Migrating texts EDITED BY MARILYN BOOTH Circulating Translations around the Ottoman Mediterranean EDINBURGH STUDIES ON THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE MIGRATING TEXTS Edinburgh Studies on the Ottoman Empire Series Editor: Kent F. Schull Published and forthcoming titles Migrating Texts: Circulating Translations around the Ottoman Mediterranean Edited by Marilyn Booth Ottoman Sunnism: New Perspectives Edited by Vefa Erginbaş The Politics of Armenian Migration to North America, 1885–1915: Sojourners, Smugglers and Dubious Citizens David E. Gutman The Kizilbash-Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia: Sufism, Politics and Community Ayfer Karakaya-Stump Çemberlita ş Hamami in Istanbul: The Biographical Memoir of a Turkish Bath Nina Macaraig Nineteenth-Century Local Governance in Ottoman Bulgaria: Politics in Provincial Councils Safa Saraçoğlu Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire: Microcosms of Modernity Kent F. Schull Ruler Visibility and Popular Belonging in the Ottoman Empire Darin Stephanov Children and Childhood in the Ottoman Empire: From the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Centuries Edited by Gulay Yilma and Fruma Zachs euppublishing.com/series/esoe MIGRATING TEXTS CIRCULATING TRANSLATIONS AROUND THE OTTOMAN MEDITERRANEAN 2 Edited by Marilyn Booth Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com We are committed to making research available to a wide audience and are pleased to be publishing an Open Access ebook edition of this volume. © editorial matter and organisation Marilyn Booth, 2019, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence © the chapters their several authors, 2019, under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f ) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in Jaghbuni by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 3899 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 3901 5 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 3902 2 (epub) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents List of Charts and Maps vii Acknowledgements viii The Contributors ix Note on Translation and Transliteration xii Introduction: Translation as Lateral Cosmopolitanism in the Ottoman Universe 1 Marilyn Booth PART I. TRANSLATION, TERRITORY, COMMUNITY 55 1. What was (Really) Translated in the Ottoman Empire? Sleuthing Nineteenth-century Ottoman Translated Literature 57 Johann Strauss 2. Translation and the Globalisation of the Novel: Relevance and Limits of a Diffusionist Model 95 Peter Hill 3. On Eastern Cultures: Transregionalism and Multilingualism in Iraq, 1910–38 122 Orit Bashkin PART II. TRANSLATION AND/AS FICTION 149 4. Gender and Diaspora in Late Ottoman Egypt: The Case of Greek Women Translators 151 Titika Dimitroulia and Alexander Kazamias Contents vi 5. Haunting Ottoman Middle-class Sensibility: Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s Gothic 193 A. Holly Shissler PART III. ‘CLASSICAL’ INTERVENTIONS, ‘EUROPEAN’ INFLECTIONS: TRANSLATION AS/AND ADAPTATION 211 6. Lords or Idols? Translating the Greek Gods into Arabic in Nineteenth-century Egypt 215 Raphael Cormack 7. Translating World Literature into Arabic and Arabic into World Literature: Sulayman al-Bustani’s al-Ilyadha and Ruhi al-Khalidi’s Arabic Rendition of Victor Hugo 236 Yaseen Noorani 8. Girlhood Translated? Fénelon’s Traité de l’éducation des filles (1687) as a Text of Egyptian Modernity (1901, 1909) 266 Marilyn Booth 9. Gulistan : Sublimity and the Colonial Credo of Translatability 300 Kamran Rastegar Bibliography 318 Index 344 Charts and Maps Charts 1 First print translations of Don Quixote (to 1935) 97 2 First print translations of Télémaque 97 3 First print translations of Robinson Crusoe 98 4 First print translations of Bélisaire 98 5 First print translations of Anacharsis 99 6 First print translations of Paul et Virginie 99 7 First print translations of Monte Cristo 100 8 Translations of Qasim Amin’s Tahrir al-marʾa and al-Marʾa al-jadida 115 9 Translations of Jurji Zaydan’s historical novels (excluding reprints) 116 Maps 1 Inner core 101 2 Outer core 101 3 First semi-periphery 103 4 Second semi-periphery 103 5 First periphery (three or more out of four novels, 1850–1930) 105 6 Second periphery (one or two out of four novels, 1850–1930) 105 7 Print translations of Télémaque into languages of the Balkans, Mediterranean and Near East, to 1880 111 8 Translations of Qasim Amin’s Tahrir al-marʾa and al-Marʾa al-jadida 115 9 Translations of Jurji Zaydan’s historical novels 116 viii Acknowledgements I want to express my gratitude to all of the colleagues who have partici- pated in the four workshops that this project has entailed to date (a further volume will be based on the third and fourth workshops). The enthusiasm, intensity of discussion, and collaborative spirit at these events – continu- ing on into memorable dinners – have been the most rewarding kind of intellectual collegial exchange, reminding us of the excitement and sheer fun of research. That there is strong consensus to keep this ‘collective’ going speaks for itself. For generously funding and hosting those workshops, I am grateful to the Abu Dhabi Institute Humanities Research Fellowship Program, New York University Abu Dhabi, and to its director, Professor Reindert Falkenburg; to the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World, University of Edinburgh; and to the Higher Studies Fund and TORCH, University of Oxford. I am grateful to the Performing Arts