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 was from Ashtian and 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 poet Parvin Etessami.

Yussef 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 a 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, and Friedrich Schiller's Kabale und Liebe. He is the author also of a commentary in Arabic of Abolqassem al-Zamakhshari's Atwaq ad-Dahab, a three-volume catalogue of manuscripts in the Majles Library.