A Turkic Translation Landscape
Polities and Policies of Translation: Mapping an Early Modern Turkic Translation Landscape
Researcher: Tobias Sick
The TRANSLAPT project focuses on translation processes in the Eastern Mediterranean and addresses, first and foremost, Ottoman Turkish translations of Arabic and Persian works. The present sub-project adds a comparative dimension to this undertaking by investigating the translation activities of early modern Turkic polities in Central Asia, in particular the Chinggisid dynasties of the Abū al-Khayrids (1500–1599) and the Jānid/Ashtarkhānid khanates in Bukhara, Samarkand, and Khiva (1599–1785) during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Divided into different but interconnected and, at times, competing political entities, these khanates are well-known for the production of literary works in Persian. However, their Turkic translation programmes have not yet been studied in a comprehensive fashion, even though isolated studies have proven both the existence and relevance of translations for the polities at hand, in particular in relation to the genres of historiography and hagiography.
Initially, the main focus of the sub-project is to conduct a comprehensive survey of both translations and their extant manuscript corpora. Then, a subset of the surveyed translations pertaining the aforementioned genres will be selected for detailed analysis as case studies. In doing so, the project will asses the underlying rationales, literary transformations, and cultural impact of translations into Turkic produced within and outside of courtly contexts and, at times, under the patronage of important ruling figures.
Within the individual case studies, the sub-project will apply the perspectives of inquiry integral to TRANSLAPT, investigating translation as a historical concept, a literary process of mediation, and a material product instantiated in a plethora of manuscript forms. More specifically, this entails a comparative study of individual genres in Arabic and Persian vis-à-vis Turkic renditions that will not only shed light on the continuities between these traditions but also on which aspects were lost or added in the translation processes, tracing their proliferation and development in a context seldomly discussed in the scholarly literature. Ultimately, this will make it possible to assess the reception, transformation, and influence of Turkic literature in Central Asia during the early modern period. This will be particularly significant for an improved understanding of the transmission and transformation of literary works via the medium of translation as a form of Turkic vernacularisation in the Persianate world.