Forum, St-Erme, France, for hosting the fourth workshop. I want to thank Alexandra Sandu, Manal Demaghlatrous, Marie McPherson, Claire Savina, Stephanie Yoxall and Amy Pennington for their invaluable help in not only making these workshops happen but in making them wonderfully pleasurable. I owe Claire Savina a special note of thanks for reading these chapters with close critical attention and helping with sources and details, as well as for her enlivening and encouraging presence as research associate on this project, an association I hope will continue. Finally, I want to thank Kent Schull and Nicola Ramsey for so warmly welcoming this book, the Press Committee of EUP and anonymous readers for their helpful and encourag- ing suggestions, and Eddie Clark, Sue Dalgleish, Rebecca Mackenzie and Kirsty Woods for their help and patience in the production process. Marilyn Booth, Oxford, August 2018 ix The Contributors Orit Bashkin is professor of modern Arab history in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago. Her publications include book chapters and articles on the history of Arab- Jews in Iraq, on Iraqi history and on Arabic literature. She is the author of The Other Iraq – Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (2009) and New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (2012). Marilyn Booth is the Khalid bin Abdallah Al Saud Professor of the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at Oxford University and has recently been a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Before joining Oxford, she was Senior Humanities Research Fellow, New York University Abu Dhabi (2014–15) and, before that, Iraq Professor in Arabic and Islamic Studies, University of Edinburgh. Her third monograph is Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces: Writing Feminist History Through Biography in Fin-de-siecle Egypt (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and she is completing a monograph on the works of nineteenth-century writer and feminist Zaynab Fawwaz. She edited Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces (2010). Her research also focuses on vernacu- lar Arabic writing, early Arabic journalism, and practice and politics of literary translation. She has translated over a dozen works of fiction and memoir from the Arabic. Raphael Cormack held a Wolfson scholarship at the University of Edinburgh where he recently completed a PhD on Arabic translations and adaptations of Oedipus in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt. He co- edited the translation collection Book of Khartoum (2016) and is pursuing further research on the history of theatre in Egypt and Ottoman Syria. The Contributors x Titika Dimitroulia is Associate Professor of Translation Theory and Practice at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Director of the National School of Public Administration and Local Government of Greece. Her research interests concern literary translation, European and global literature, translation and language technologies, and digital humanities. She has translated several books and libretti and in 2008 was awarded the European Translation Centre Literature and Human Sciences translation prize. Her recent publications include a Greek translation of the Francophone novel by Melpo Axioti, République-Bastille (2014), the books Literary Translation. Theory and Practice (with Yorgos Kentrotis, in Greek) and Digital Literary Studies (with Katerina Tiktopoulou, in Greek), the edited special issue ‘Corpora and Literary Translation’, Intralinea (with Dionysis Goutsos), and two articles on crime fiction in translation. Peter Hill is a historian of the Arab world in the long nineteenth century. He is currently a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford; his first book, Utopia and Civilisation in the Arab Nahda , is appearing in 2019. He has published articles on translation and political thought in the Arab world in journals such as Past & Present and PMLA Alexander Kazamias is Senior Lecturer in Politics, Coventry University. He has published on modern Greek politics and history, Greek-Turkish relations, and the politics and history of modern Egypt. His latest publica- tions include ‘Cromer’s assault on “Internationalism”: British Colonialism and the Greeks of Egypt, 1882–1907’, in M. Booth and A. Gorman (eds), Egypt in the Long 1890s: Colonial Quiescence, Subterranean Resistance (Edinburgh University Press, 2014) and ‘From popular revolution to semi-democracy: Egypt’s experiment with Praetorian Parliamentarism’, in R. Abou-El-Fadl (ed.), Revolutionary Egypt: Connecting Domestic and International Struggles (2015). Yaseen Noorani is Associate Professor of Arabic and Persian Languages and Literatures at the University of Arizona. He earned a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago and has previously taught at the Universities of Edinburgh and Michigan. His research centres on how social norms and ideals such as virtue, nationality and the public/ private division, have been imagined and represented in Middle Eastern culture in both premodern and modern eras. He has also published articles on modernism in Arabic literature. He is co-editor of Counterhegemony in the Colony and Postcolony (2007) and author of Culture and Hegemony in the Colonial Middle East (2010). xi The Contributors Kamran Rastegar is Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literatures at Tufts University and director of the Center for the Humanities at Tufts. He is a specialist