- Yussef Etessami
Yussef Etessami (or Etessam-ol-molk), Iranian journalist, official, publisher, translator, and writer, was born in 1874 and died in 1938. His father Ebrahim Etessami was the head of finance of the Iranian province of Azerbaijan. He was the elder brother of the architect and painter
Abolhassan Etessami , and the father of the poetessParvin Etessami .In the 1890s, Yussef Etessami established the first typographical printing house in Tabriz. He was member of the Iranian Parliament or Majles in 1909-12, and founded the "Bahar" journal in 1910. At various junctures he served in the Ministry of Education and headed the Royal and Majles Libraries.
The "Bahar" journal was a sixty-four-page monthly published in 1910-1 and 1921-2. As noted in the first issue, the purpose of "Bahar" was “to provide a … forum for various significant topics of scientific, literary, ethical, historical, and artistic interest to people of understanding, and to acquaint the public with valuable information.” Most of the journal's material was written or translated by Yussef Etessami, and large part devoted to Western culture. To
Edward Granville Browne (1928, 489) "Bahar" appeared “very modern and European in tone;” and in "Encyclopaedia Iranica ", Heshmat Moayyad points out its “liberal and humanistic” orientation.In addition to his contributions to "Bahar", Yussef Etessami's produced about forty volumes of translations, in particular some Persian translations of
Qasim Amin 's "Tahrir al-Mara",Victor Hugo 's "Les Misérables", vol. 1, andFriedrich Schiller 's "Kabale und Liebe". He is the author also of a commentary in Arabic of Abolqassemal-Zamakhshari 's "Atwaq ad-Dahab", an a three-volume catalogue of manuscripts in the Majles Library.Sources
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, G. H. Bahar. In "Encyclopædia Iranica" online.
External links
[http://www.iranica.com/ "Encyclopædia Iranica" online]
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