Eminent Iranian translator, editor, lexicographer and critic Karim Emami died on this day. He was born in Calcutta in 1930. His father had been a frequent visitor to the city.
Emami returned to Iran as a child and studied English literature at Tehran University and later in the US.
He is one of the most accomplished translators of contemporary Iranian poetry into English and has also translated from English to Persian. He was editor-in-chief at Franklin Books and started a publishing house called Saroush Press. He founded the Zamineh bookstore in Tehran, which became an intellectual hub.
In his last years, he was working on a Persian-English dictionary that would incorporate the expanded vocabulary of the Persian language at the time of writing.