in Persian and Arabic literary history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on movements of cultural revival and innovation. In Literary Modernity between Europe and the Middle East (2007) he explored concepts of literary modernity in Arabic and Persian literatures. He has explored the role of cinema and visual culture in the formation of cultural memory in conflict and post-conflict social settings in Surviving Images: Cinema, War and Cultural Memory in the Middle East (2015). A. Holly Shissler is Associate Professor of Ottoman and Modern Turkish History at the University of Chicago. Her publications include Between Two Empires: Ahmet Ağaoğlu and the New Turkey and an edited special issue on ‘Sex, gender and family structure’ in Comparative Studies on South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, including her article ‘Beauty is nothing to be ashamed of: Beauty contests as tools of women’s liberation in early republican Turkey’. Johann Strauss studied German, Romance languages and Turcology at the University of Munich, and his PhD (1987) focused on a seventeenth- century Ottoman chronicler. He has taught at the Institut für Geschichte und Kultur des Nahen Orients sowie für Turkologie, Munich; the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman & Modern Greek Studies, Birmingham University; and the Orientalisches Seminar, Freiburg University; and was Referent at the Orient Institut of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft in Istanbul, 1988–9. He currently teaches in the Turkish Department, Strasbourg University. He has published numerous articles in English, French and German on topics including translations from Western lan- guages, the history of printing and publishing, and linguistic and cultural contacts between communities in the Ottoman Empire. xii Note on Translation and Transliteration Due to considerations of space and complexity, not all texts are provided in their original languages in these chapters. On transliteration, some discretion has been left to authors. For Ottoman texts, orthography depends on the source of the text: whether it has been referenced as an original Ottoman text or a transcription into modern Turkish; for Ottoman terms and names we generally follow conventions used in modern Turkish to represent the Ottoman language. Transliterations of Arabic generally preserve only the ʿayn and internal hamza . Because this is a book about translators and translations, some- times works are referenced by the translator’s name as in effect author of the text. The choice has been left up to individual chapter authors. 1 Introduction: Translation as Lateral Cosmopolitanism in the Ottoman Universe Marilyn Booth In November 1873, the educational journal Rawdat al-madaris al- misriyya (Egyptian schools’ garden, Cairo, 1870–7), introduced a short translation: We reproduce what was sent to Rawda ’s office by one who is the substance and spirit of translation, abode of its virtue and doorway to its acquisition, Muhammad Efendi ʿAbd al-Raziq. He stripped his transported text [ manqu- lahu ] of the foreignness [ ʿajama ] of French and endowed his words with the fine tonalities of Arabic. It embraces the rich blessings the Khedivial Hand has bestowed, especially new work to extend education to all by opening schools for girls. Peruse what follows and you will find an instructor on the topic, a guide along the best-considered pathway for men to share learning with women so that together they propagate knowledge more widely. 1 Next came the translator’s preface. Unusually for the time, it explained the text’s origin precisely. As I wandered through the gardens of the palm-fronds/newspapers [ jaraʾid ] of knowledge, my chest expansive with happiness at the delights blooming there to give minds good exercise, I stumbled on [an article] in the journal of political inquiry known as al-Diba [Le Débat], in French, published in Paris on Thursday [ yawm al-khamis ] in September 1873, equivalent to 3 Sh[aʿban] 1290. It praised . . . the Khedive’s proposal . . . As it is amongst the most famous newspapers, its texts singularly truthful and useful, I got to work to Arabize and publish this, [wanting] to make it a serious testimony by which the erudite would find certainty enhanced, and the doubting, corroboration and hence compliance. For the witnesses given by the eminences of Europe on how good it is to initiate and pursue education of children in [all] countries – espe - cially as they peruse news of all lands – are amongst the most reliable guides to sound thinking. 2 Marilyn Booth 2 Sure enough, an untitled article on the opening of the first state girls’ school in Cairo appeared on page 3 of the Paris Journal des débats poli- tiques et économiques, Thursday, 25 September 1873. Rawda ’s preface to the translated article drew on a lexicon associ- ated with Islamic religious practice, localising and implicitly lauding the translator’s style as tajwid , a term most often denoting the exacting art of sonorous Qurʾan recitation. The translation bears the marks of high Arabic style then: rhymed prose and near-synonym pairings, interspersed cou- plets of poetry to elaborate on points made in prose. Though the translator decided to render the French article because he found it ‘eloquent beyond what I could envision saying on the subject’, he translated according to what he saw as the tastes of his envisioned audience. ‘I sweetened the sweetness of its attributes with metrical composition to enhance it for the reader, adding beauty to beauty’. 