Translation after the Persianate? Omar Khayyam and Late Perso-Ottoman Poetic Connectivity

What is it about?

Focusing on late Ottoman Turkish translations of Omer Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, this article provides a historical overview of Persian and Ottoman translational relations in the early twentieth century. Against the backdrop of the late Ottoman anti-Persianate discourse, which is important for its moral dimensions, this article examines the implications of translation for literary sovereignty as translation conceptually moves from submission through liberalism to devotion in Persian-Ottoman literary entanglement. In comparatively reading Hüseyin Daniş’s Rubaiyat-ı Ömer Hayyam (1927) and Mevlevi Mustafa Rüşdi b. Mehmet Tevfik’s translation of Khayyam’s quatrains, part of Rüşdi’s manuscript compendium of various translated texts (1931-32), this article suggests, by way of specific attention to the ethics of translation that governs each text, that literary modernity was not only about nationalized literary histories, but also about the ethical substrate of literary knowledge.

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