Courses by Rebecca Ruth Gould
This poetry translation masterclass focuses on the craft of poetry translation by examining and c... more This poetry translation masterclass focuses on the craft of poetry translation by examining and critiquing translations of Russian and Persian poetry into English. Examples are drawn from Osip Mandelstam (as translated by Christian Wiman), Hafez (as translated by Geoffrey Squires) and Bijan Elahi (as translated by Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould). The thematic focus is on punctuation, line breaks, and translating cultural difference. 3 video lessons
Books by Rebecca Ruth Gould
by Rebecca Ruth Gould, Sarah Irving, Eylaf Bader Eddin, Moses Kilolo, Aria Fani, omid mehrgan, Brahim El Guabli, Sahar Fathi, Mehrdad Rahimi-Moghaddam, Manuel Yang, Michela Baldo, Bidisha Pal, and Partha Bhattacharjee The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism provides an accessible, diverse, and in many r... more The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism provides an accessible, diverse, and in many respects ground-breaking overview of literary, cultural, and political translation across a range of activist contexts. This volume brings together case studies and histories of oppressed and marginalised peoples from more than twenty different languages, ranging across Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. Part One considers the theoretical foundations of translation and activism. Part Two examines the figure of the interpreter as an activist. Part Three examines the figure of the translator as an activist. Part Four is comprised of autobiographical reflections by translators and writers who bear witness to the stories of oppressed peoples. Part Five engages with translation and activism from a range of legal perspectives focusing on human rights. Part Six introduces a range of case studies of translations into vernacular languages. Part Seven situates translation and activism in the context of migration, with particular attention to refugee experience. Part Eight examines the role of translators in shaping revolution. As the first extended collection to introduce translation and activism from a systematically global perspective, this handbook will serve as a useful guide to translators, writers, scholars, and activists seeking to better understand the agency of language in bringing about political change.
Erasing Palestine examines the history of radical anti-Zionist Jewish thought, beginning with the... more Erasing Palestine examines the history of radical anti-Zionist Jewish thought, beginning with the maverick intellectuals Abraham Leon (1918-1944) and Isaac Deutscher (1907-1967), whose critical relationship with Israel has been erased from public memory. Guided by Abram’s and Deutscher’s understanding of Jewish history, I examine anti-Zionist movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, before the founding of the state of Israel, and with a particular focus on British anti-Zionism among Yiddish-speaking migrants around the time of the Balfour Declaration (1917). This history frames the discussion of issues that are actively shaping our political present: the remaining chapters are taken up with recent debates around defining antisemitism within British politics and society, with a particular focus on the highly contentious IHRA definition. Interviews with Palestinians and pro-Palestinian activists who have been disproportionately affected by the crackdown on anti-Israel speech that the adoption of the IHRA definition has facilitated throughout the UK and beyond demonstrate how the adoption of the IHRA definition has suppressed political activism. At the same time, these suppressions create new opportunities to reevaluate our commitment to free speech and to bring it in line with the mandate of social liberation.
* Winner, University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies
* Winner... more * Winner, University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies
* Winner, Best Book by a Woman in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Studies, Association for Women in Slavic Studies
* Honorable Mention, Joseph Rothschild Prize in Nationalism and Ethnic Studies, Association for the Study of Nationalities
* Honorable Mention, Davis Center Book Prize, Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies
* Shortlisted, Central Eurasian Studies Society Book Award (History and Humanities)
Examining literary representations of social banditry to telling the story of Russian colonialism from the vantage point of its subjects, among numerous other themes, Gould argues that the literatures of anticolonial insurgency constitute a veritable resistance—or “transgressive sanctity”—to colonialism.
(Priced as low as $35 through Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Writers-Rebels-Literature-Insurgency-Caucasus/dp/0300200641?ie=UTF8&qid=1467982647&ref_=la_B01090PRK8_1_4&s=books&sr=1-4).
