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Shiraz on the Adriatic

Persian Literary Culture, Φαρσί Speakers and Multilingual Locals between Cairo, the Balkans and Venice (ca. 1600–1900)

In: Iran and the Caucasus
Author:
Stefano Pellò Ca’ Foscari University of Venice Venice Italy

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https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5496-8605
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Abstract

This paper deals with three different but interconnected cases of placement, displacement and relocation of Persian literary culture in the Eastern Mediterranean sphere: the reception of a line by Ḥāfiẓ in 1920s Cairo, as represented in a novel by Najīb Maḥfūẓ; a Modern Greek adverb, φαρσί, expressing multilingual fluency and its probable Ottoman roots; a Veneto-Balkanic net of circulation of Persian textual and linguistic heritage, focusing especially on Mostar. As the intertwined case-studies touched upon in this essay clearly show, only deep philological excavations in little-studied local microhistories can properly unearth the still obscure early modern ecology of Persian “between the Adriatic and the Nile”. By taking a multilingual approach (in which Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Bosnian, Venetian and Italian are read as a cultural continuum), and looking at the ubiquity of the prestige of Persian against the background of a “significant geography” made of both physical and linguistic spaces we throw a new light—taking a step beyond the sometimes over-used notion of the “Persianate”—on the dynamics of inscriptions of Persian in the early modern Mediterranean and Southern European realities.

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