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Abstract
This article addresses poetic form as a foundation bridging the literary contexts of Arabic and Persian that exists beyond the bounds of Euro-American influence. We find the originally Arabic science of ʿarūḍ, prosody, used in these two contexts to retool premodern poetic form for the modern era. Questions of form encourage us to think about how modernist poets writing in Persian and Arabic approach their poetry as a craft that emerges not out of engagements with Western literature but rather from a shared poetic past. By tracing formal links across Arabic and Persian, this article argues that paying attention to the premodern tradition of prosodic science they share helps us both to understand the early development of modernist poetry in each language and to avoid explanations informed mostly by literary critical frameworks used to study Western literatures.
Abstract
This article analyzes a little-known practice called iqtirāḥ—“test of poetic talent” or “poetic competition”—that proliferated in twentieth-century Persian-language periodicals. It examines two case studies: one in Tehran in 1928, which mythologized Nādir Shah (r. 1736–1747), a Turko-Persian monarch, as a national hero, and one in Kabul in 1932, which eulogized Muḥammad Nādir Shah (r. 1920–1933), a ruling monarch at the time, for restoring an Afghan homeland imagined as unified. The article frames iqtirāḥ as an afterlife of Persianate modes of sociability that were reconfigured by modern periodicals to serve the demands of romantic nationalism in the twentieth century. By critically examining the ways in which poetic composition interacts with the formation of a national historiography, this article also shows that any clear-cut distinction between the two is arbitrary.
Abstract
This article focuses on late Ottoman/Turkish translations of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat (“quatrains”) as part of Perso-Ottoman poetic connectivity in the early twentieth century. Situating the reception of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat at the nexus of world literature, literary historiography, and translatability, the article explores the methodological affordances of translation to redress the overdominance of discursive and historical points of rupture in studies of late Persianate literatures. To that end, the article offers a comparative reading of Hüseyin Daniş’s Rubaiyat-ı Ömer Hayyam (1927), Rıza Tevfik’s Ömer Hayyam ve Rubaileri (1945), both of which are based on their co-authored translation in 1922, and Mevlevi Mustafa Rüşdi b. Mehmet Tevfik’s translation of Khayyam’s quatrains (1931–32). By way of specific attention to translation as hermeneutics, this article suggests that translating after the Persianate did not involve a straight shift from regional translation practices to translation proper nor was it exclusively a modus operandi of literary and linguistic nationalism. In drawing attention to how translation can accommodate both synchronic and diachronic mobility, the article therefore calls for alternative comparative methodologies which attend to persistent textual practices as well as conjunctural discourses in literary history.
Abstract
Khālid al-Kātib is the author of more than 500 love poems and was associated with several notables of the Abbasid court, including Ibrāhīm b. al-Mahdī. Male-male love is a major theme in Khālid’s poetry and akhbār. Abū Tammām figures prominently in the biographical anecdotes about Khālid, both as an admirer and an adversary. Khālid’s akhbār in Kitāb al-Aghānī, Taʾrīkh Baghdād, and other sources provide insights into his relationships with his contemporaries while leaving open many questions about life, love, and poetry in Abbasid Baghdad.
Abstract
Bashshār b. Burd composed a masterful poem in the rajaz style in the aftermath of an infamous incident with ʿUqba b. Ruʾba, the son of the celebrated rajaz poet Ruʾba b. al-ʿAjjāj. An analysis of the poem shows that it might have been composed as a double entendre. While the poem was meant to be a panegyric in praise of the Basran governor Ibn Salm, Bashshār imbued the poem with satirical references to his rival poet ʿUqba b. Ruʾba. The poem reflects themes of shuʿūbiyya, the poetic rivalry between the conservative and the modern poets, and contempt against the monopoly of tradition and family heritage.