Prison Hunger Strikes in Palestine: A Strategic Perspective, 2023
This book is the first major transnational examination of prison hunger strikes. While focusing o... more This book is the first major transnational examination of prison hunger strikes. While focusing on Palestine, the research is enriched by extensive interviews and conversations with South African, Kurdish, Irish, and British ex-prisoners and hunger strikers. This study reveals in unprecedented detail how prison hunger strikes achieve monumental feats of resistance through the weaponization of lives.
How do prison hunger strikers achieve demands? How do they stay connected with the outside world in a space that is designed to cut them off from that world? And why would a prisoner put their lives at risk by refusing to eat or, at times, drink? This research shows that sometimes prisoners’ need for dignity (karamah) and freedom (hurriya) trump their hunger pangs and thirst.
Prison Hunger Strikes in Palestine evaluates the process of hunger striking, including the repressive actions prisoners encounter, and the negotiation process. It analyzes differences and similarities between individual and collective strikes, and evaluates the role and impact of solidarity actions from outside the prison walls.
The work’s critical and grassroots understanding of prison hunger strikes fully centers the voices of hunger strikers. The analysis results in actionable takeaways that will be as useful to prison activists as they will be to their allies around the world.
Articles by Rebecca Ruth Gould
A new museum has opened in Tbilisi at the Writer's House of Georgia: The Museum of Repressed Writ... more A new museum has opened in Tbilisi at the Writer's House of Georgia: The Museum of Repressed Writers. The museum honours the executed poets from Georgia’s Soviet past, poets whose identities Soviet authorities tried to destroy. This article examines the story the museum tells about Soviet literary and political history.
Line breaks are arguably the defining feature of poetry, in the absence of which a text becomes p... 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 in poetry, constitutes the difference between poetry and prose. Yet, the translation of line breaks is among the least studied areas of translation theory. This essay explores the challenge of translating classical and modernist line breaks through examples from Persian and European literary canons. From Shams-i Qays’s classic treatise on Persian prosody to Arthur Rimbaud and William Carlos Williams to modernist poet Bijan Elahi’s poetic rewriting of One Thousand and One Nights, we explore the options open to the translator-poet who seeks to create a new poem in and through translation.
This article examines the temporality of interlinear translation through a case study of the rend... 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). Kairos is made manifest in the literalist translations of Hölderlin by the modernist Iranian translator-poet Bijan Elahi (d. 2010). This inquiry advances our understanding of the role of syntax in constituting literary form and in shaping translation, and exposes the contingency of the translator’s decisions in every given literary juncture.
In the summer of 2011, an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Ivanov (1887) debuted on the Iranian stag... 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 by shifting the dramatic focus from male to female characters and by internalizing the censor’s gaze in his work. André Lefevere’s concept of translation as refraction is used to show how literary texts function within the systems of cultural production that shape political and aesthetic consciousness. As a pre-revolutionary Russian play positioned between East and West, Chekhov’s Ivanov has striking relevance for an Iranian post-revolutionary audience. This case study of watching and performing Chekhov in Tehran illustrates how refracted texts acquire new lives in the process of their performance and translation into new cultural contexts.
Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics (2021)
This article compares three key texts in Daghestani Islamicate literature by Persian Azeri writer... more This article compares three key texts in Daghestani Islamicate literature by Persian Azeri writer Bākīkhānūf (d. 1847), Lezgi polymath al-Alqadārī (d. 1910), and Qumyq (Turkic) biographer al-Durgilī (d. 1935), with a view to understanding how their authors conceptualized their role as chroniclers of times past. I draw in particular on Italian historian Arnaldo Momigliano’s account of antiquarianism in order to develop a concept of Islamic antiquarianism and to propose a new way of understanding Islamic historiographic methods and traditions. By comparing Daghestani authors' varying historical epistemologies, I also shed light on Daghestani multilingualism. I argue that Daghestani cosmopolitanism is linked to the antiquarian imagination of its most notable theorists and chroniclers of times past.
