DOMESTICATION AND INTERSEMIOTIC TRANSLATION OF THE CHERRY ORCHARD IN IRANIAN CINEMA

Abstract

The article examines the Iranian film The Season of the White Fish (2018), directed by Ghorban Najafi, as an intersemiotic and intercultural cinematic adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s play The Cherry Orchard. Drawing on Roman Jakobson’s concept of intersemiotic translation, as well as the semiotic theories of Yuri M. Lotman and Umberto Eco, the study analyzes the strategies by which meanings, symbolic structures, and narrative models of Chekhov’s text are transferred into the cultural context of contemporary Iran. The aim is to identify and classify the mechanisms of domestication through which the Russian source text becomes integrated into a new social, religious, and spatio-temporal environment. While preserving the plot framework and key motifs of The Cherry Orchard, Najafi reconfigures them through symbolic substitution, transforming the image of the cherry orchard into the imagery of rice fields and the metaphor of the “white fish”—a local symbol of life and natural cyclicality characteristic of the Caspian region. The article concludes that this film adaptation functions as an autonomous interpretative act within the broader space of intersemiotic translation.