Nafisi-Vullers (1936) edition of the Persian text.

By 1937, they were able to obtain more spacious accommodation.

However, by the time she began her monumental translation of the Shahnameh, Banu and her family were living in relative poverty in Ivanovka, near Moscow.

These were troubled years politically, but in the midst of artistically inclined neighbours, they were able to find the tranquility required for work.

In 1938, Lahouti wrote The Story of a Rose (Dāstān-e gol) in Tajik in a private letter addressed to Stalin, hoping to persuade him to support Mikhoels and the Jewish Theatre in the midst of the Great Purge.

Its poetic translation into Russian by Banu accompanied the original.

To Lahouti's fury, Stalin called the poem a sycophantic thing, following which Lahouti remained in disgrace till Stalin's death.

King Lear, which had been presented in Yiddish to great acclaim by Solomon Mikhoels and the Moscow State Jewish Theatre, was one translation; another was Othello, which was presented in Tajik during the Decade of Tajik Art in Moscow in 1941.

In 1941, to celebrate the Decade of Tajik Literature and Culture in Moscow, Lahouti wrote the libretto to the opera Kaveh the Blacksmith in six acts, based on the themes of the Shahnameh.

This was translated into Russian by Banu with E.G. Dorfman.

Besides these, she also translated the Persian poetry of Omar Khayyam, Rudaki, Rumi, Saadi Shirazi, Hafez, as well as her magnum opus, the translation of the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi.

Thirty-eight ruba'is of Khayyam were rendered into excellent and simply styled Russian by Banu, hewing closely to the original Persian in meaning and form.

The book was published in Tajikistan but was difficult to find, and attracted attention only much later.

Cecilia Banu began her first translations of the Shahnameh, with the publication of several dastans in the newspaper Pravda.

Her attempts to capture the rhythm and style of the original were already evident.

At the first Union of Soviet Writers that same year, Maxim Gorky recommended a full translation of the poem and advised Banu to occupy herself with the translation of classical Eastern poetry into the Russian, pointing out that she had someone close to her, her husband, who fully understood the nuances of the East.

Having read through the poem twice and with her husband's commentary on each verse, Banu began the six-volume translation in 1957.

Lahouti edited the first volume, which appeared on the day he died; subsequent volumes were published intermittently till 1989.

Cecilia Banu died in Moscow on 11 January 1998.

Cecilia Banu published three volumes of poetry.

She also became known as a brilliant translator from Persian.

Banu translated much of her husband, Abolqasem Lahouti's oeuvre into Russian.

She also worked with him in the translation of Russian and European works into the Tajik language.