Within Iran, the transformation in the Islamic legal understanding of the foreign (ajnabi) into a... more Within Iran, the transformation in the Islamic legal understanding of the foreign (ajnabi) into a political concept was accelerated by the encounter with Europe during the 19th century. The classical Iranian understanding of otherness as a domain fully demarcated from the self was replaced by an internalized other, resulting in what we call here the xenological uncanny. This article examines Iranian modernism through the lens of trauma theory, whereby haunted subjects fail in distinguishing between self and other, and modernization is perceived as demonization. The three works we discuss—Sadeq Hedayat’s Blind Owl (1937), Bahram Sadeqi’s Heavenly Kingdom (1961), and Hushang Golshiri’s Prince Ehtejab (1968)—each delineate a different register in the xenological uncanny. Our lineage reveals how modernist Persian prose recapitulates a trajectory of possession and dispossession by the foreign and in the process brings about the traumatic recognition of a foreign voice within the self. In focusing on the divided modernist self from a Persian point of view, we identify an unrecognized trajectory for the uncanny within global literary modernism.
Drawing on archival research, this article introduces several Russian poems by the Arabic mahjar ... more Drawing on archival research, this article introduces several Russian poems by the Arabic mahjar poet and writer Mikhail Naimy (Mīkhāʿīl Nu’aymah) (1889-1988) for the first time to scholarship. By examining the influence of Russian literature on Naimy’s literary output, we shed light on the role of multilingualism in generating literary identities and in shaping literary form. Naimy’s Russian poetry, we argue, furthers our understanding of the nahḍah as a multilingual movement that synthesized influ- ences from many different languages. We also show how this multilingual orientation served as a bridge between the nahḍah and mahjar literature, by helping Arab writers craft a poetics of Arabic modernism in the diaspora. Alongside documenting an important archival discovery, this research contributes to our understanding of the temporality of Arabic modernism while illuminating its geographically and linguisti- cally diverse substance.
This is an adapted excerpt from a chapter of my book Writers & Rebels for a special issue in Gron... more This is an adapted excerpt from a chapter of my book Writers & Rebels for a special issue in Groniek on resistance to the state.
Building on Earl Miner's insight that the lyric is a 'foundation genre' of world literature, this... more Building on Earl Miner's insight that the lyric is a 'foundation genre' of world literature, this article examines the Russo-Persian lyric, a hybrid genre that developed within 19th and 20th century Russian literature, as a case study in lyric translatability. First developed by the Russian Romantic poet Afanasy Fet (d. 1890) and later evident in Sergei Esenin's Persian Motifs (1925), the Russo-Persian lyric adds a new dimension to the Russian-Persian encounter. While tracing the migration of literary form as a process of cultural translation that transforms the original, generating new literary forms for new audiences, I shed light on how the ghazal and its adaptations modifies and extends our understanding of lyric form, and on what is and is not translated by the lyric genre.
Responding to recent calls made within UK Parliament for a government-backed definition of Islamo... more Responding to recent calls made within UK Parliament for a government-backed definition of Islamophobia, this article considers the unanticipated consequences of such proposals. I argue that, considered in the context of related efforts to regulate hate speech, the formulation and implementation of a government-sponsored definition will generate unforeseen harms for the Muslim community. To the extent that such a definition will fail to address the government’s role in propagating Islamophobia through ill-considered legislation that conflates Islamist discourse with hate speech, the concept of a government-backed definition of Islamophobia appears hypocritical and untenable. Alongside opposing government attempts to define Islamophobia (and Islam), I argue that advocacy efforts should instead focus on disambiguating government counter-terrorism initiatives from the government management of controversies within Islam. Instead of repeating the mistakes of the governmental adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism by promoting a new definition of Islamophobia, we ought to learn from this error. We should resist the gratuitous securitization of Muslim communities, rather than use such definitions to normalize compliance with the surveillance state.
