The Explanation of the Religions (Bayān al-Adyān, 1091-2) is the first surviving Persian encyclopedia of comparative religions completed before the better-known Arabic-language the Book of Sects and Creeds (Kitāb al-Milāl wa al-Niḥal) by Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Karīm Aḥmad al-Shahrastānī from 1127-8. Beyond that, it is the earliest s…[Read more]

Line breaks are arguably the defining feature of poetry, in the absence of which a text becomes prose. Consequently, the translation of line breaks is a decisive issue for every poetry translator. Classical and modern literary theorists have argued that the potential for enjambment, which we understand as the effect that makes line breaks possible…[Read more]

This working paper deals with the potentials of visual paronomasia and misreading in Persian poetics, and what they imply for textual criticism. In Arabic and Persian poetry, words gain an aesthetic value for their shape, the way they appear in writing. A visual parallelism between words defines a special kind of paronomasia known as script…[Read more]

In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, when a new style of Persian poetry was developing in the Persianate world, several erudite literary critics appeared in India, whose meticulous critiques of Persian poetry was unprecedented in the long history of Persian literature. A close study of the works produced by these critics reveals their vast…[Read more]

This working paper presents a full and annotated translation of two titles by 19th-century Ottoman author-cum-statesman Ziya Pasha: (1) a newspaper article written in exile, modern in terms of format and reformist in terms of tenor and providing an staunch and iconoclastic critique of Ottoman language and literature, and (2) the versified preface…[Read more]

A translation of a commentary on a poem by Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī. The commentary is written by Ṣā’in al-Dīn Turka Iṣfahānī (d. 1432), a distinguished figure of intellectual millennialism in the early Timurid era: a productive scholar, commentator, and an occult philosopher, who is best known for his synthesis of Ibn Sīnā’s Peripatetic philoso…[Read more]

This article explores the reconfiguration of world poetics by the Iranian poet and translator Ahmad Shamlu (1925-2000). Working at the intersection of global modernism and translation studies, we trace the formation of a Persian modernist poetics of solidarity on the basis of translations from so-called third world literatures and show how…[Read more]

A discussion of majāz or allegory that is commonly ascribed to the 15th-century Ottoman polygraph Mollā Lüṭfī and that builds on the works of al-Sakkākī and al-Qazwīnī.
The author gives two alternative overarching classifications: a linguistic vs. cognitive allegory classification, and a metaphor vs. hypallage classification that is supplemen…[Read more]

Poetry is widely considered to be untranslatable. Notwithstanding the preponderance of theories which insist on the impossibility of poetry translation, poetry has been translated for millennia around the world. In this article, I discuss the untranslatability of poetry by drawing upon my experience as a translator of Persian poetry into English.…[Read more]

In Arabic and Persian rhetoric, laff wa-nashr or laff-u-nashr is a structuring device. It involves creating a one-to-one correspondence between two or more sets of words across verses or hemistiches of a poem. Laff wa-nashr was in use by the earliest Persian poets but only came to be named as such for the first time in Persian in the fourteenth…[Read more]

This working paper presents in full translation four texts of the Uzbek early 20th-century jadid reformist Abdurrauf Fitrat. Identifying educational reform as the main key to progress, he advocated for the emancipation and nationalisation of the Chaghatay/Uzbek language as a tool to educate the masses rather than to serve the interests of a…[Read more]

This working paper presents a 16th- or 17th-century Ottoman translation-cum-commentary of the preface and introduction of one of the classics of Islamicate rhetoric, al-Qazwīnī’s Talkhīṣ al-Miftāḥ (The Key’s Digest), a 14th-century work on rhetoric based on al-Sakkākī’s 13th-century seminal Miftāḥ al-ʿUlūm (The Key of Sciences). This part…[Read more]

In classical manuals of Persian science of eloquence (balāgha), poetry translation (tarjama) is classified as a figure of speech along with other rhetorical devices, such as metaphor (istiʾāra), simile (tashbīh), and paronomasia (jinās). In this working paper, I have translated sections related to the rhetorical device tarjama from Tarjuman al-b…[Read more]

The translation of a short treatise on paranomasia, simile, and metonymy, by the foremost Persian-Turkish lexicographer of the 15th century, Lütfu’llāh el–Ḥalīmī. The text combines a rather dense and elliptic prose style with a remarkably lucid and clear-cut typology of seven types of tajnīs, seven types of tashbīh, and nine types of majāz, ofte…[Read more]

In celebration of the tenth anniversary of the second centennial of Ākhūndzade’s birth, three Azerbaijani texts in translation by the Molière of Azerbaijan. The texts—one poem, one letter, and one prose text—reflect Ākhūndzāde’s sharp, sometimes vitriolic, take on Rūmī ’s teaching (a dangerous, incomprehensible word jumble), most poetry and po…[Read more]

The book we read today in the name of Tanklūshā in Arabic and Persian versions is pseudepigraphic––most likely an imaginary reconstruction of an astrological work by Teukros, rich with images of everyday life appearing in supernatural tints as constellations on the vast screen of the night sky. Each of the twelve zodiac signs contains depic…[Read more]

Are you tripping over your own feet, incapable of advancing even a single metre, when it comes to understanding the technicalities of the feet and metres of pre-modern Islamicate poetry? Then you should probably not consult Nevāʾī’s Meter of Meters, since you are better off with the works of a Wheeler Thackston or a Finn Thiesen… If, howe…[Read more]

The process by which a literary text comes to be is among the understudied domains of translation studies. This article draws on my experience of translating Samuel Beckett’s late prose works into Persian to explore how a convergence of translation studies and genetic criticism can affect and broaden the literary translator’s
choices. I out…[Read more]

This article examines the temporality of interlinear translation through a case study of the rendering of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poetry into Persian. We argue that, in its adherence to the word order of the original, the interlinear crib prioritizes the temporality of the instant (kairos) over the temporality of the linear sequence (chronos). Ka…[Read more]

In the summer of 2011, an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Ivanov (1887) debuted on the Iranian stage. The director and playwright Amir-Reza Koohestani (b. 1978) created a production that was faithful to the classic status of this text while also maximizing its resonance with a contemporary Iranian audience. I explore how Koohestani achieved this b…[Read more]