The Translating Subject: Self-Assertion and Edges of Mediation in Ali Ufkî’s Bilingual Dialogues

What is it about?

Why did translation matter for religious converts in early modernity? Approaching Ottoman court translator and religious convert to Islam, Ali Ufkî (Wojciech Bobowski, d. 1677)’s intellectual endeavors beyond the historiographical limitations on the role of “go-betweens,” this article explores the multilayered relationship between translation, individuality, and knowledge production by focusing on the translating subject. It argues that translation was an epistemic posture taken on by religious converts to navigate their self-assertion via dissimulation during the unsteady time of pietistic movements in seventeenth-century Istanbul. In so doing, it suggests reading precarious translations beyond imperial logics and their concomitant religious orthodoxies.

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