This article traces the conception of love and desire (ʿishq) in a Persian verse romance by the I... more This article traces the conception of love and desire (ʿishq) in a Persian verse romance by the Indo-Persian poet Ḥasan Dihlavī, known as ʿIshqnāma (composed in 1301). ʿIshqnāma narrates a tragic and unconsummated love affair between a young Hindu couple. As the two protagonists immolate themselves in what is at once a reworking of the Indic custom of widow burning (sati) and an allusion to the deaths of the famed lovers Laylī and Majnūn, the poet offers an innovative account of the temporality of desire. In transforming the Persian master narrative of love, Ḥasan anticipates Freud's account of the account of the death drive in relation to the pleasure principle in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1921). This article initiates a dialogue between Freud and Ḥasan Dihlavī in order to suggest that desire for another may be the self's only means of reckoning with its contingency.
This article explores the reconfiguration of world poetics by the Iranian poet and translator Ahm... 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 Shamlu’s political aesthetic traverses national borders to embrace ignored and marginalized poetic traditions. Instead of relying on French and other European modernisms to reinvigorate his national literature, Shamlu made available to his Iranian contemporaries a broad panorama of world literature that brought together Global Southern literatures, modernist poetics, and transnational political commitments. In tracing the literary and political forms taken by Shamlu’s global solidarity, this article develops a post-Eurocentric framework for the study of Iranian literary modernism.
This article engages with cosmopolitan conceptions of culture that flourished in the nineteenth c... more This article engages with cosmopolitan conceptions of culture that flourished in the nineteenth century Caucasus with a view to clarifying the relevance of these legacies today. I focus in particular on the polymath writer ʿAbbās Qulī Āghā Bākīkhānūf (1794–1847). As I explore Bākīkhānūf’s historical writing, I consider how the Persianate literary tradition of which he partakes advance a cosmopolitan conception of community that contests the nationalist histories promulgated by modern European historiography. As a scientific and literary project, Bākīkhānūf’s cosmological cosmopolitanism shows how epistemic openness advances cultural inclusivity, in part by recognizing the relationship between the literary imagination and scientific inquiry.
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Courses by Rebecca Ruth Gould
Books by Rebecca Ruth Gould
* Winner, Best Book by a Woman in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Studies, Association for Women in Slavic Studies
* Honorable Mention, Joseph Rothschild Prize in Nationalism and Ethnic Studies, Association for the Study of Nationalities
* Honorable Mention, Davis Center Book Prize, Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies
* Shortlisted, Central Eurasian Studies Society Book Award (History and Humanities)
Examining literary representations of social banditry to telling the story of Russian colonialism from the vantage point of its subjects, among numerous other themes, Gould argues that the literatures of anticolonial insurgency constitute a veritable resistance—or “transgressive sanctity”—to colonialism.
(Priced as low as $35 through Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Writers-Rebels-Literature-Insurgency-Caucasus/dp/0300200641?ie=UTF8&qid=1467982647&ref_=la_B01090PRK8_1_4&s=books&sr=1-4).
How do prison hunger strikers achieve demands? How do they stay connected with the outside world in a space that is designed to cut them off from that world? And why would a prisoner put their lives at risk by refusing to eat or, at times, drink? This research shows that sometimes prisoners’ need for dignity (karamah) and freedom (hurriya) trump their hunger pangs and thirst.
Prison Hunger Strikes in Palestine evaluates the process of hunger striking, including the repressive actions prisoners encounter, and the negotiation process. It analyzes differences and similarities between individual and collective strikes, and evaluates the role and impact of solidarity actions from outside the prison walls.
The work’s critical and grassroots understanding of prison hunger strikes fully centers the voices of hunger strikers. The analysis results in actionable takeaways that will be as useful to prison activists as they will be to their allies around the world.
Articles by Rebecca Ruth Gould
* Winner, Best Book by a Woman in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Studies, Association for Women in Slavic Studies
* Honorable Mention, Joseph Rothschild Prize in Nationalism and Ethnic Studies, Association for the Study of Nationalities
* Honorable Mention, Davis Center Book Prize, Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies
* Shortlisted, Central Eurasian Studies Society Book Award (History and Humanities)
Examining literary representations of social banditry to telling the story of Russian colonialism from the vantage point of its subjects, among numerous other themes, Gould argues that the literatures of anticolonial insurgency constitute a veritable resistance—or “transgressive sanctity”—to colonialism.
