Multilingualism, Translation, Transfer:
Persian in the Ottoman Empire

Conference

The widespread use of Persian in the Ottoman Empire as part of the larger multilingual region of the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond during the early modern to modern periods has been highlighted by scholars from various disciplines. Concepts such as the “Persophonie” (Bert G. Fragner) or the “Persianate world” (Nile Green) have pointed out the significant influence of Persian in the fields of literature, education and, to some extent, administration and diplomacy (e.g. as a lingua franca) in much of the eastern Islamic world from the 11th to the 19th centuries, especially in the Ottoman Empire. However, these discussions still lack adequate contextualisation and a multidisciplinary approach that allows for an analytical understanding of the phenomenon of translation as a particular mechanism of knowledge transmission and exchange in these contexts. The notion of translation as a concept, process, and product of transregional and intercultural entanglements in the broader Transottoman sphere thus poses an ongoing challenge to contemporary scholarship, especially with regard to the discussion of the Persian language and its role and significance in various cultural, literary, and political realms.

The conference brings together scholars with expertise in Persian and Ottoman Turkish language contacts who are inte- rested in the fields of language, literature, and history, and to explore the role of multilingual practices – especially translation – which are an essential part of knowledge production in the respective traditions. In addition, the conference provides a forum for discussion and collaboration between scholars of Ottoman, Iranian and Arabic studies and beyond who are concerned with the interactions of the three languages in the Ottoman Empire (elsine-i selāse ) and examine their functions as well as the interrelationships between languages, (literary) genres, and disciplines.

In particular, the contributions focus on the agents (or institutions) involved in and facilitating such multilingual processes, on the processes themselves as forms of preservation, adaptation, etc. of knowledge, or on the products (i.e. translations contained in manuscripts and prints) and their reception within the Ottoman Empire and beyond during the early modern period.

This conference was funded by and organised within the DFG Priority Programme 1981: “Transottomanica: Eastern European-Ottoman-Persian Mobility Dynamics”.

Programme

April 27, 2023

18:00 Keynote lecture

Andrew Peacock (St Andrews): Persian in the Lands of Rum: Texts, Translations and Transformations

April 28, 2023

9:30-11:00 Panel I: Ottoman Historiography and Persian Poetry

Ronnie Agassi Cohen (Jerusalem): Persian Epic Poems in the Service of Ottoman Historiography of the 15th and 16th Centuries
Veronika Poier (Vienna): Who decided? Arabic and Persian Inscriptions in the Context of Political and Artistic Agency in the Green Mosque of Sultan Mehmed I in Bursa (1419–1424)
Zakir Hussein Gul (Birmingham): Kemālpaşazāde’s Nigāristān: A 16th Century Ottoman Emulation of Saʿdī’s Gulistān and Jāmī’s Bahāristān

11:00-11:30 Coffee break

11:30-12:30 Panel II: Ottoman and Persian Poetry

Renaud Soler (Strasbourg): To Have a Heart Like a Kebab: History of a Metaphor in Persian and Ottoman Literature (11th–19th Centuries)
Kameliya Atanasova (Lexington, VA): Persian Poetry and Sufi Authority: A Look at an Early Modern Ottoman Qurʾān Commentary

12:30-13:30 Lunch

13:30-15:00 Panel III: Literature in Translation

Sacha Alsancakli (Paris): Reading Mustawfī in Turkish: On a Translation of the Nuzhat al-Qulūb Produced in 17th-Century Bidlīs
Philip Bockholt (Münster): Mirrors for Princes and the Emergence of an Empire: On the Production of Hümāyūnnāme Manuscript Copies in the 16th and 17th Centuries
Tobias Sick (Münster): Translating and Reading Persian Advice Literature in the Multilingual Ottoman Context: Tracing the Reception of the Pandnāma-yi ʿAṭṭār

15:30 Manuscript Collection of the Gotha Research Library

19:30 Dinner

April 29, 2023

09:30-10:30 Panel IV: Transottoman Perspectives

Ludwig Paul (Hamburg): The Linguistic Ecology of the (Trans)ottoman Area
Stefan Rohdewald (Leipzig): Transottoman Perspectives on Usages of Persian North of the Ottoman and Persian Empires

10:30-11:00 Coffee break

11:00-11:30 Panel V: Ottoman Lexicography I

Ani Sargsyan (Hamburg): (Re-)Writing and/or Editing Tuḥfetü s-Seniyye ilā l-Ḥażreti l-Ḥaseniyye: The Trajectories of Learning Persian in the 16th and 17th Centuries

11:30-13:30 Lunch

13:30-14:30 Panel VI: Ottoman Lexicography II

Hülya Çelik (Bochum): Viennese Court Librarian Sebastian Tengnagel’s Persian-Turkish-Latin Dictionary Project and a Turkish Captive’s Multilingualism in 1614
Nil Palabıyık (London): English Orientalists and their Persian-Turkish Dictionaries

14:45-16:15 Tour of the Castle

16:30-17:30 Coffee break & Concluding discussion

19:00 Dinner