Ph.D., Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago, Winter 2018. Dissertation committee: Franklin Lewis (chair), Robert Bird, A. Holly Shissler, Eleonor Gilburd. B.A./M.A., Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, Spring 2008.
My introduction to a forum in Comparative Literature Studies on the brilliant Alexander Jabbari's... more My introduction to a forum in Comparative Literature Studies on the brilliant Alexander Jabbari's The Making of Persianate Modernity (2023). Other contributions come from C. Ceyhun Arslan, Fatima Burney, Allison Kanner-Botan, and Levi Thompson, as well as a response from Jabbari himself.
Across the Persianate regions of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Eurasia, the discour... more Across the Persianate regions of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Eurasia, the discourse of modernization had a deep, perhaps even dominant aesthetic dimension. Apparently disparate anxieties about oriental indolence, homosexuality and unmanliness, flattery and unmeaning speech, and submission to despots all may be understood as elements of a coherent critique of a single literary mode: taghazzul. Insofar as ghazal was a "royal genre" (Ireneusz Opacki), it provided the formal-aesthetic framing for numerous literary and speech genres, and thus for the social and political order. In case studies from across the Persianate zone, this article considers how writers' refusal of taghazzul, or its excision from their texts, became a recognizable gesture of disaffiliation from the Persianate. In the resulting reordering of the literary field, taghazzul took on new functions in relation to the Western category of lyric.
The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation, 2022
Before the post-WWII watershed of decolonization, the Soviet-led translation system stood alone a... more Before the post-WWII watershed of decolonization, the Soviet-led translation system stood alone as a systematic, reciprocal attempt to establish a canon of world literature in which “world” did not practically coincide with “Europe.” Persian played an integrating role in this system, second only to Russian, as a prestige language of world classics, the language of a Soviet nationality (Tajik), a common second language among Soviet Eastern nationalities, and a bridge between the Soviet and international East. The result was a fundamental transformation of the relationship between the Persian literary classics and their readership across the Persianate world and beyond. This essay introduces the network of intellectuals responsible for this transition: Soviet Eastern writers and bureaucrats, Russian and foreign leftist orientalists, Russian poet-translators, and anticolonial writers and scholars across West and South Asia. It then surveys the forms and venues whose skopoi and production conditions informed the varied styles of Soviet and Second-World translations of Persian classics: Russian, Azerbaijani, and Uzbek scholarly annotation-translations, prestige editions of literary translations from interlinear ponies, school textbooks, and so on. Finally, it briefly situates Persian classics translations in relation to Second-World literary translations into Tajik/Persian.
Nov 3, 2020 12:00 PM in Eastern Time (US & Canada) RSVP at: https://yale.zoom.us/webinar/... more Nov 3, 2020 12:00 PM in Eastern Time (US & Canada) 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.
In scholarship on post-Persianate literary modernity, the emergence of the new institution of lit... more In scholarship on post-Persianate literary modernity, the emergence of the new institution of literature is often conflated with the delimitation and reification of national cultures as different manifestations of a single process. This article examines three anthologies of Persian literature from the interwar Persophone Soviet Union to reconsider the relationship between state cultural institutions' procedures of literary modernization and nationalization. The anthologies mark out the stages by which classical Persian literature was portioned out to Soviet Eastern nationalities, and in particular the advent of Tajik literary history, but they also reveal the degree to which national literatures coevolved with new post-Persianate literary cosmopolitanisms and internationalisms.
Formal studies of the arts in the Soviet national republics have focused on the unidirectional tr... more Formal studies of the arts in the Soviet national republics have focused on the unidirectional transfer of genres and forms from the Russian centre to the national periphery. This article explores how vernacular and non-European cosmopolitan genres altered the imported forms in translation, by examining three Stalin-era musicals, Tajik, Uzbek, and Azerbaijani, all adapted from the same Persian romance. The librettists’ approaches to the transposition of classical mathnawīs each drastically modified the theatrical form and tragic genre. Their shared aesthetic assumptions suggest a vision of Soviet “world literature” that accommodated a Persianate zone of cosmopolitan culture whose centre was not Moscow.
At the height of literary nationalisms in the twentieth century, leftist internationalists from T... more At the height of literary nationalisms in the twentieth century, leftist internationalists from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and the Soviet East bonded over their shared love of the classical Persian verses of Hafiz and Khayyam. At writers' congresses and in communist literary journals, they affirmed their friendship and solidarity with lyric ghazals and ruba'iyat. Persianate poetry became the cultural commons for a distinctively Eastern internationalism, shaping national literatures in the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and South Asia. By the early Cold War, the literary entanglement between Persianate culture and communism had established models for cultural decolonization that would ultimately outlast the Soviet imperial project. In the archive of literature produced under communism in Persian, Tajik, Dari, Turkish, Uzbek, Azerbaijani, Armenian, and Russian, this book finds a vital alternative to Western globalized world literature.