(Priced as low as $35 through Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Writers-Rebels-Literature-Insurgency-Caucasus/dp/0300200641?ie=UTF8&qid=1467982647&ref_=la_B01090PRK8_1_4&s=books&sr=1-4).
How do prison hunger strikers achieve demands? How do they stay connected with the outside world in a space that is designed to cut them off from that world? And why would a prisoner put their lives at risk by refusing to eat or, at times, drink? This research shows that sometimes prisoners’ need for dignity (karamah) and freedom (hurriya) trump their hunger pangs and thirst.
Prison Hunger Strikes in Palestine evaluates the process of hunger striking, including the repressive actions prisoners encounter, and the negotiation process. It analyzes differences and similarities between individual and collective strikes, and evaluates the role and impact of solidarity actions from outside the prison walls.
The work’s critical and grassroots understanding of prison hunger strikes fully centers the voices of hunger strikers. The analysis results in actionable takeaways that will be as useful to prison activists as they will be to their allies around the world.
The excerpt translated here describes the narrator’s native city, Isfahan, on the brink of revolution. Using stream of consciousness techniques and avoiding paragraph breaks, the novel evokes an historical scene from Shah Square where the narrator stands, imagining the brutality of past eras, against the background of an onslaught of tourists.
"My Scent that Doesn't Pass" [بوی من که نمیآید]
"Dupin Detects" [Dupin Detects]
"Song of the Moon Hanging over the Fields of Damascus"
[معلقهی ماه روی دشتهای دمشق ]
*************************************************************************************
“The Death of Bagrat Zakharych”, a highly sardonic account of the sudden death of a chancellery official in which Vazha-Pshavela’s ironic sense reaches its fullest pitch, invites comparison to classic works such as Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”.
“Memories: A Christmas Tale” tells of a boy who returns from boarding school to his village for the winter holiday and reconnects with his family – especially his wild-natured uncle, a hunter whose tales of expeditions past and present captivate him.
“Batura’s Sword” is a transfixing story featuring a haunted weapon that frightens the people of Pshavi following the death of its owner.
Finally, Gogotur and Apshina is one of Vazha-Pshavela’s many legendary epic poems. A moving rumination on the themes of military glory and courage, it was translated into Russian three times by three of Russia’s greatest poets: Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Nikolay Zabolotsky.
As with other Persian poets, Hasan worked within a highly regulated set of poetic conventions that brought into relief the interpenetration of apparent opposites—metaphysical and material, mysterious and quotidian, death and desire, sacred and profane, fleeting time and eternity. Within these strictures, he crafted a poetics that blended Sufi Islam with non-Muslim Indic traditions. Also see http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/40901/ghazal-42.html
Based on fuller article at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3355274
largely due to US sanctions. But, also, the anonymity of cryptocurrency – where transactions are conducted peer-to-peer rather than being
run by a central authority – makes it possible for Iran to evade the bank sanctions that bar them from engaging in financial transactions with the
outside world. Both the Iranian state and its citizens share an interest in cryptocurrency mining, which is necessary to maintain the ‘ledger of transactions’ on which digital currencies run. For everyday Iranians, crypto is both a hedge against inflation and a way of gaining access to the global market.
RSVP at: https://yale.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_3QSJXjZYQJyCzxcvNSQDtg
Join us for a reading and discussion of modern Iranian poetry and translation with Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould, both scholars and practicing poets based at the University of Birmingham, who frequently collaborate on their translations of Persian poetry. They will read poetry by Tahmasebian, as well as their translations of verse by Bijan Elahi and Hasan Alizadeh. They will be joined in conversation by Sam Hodgkin and Robyn Creswell from Yale’s Department of Comparative Literature.
