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From Persianate Cosmopolis to Persianate Modernity: Translating from Urdu to Persian in Twentieth-Century Iran and Afghanistan

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

This article examines twentieth-century Persian translations of Urdu-language works about Persian literature, focusing on two different Persian translations of an influential Urdu-language work on Persian literary history, Shi'r al-'Ajam (Poetry of the Persians), by Shibli Nu'mani. The article offers a close, comparative reading of the Afghan and Iranian translations of Shi'r al-'Ajam in order to understand why two Persian translations of this voluminous text were published within such a short time period. These translations reveal how Indians, Afghans, and Iranians were invested in the same Persianate heritage, yet the emergence of a “Persianate modernity” undergirded by a cultural logic of nationalism rather than cosmopolitanism, along with Iran's and Afghanistan's differing relationships to India and Urdu, produced distinct approaches to translation.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)611-630
Number of pages20
JournalIranian Studies
Volume55
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 2022
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Iranian Studies.

Keywords

  • Afghanistan
  • Iran
  • Persian literature
  • Persianate
  • Urdu
  • adab
  • nationalism
  • translation

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