محمود اعتمادزاده (م. ا. به‌آذین)Mahmoud Etemadzadeh (M. A. Beh-Azin)

Mahmoud Etemadzadeh, known as M. A. Beh-Azin, was an Iranian translator, fiction writer, editor and political activist, born in Rasht on 14 January 1915 and dead in Tehran on 31 May 2006. Encyclopaedia Iranica also records the pseudonyms Nowruz Ali Azad and Hormoz Malekdad. His father was a middle-class merchant bankrupted when trade with Russia was interrupted during the First World War. The family moved to Mashhad in 1927, where Etemadzadeh completed three years of secondary education before attending Dar al-Fonun and Tadayyon High School in Tehran.

He went to France on a government engineering scholarship in September 1932 and later studied at the Brest Naval Engineering and Architecture College with naval support. Returning in January 1938, he served in the Iranian navy. During the Allied bombardment of Bandar Pahlavi in September 1941 he was injured and his left arm was amputated. Medically discharged, he transferred to the education ministry and taught physics and mathematics. He married in 1942; Iranica does not publish a spouse’s name or children, so this profile does not guess them.

His literary career began in periodicals in 1943. Parakanda appeared in 1944 and Be su-ye mardom in 1948. After the 1953 coup he spent two months in prison and was banned from teaching; translation became both a livelihood and his most influential literary work. His Balzac, Romain Rolland, Sholokhov, Goethe and Shakespeare translations were praised for clarity and stylistic care. Iranica’s bibliography lists Othello in 1958, Hamlet in 1965 and King Lear in 1998. Its “1509” beside Hamlet is incompatible with the work’s history and is not repeated as a work date here.

Beh-Azin helped found the Writers’ Association of Iran in 1968 and worked with Jalal Al-e Ahmad on its charter, although political division later placed them in opposing factions. A 1970 protest against Fereydun Tonekaboni’s arrest led to four months in Qasr prison and the memoir Mehmān-e in āqāyān. He spoke on the tenth Goethe Institute night in 1977. His Association membership was suspended with several colleagues in 1980; a 2000 general assembly called that action undemocratic and restored the memberships.

He was arrested in 1982 and imprisoned in Evin until 1989. He lived more privately after release, suffered a stroke in 2000 and died at Arad Hospital on 31 May 2006. Iranica records both events but does not explicitly make the earlier stroke the medical cause of death, so this profile leaves the immediate cause unstated. For this AlefBa edition, Beh-Azin is the Persian translator only and William Shakespeare is the author. The Daat record has ISBN 9789649541907 and 153 pages; its physical impression date remains outside Book schema pending a colophon check. No identity-verified portrait with a clear commercial-reuse licence was established, so the profile remains image-free.