My introduction to a forum in Comparative Literature Studies on the brilliant Alexander Jabbari's... more My introduction to a forum in Comparative Literature Studies on the brilliant Alexander Jabbari's The Making of Persianate Modernity (2023). Other contributions come from C. Ceyhun Arslan, Fatima Burney, Allison Kanner-Botan, and Levi Thompson, as well as a response from Jabbari himself.
Across the Persianate regions of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Eurasia, the discour... more Across the Persianate regions of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Eurasia, the discourse of modernization had a deep, perhaps even dominant aesthetic dimension. Apparently disparate anxieties about oriental indolence, homosexuality and unmanliness, flattery and unmeaning speech, and submission to despots all may be understood as elements of a coherent critique of a single literary mode: taghazzul. Insofar as ghazal was a "royal genre" (Ireneusz Opacki), it provided the formal-aesthetic framing for numerous literary and speech genres, and thus for the social and political order. In case studies from across the Persianate zone, this article considers how writers' refusal of taghazzul, or its excision from their texts, became a recognizable gesture of disaffiliation from the Persianate. In the resulting reordering of the literary field, taghazzul took on new functions in relation to the Western category of lyric.
The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation, 2022
Before the post-WWII watershed of decolonization, the Soviet-led translation system stood alone a... more Before the post-WWII watershed of decolonization, the Soviet-led translation system stood alone as a systematic, reciprocal attempt to establish a canon of world literature in which “world” did not practically coincide with “Europe.” Persian played an integrating role in this system, second only to Russian, as a prestige language of world classics, the language of a Soviet nationality (Tajik), a common second language among Soviet Eastern nationalities, and a bridge between the Soviet and international East. The result was a fundamental transformation of the relationship between the Persian literary classics and their readership across the Persianate world and beyond. This essay introduces the network of intellectuals responsible for this transition: Soviet Eastern writers and bureaucrats, Russian and foreign leftist orientalists, Russian poet-translators, and anticolonial writers and scholars across West and South Asia. It then surveys the forms and venues whose skopoi and production conditions informed the varied styles of Soviet and Second-World translations of Persian classics: Russian, Azerbaijani, and Uzbek scholarly annotation-translations, prestige editions of literary translations from interlinear ponies, school textbooks, and so on. Finally, it briefly situates Persian classics translations in relation to Second-World literary translations into Tajik/Persian.
Nov 3, 2020 12:00 PM in Eastern Time (US & Canada) RSVP at: https://yale.zoom.us/webinar/... more Nov 3, 2020 12:00 PM in Eastern Time (US & Canada) 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.
In scholarship on post-Persianate literary modernity, the emergence of the new institution of lit... more In scholarship on post-Persianate literary modernity, the emergence of the new institution of literature is often conflated with the delimitation and reification of national cultures as different manifestations of a single process. This article examines three anthologies of Persian literature from the interwar Persophone Soviet Union to reconsider the relationship between state cultural institutions' procedures of literary modernization and nationalization. The anthologies mark out the stages by which classical Persian literature was portioned out to Soviet Eastern nationalities, and in particular the advent of Tajik literary history, but they also reveal the degree to which national literatures coevolved with new post-Persianate literary cosmopolitanisms and internationalisms.
Formal studies of the arts in the Soviet national republics have focused on the unidirectional tr... more Formal studies of the arts in the Soviet national republics have focused on the unidirectional transfer of genres and forms from the Russian centre to the national periphery. This article explores how vernacular and non-European cosmopolitan genres altered the imported forms in translation, by examining three Stalin-era musicals, Tajik, Uzbek, and Azerbaijani, all adapted from the same Persian romance. The librettists’ approaches to the transposition of classical mathnawīs each drastically modified the theatrical form and tragic genre. Their shared aesthetic assumptions suggest a vision of Soviet “world literature” that accommodated a Persianate zone of cosmopolitan culture whose centre was not Moscow.
At the height of literary nationalisms in the twentieth century, leftist internationalists from T... more At the height of literary nationalisms in the twentieth century, leftist internationalists from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and the Soviet East bonded over their shared love of the classical Persian verses of Hafiz and Khayyam. At writers' congresses and in communist literary journals, they affirmed their friendship and solidarity with lyric ghazals and ruba'iyat. Persianate poetry became the cultural commons for a distinctively Eastern internationalism, shaping national literatures in the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and South Asia. By the early Cold War, the literary entanglement between Persianate culture and communism had established models for cultural decolonization that would ultimately outlast the Soviet imperial project. In the archive of literature produced under communism in Persian, Tajik, Dari, Turkish, Uzbek, Azerbaijani, Armenian, and Russian, this book finds a vital alternative to Western globalized world literature.
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