RSVP at: https://auc-connect.aucegypt.edu/PUBLICEV/rsvp_boot?id=300044808
This event involves a conversation between the co-editors of the recently released The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism (2020), a work comprising reflections on translation and activism from across the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, East Asia, the US and Europe. We will consider the work on the topic that has preceded us, and then discuss the light that our contributors shed on translation and activism in these different geographies and contexts. We will also reflect on the future trajectories of translation and activism that were opened up by this work, before opening the discussion to questions from the audience.
international imaginaries, local politics,” 8 June 2018)
Abstract: The early years of the Soviet experiment generated new alliances between Marxist revolutionaries and Muslim activists, including the Tatar Mir Said Sultan-Galiev, executed in 1940 for his efforts to generate a revolutionary Marxist-Muslim praxis. This lecture explores the influence of Muslim Marxism on subsequent anticolonial Marxist movements across the global south, with particular reference to Sultan-Galiev’s influence on M.N. Roy and his thinking about the revolutionary aspects of Indian Islam. Alongside its anticapitalist agenda, Muslim Marxism envisioned an aesthetic transformation of revolutionary art forms that merged avant-garde modernism with classical Islamic aesthetics and Russian Orientalism. In realigning art and politics, Muslim revolutionary thinkers developed a form of Marxist heterodoxy that challenged the limitations in Soviet ideology, while activating its revolutionary potentialities for anticolonial ends.
Also at https://www.full-stop.net/2020/05/20/interviews/rebecca-ruth-gould/samah-selim/
https://www.academicstudiespress.com/central-asian-literatures-in-translation/?rq=central%20asian%20literatures
While it remains unclear whether Mollā Lüṭfī ever cracked a joke that began with “A lion walks into a hammam…”—I for one like to imagine that he did—what stands beyond doubt is that the 15th-century Ottoman polymath spent quite some time thinking on lions doing exactly such things… In his conclusion to a work on ʿilm al-maʿānī or “word order”, Mollā Lüṭfī offers a succinct apercu of the ʿilm al-bayān or “figures of speech”: tashbīh or “simile”, majāz or “allegory”, and kināya or “metonymy”. This working paper offers a full translation of Mollā Lüṭfī’s intricate discussion of the second of these figures of speech: the allegory. For this, the author gives two alternative overarching classifications: a linguistic vs. cognitive allegory classification and a metaphor vs. hypallage classification that is supplemented with three more ways of cognitive signification. Following a brief discussion of the various types of hypallage, the author then zooms in on the metaphor, by providing a perplexing array of alternative metaphor typologies:
• basic metaphor & metaphor of dependency
• explicit metaphor & implicit metaphor & imaginary metaphor &
confirmatory metaphor
• absolute metaphor & enhanced metaphor & naked metaphor
• proverbializing metaphor
• metaphor of affectionate irony & metaphor of sarcastic irony.
If all goes well, by virtue of this translation, a lion walking into a hammam won’t hold any more secrets for you, be it a clawed lion, a lion marksman, a lion you raise in order to have it kill you, a lion wiggling its feet, a cowardly lion, a lion standing next to you, or a lion whose night stands in prayer…
As a DIY, however, the work falls short. Clearly preaching to the choir, Ḥasan deals merely with a selection of figures and genres and presents these in their barest outlines only. However, it should be noted that Ḥasan has included some less ubiquitous items as well, such as the rhetorical figures of makhlaṣ-parvarī and taʿlīq al-muḥāl. In particular Ḥasan’s discussion of how to successfully combine two hemistiches into a distich — in such a way that “these constitute a single pith, as a pistachio or almond” — appears to be of rare occurrence.
Nonetheless, rather than thinking of Poetry’s Artistry as a DIY or vade-mecum, a more fruitful way to engage with it is to think of it as a metapoem, that is, a poem that combines some of the technicalities of what poetics are with a more reflexive turn on what poetry and poets ought to be. As such, the succinct yet succulent Poetry’s Artistry is well worth a read, as it allows the modern reader not only to familiarize him- or herself with the stock motifs, figures and formats of Ottoman high poetry, but also to contemplate the radically different societal role that poetry once played.