Kamran Rastegar: 'Gulistan, Translation, and Suspect Mediation'
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About this event
My current project is an examination of the life of the Gulistan as a circulatory text in modern—18th through 20th century—contexts, recovering it from Iranian nationalist literary historiography and allocating it to different other modes of literary imagination. What is the Gulistan if viewed as sustained in its resonances with an oceanic—specifically, Indian Ocean—imagination? What is the Gulistan if viewed as representing specifically colonial forms of knowledge, a tool of Empire that doubles back to serve multiple nationalist ends? What is the Gulistan if thought of as representing a transition from a pre-modern disposition of sacred untranslatability to a modern realm of multilingualism—reaching beyond its original Arabic reflections to its various 19th century translations produced in English, Arabic, Urdu and Ottoman Turkish? What is the Gulistan if it is viewed through the lens of those who presumably loved it, by which I mean its translators—could it be viewed as a work of suspect mediation?