TEHRAN -- Iranian poet, writer, translator Taheher Saffarzadeh died of cancer at Tehran’s Iranmehr Hospital on Saturday morning.

Saffarzadeh underwent surgery on September 27 to remove a brain tumor, but she went into a coma on October 13.
She was busy with translating a selection of the Nahj-ul-Balagha of Imam Ali (AS) into Persian and English.
In 2007, her new English translation of the Holy Quran was published by Iran’s international publisher and distributor of Islamic books Al-Hoda.
She had previously published a bilingual translation of the Quran in Persian and English in 2001.
In March 2006, Saffarzadeh received the title of 2005 Woman Scholar of the Islamic World, which is annually selected by the Organization of Afro-Asian Writers in Egypt.
Born in Sirjan in southern Iran, Saffarzadeh received her BA in English language and literature in 1960 from the University of Tehran.
Several years later, she left Iran for England and then went to the United States and was accepted as a member of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. For her degree she studied major contemporary world literature with a special focus on practical literary criticism and translation workshops. She was a professor at the Shahid Beheshti University and several other academic studies centers in Tehran.
Saffarzadeh published fourteen collections of poems including “The Red Umbrella,” “The Journey of Five,” “Move and Yesterday,” “Seven Journeys” and “The Visit to the Morning.”
She is also the author of ten books on the principles of translation of literary, scholarly, and Quranic texts.
Saffarzadeh presented several theories on the effectiveness of the science of translation, which “Scientific Progression via Translation” regarded as the most notable.
She has also written the book “Translating the Fundamental Meanings of the Holy Quran” (1999), in which she examines the main flaws and shortcomings of previous translations of the Quran by Muslim and non-Muslim scholars.