Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department
Please join us for the next Persian Program Lecture
This lecture will be in English
Thursday, November 7 at 5:00pm
Comparative Literature Library
Bingham Hall, 8th Floor
300 College St
Talk:
Iranian Pushkin, Tajik Shakespeare, Russian Firdawsi:
Translated Monuments of Persian Second-World Literature
The Soviet literary bureaucracy brought together writers from the Soviet East, Russophone writers and scholars, and fellow travelers from the West and the third world in the largest project of multidirectional literary translation that the world has ever seen. This talk will provide an introduction to the rich diversity of second world literature through the Stalin-era translations of a married couple, the Iranian emigre poet Abolqasem Lahuti and the Jewish orientalist Tsetsilia Banu, whose work shaped both the reception of the Persian classics and conceptions of world literature in Russia, the Middle East, and Central Eurasia.
Speaker:
Dr. Samuel Hodgkin is an assistant professor in Comparative Literature at Yale. He is a scholar of Persian, Turkic, and other Eurasian literatures, whose research deals with canon formation, translation, and genre from the 8th century to the present. His current book project is World Literature in One Country: Representing Persian Poetry in the Communist East.