Chapter 22 Sweetening the Heavy Georgian Tongue
Jāmī in the Georgian-Persianate World
In: Jāmī in Regional ContextsSearch for other papers by Rebecca Ruth Gould in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Purchase instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
The poetry of Teimuraz I’s marks a turning point in Georgian literary history. From 1629–34, the poet-king of Kartli and Kaxetia (eastern Georgia) undertook to produce a Georgian equivalent to Niẓāmī Ganjevī’s famed quintet (khamsa) that stands as one of the major achievements of classical Persian literature. This chapter explores Teimuraz I’s engagement with Jāmī and with the wider Persian tradition in order to gain a deeper understanding of translation and imitation in the early modern Persianate world. In conceiving of translation as a kind of appropriation, Teimuraz I’s engagement with the romances of Niẓāmī and Jāmī offers an alternative to the current understanding of translation as the wholesale reproduction of a syntactical unit. The forms of intertextuality cultivated by these premodern translation practices indicate the limitations of contemporary understandings of translation for tracking Yūsuf u Zulaykhā’s multilingual circulation across the Persianate world. Teimuraz I turned to Persian, I argue, less for the sake of the fictional patrons and beloveds he praises so elaborately, than for the sake of a literary future he brought into being by grafting his tale, composed in the inferior Georgian tongue, onto a more durable Persianate ethos. While attending to the constraints and possibilities that were opened up by Teimuraz I’s status as a vassal of multiple Ṣafavīd rulers, I also consider the variegated meanings wielded by translation, influence, and vernacular literary expression across the early modern Persianate world.