Abolhassan Najafi Information

**Abu’l-Hasan Najafi (June 28, 1929 – January 22, 2016) was a prominent Iranian linguist and translator. He was a permanent member of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature. His major literary and scientific activities were in the fields of literary translation, editing, linguistics, and Persian prosody. Some of his most famous works include the colloquial Persian dictionary, “Do Not Write Wrong,” and the Persian translation of “The Thibault Family.”**

Abu’l-Hasan Najafi was born in 1929 in Najaf. According to his own account, he was the only member of the Najafi family born in Najaf, as his father had gone there to study religious sciences and was a qualified mujtahid. His brother, Fazlollah Najafi, was one of the officers who joined Major Eskandani during the Khurasan Officers’ Uprising in the summer of 1945 and lost his life in the cause.

A few years later, Najafi moved to Iran with his family. He completed his primary and secondary education in Isfahan and graduated with a diploma in literature in 1947. One of his teachers during high school, Jafar Al-Ebrahim, had a significant impact on him. Najafi then moved to Tehran to continue his studies and enrolled in the Faculty of Literature at the University of Tehran, majoring in French. During his university years, he was influenced by professors such as Parviz Natel Khanlari, Fatemeh Sayyah, and Mussa Broukhim. Due to certain reasons, he took a two-year break from his studies and graduated in 1953 with a thesis in French on Sadegh Hedayat. After graduation, Najafi worked as a high school teacher in Isfahan. During these years, along with Abdul Hossein Al-Resul and Ahmad Azimi Zavaraei, he founded Nil Publishing in Tehran. Their first publication was a Persian translation of Voltaire’s “Candide” by Mohammad Ghazi.

In 1959, Najafi went to France to further his education and obtained a master’s degree in linguistics from the Sorbonne University in Paris. He benefited from the classes of André Martinet and was supposed to write his doctoral thesis on “The Structures of Prepositions in the French Language” under Martinet’s supervision. However, for various reasons, he returned to Iran in 1965 with the intention of going back to France to complete his thesis.

Upon his return to Iran, Najafi joined the literary circle of the Esfahan Jangal, invited by Bahram Sadeghi and Mohammad Hoghooghi. From the third issue of the Esfahan Jangal magazine, Najafi’s collaboration with this group began. This marked the start of Najafi’s continuous and close connection with Hooshang Golshiri and the Esfahan Jangal circle, significantly influencing Bahram Sadeghi’s and even Hooshang Golshiri’s storytelling and others.

Najafi continued to teach in the Persian literature group at the University of Isfahan until 1970. In October 1970, he moved to Tehran and started working at the Franklin Institute. Meanwhile, he taught as an adjunct professor in the linguistics group at the University of Tehran. From 1976 to 1978, he participated in supervising, organizing, and editing texts for Iran’s Open University. During this time, he authored the book “Foundations of Linguistics and Its Application in Persian.”

In September and October 2015, Najafi was hospitalized due to illness. Abu’l-Hasan Najafi passed away on Friday, January 22, 2016, at the age of 86, in Mehr Hospital in Tehran.