3 The ‘Khedive’s proposal’ that occasioned the article referred to the opening on 9 Jumada II 1290 (4 August 1873) of al-Suyufiyya School for Girls, an initiative Journal des débats praised, albeit in an Orientalist framing for French readers. Publishing an ‘Arabization’ of the article in Rawda could serve several interrelated purposes. It let readers know that institutional change in Egypt was a subject of discussion in France. Not only were Europeans noticing Egypt’s educational progress: the item reminded readers that girls’ education was a ‘global’ issue, a topic of debate in France as in Egypt. Perhaps the translator or this journal – as a government-sponsored organ – hoped to garner legitimacy for a rather controversial royal project through reproducing its celebratory report- age in a major European newspaper. Perhaps also this translation alerted readers to the representational significance of gender-management issues in Egypt’s reputation abroad, even before the 1882 British invasion fuelled an ever-louder propagation by European pundits of ‘women’s status’ as a justification for continued imperial occupation. At the same time, in the 1870s and thus before that occupation (and before France’s occupation of Tunisia, if not of Algeria), perhaps it was a less sensitive matter than it would be later to highlight European approbation for such an event. Not least, the text and the translator’s preface, with its reference to ‘the erudite . . . and the doubting’, might nudge reluctant parents amongst the reading elite, underlining the moral rightness, respectability and practical benefits of putting their daughters in school. Yet, the preface’s suggestion that European polemics on education offered model guides for thought would not have been universally welcome amongst the educated in Egypt. The translation itself localised the article in style and content, embel- lishing its praises for the Khedive’s modernising efforts and shifting the 3 Introduction tone and emphases of the French noticeably, overwriting a rather pat- ronising if positive report as more fully a celebratory, didactic, directive blueprint for local initiatives (though neither the Arabic nor the French mentioned that the Suyufiyya was funded by and under the patronage of Cheshmat Afat Hanim, consort of the Khedive). This feature appear- ing in an Arabic pedagogic magazine exemplifies translation’s creative, interested, politically pivotal potential in a milieu of state-led institution building, in Egypt and throughout the Ottoman Empire, as state actors and intelligentsias connected with them negotiated and debated their places in the globalising arena of the nineteenth century. The translation appeared almost three months after Rawdat al-madaris al-misriyya had itself announced the school’s opening, long before the French journal ran its report. 4 A fortnight before that – and ten days before the school’s formal opening – Rawda featured excerpts from a translation- adaptation of Georges-Bernard Depping’s (1784–1853) Aperçu historique sur les moeurs et coutumes des nations (1826). 5 Originally published in 1833 at the government press, this translation was by the recently deceased Rifaʿa Rafiʿ al-Tahtawi (1801–73), a giant figure in the institu - tional and intellectual realms of Egyptian culture production, and notably of translation. 6 The selected excerpts presented Depping’s discussion of stadial history, a European-Enlightenment discourse of teleological and hierarchised social progress through set economic-social-ecological stages, a fundamental element of which was the notion that a society’s level of advancement could be ascertained from the status of ‘its’ women. It seems no accident that it was the section on women and societal devel- opment that the magazine (now edited by al-Tahtawi’s son) chose to republish at this particular moment. 7 Through translation – of Depping, of Journal des débats – Rawdat al-madaris al-misriyya signalled an agenda for gender management focused on girls’ schooling, hinting its priority in the highest echelons of government. 8 Throughout the Ottoman Empire including Egypt, translation is one index to the importance and contours of debates on gender organisation, girls’ education and gendered seclusion as local and global issues for modernising elites. Where this translation appeared, how it was framed by immediate paratexts and a longer context of translated reportage, and above all how it chose to render the French article as a statement or echo of local state policy offer a micro-historical study of how translation participated in policy-making and opinion man- agement then, as well as the role it can play in our contemporary projects as scholars to elucidate fine-grained intellectual histories within and across national, linguistic and imperial boundaries. At the time, Rawda was publishing translations in every fortnightly Marilyn Booth 4 issue. In 1872–5, there were (amongst other translated texts) excerpts from a work on ancient Egyptian language by Dutch Orientalist Heinrich Brugsch (1827–94, chair in Egyptology in Göttingen, employed by the Egyptian state to start an Egyptology School; he was on the board of Rawdat al-madaris ). There were selections from works on agriculture; history of the ancient Greeks; customs across the world; the history of paper and writing; plus a romance called ‘The solitude’s solace in the story of Farid’; and the first part of Peter Parley’s Universal History 9 Its translators were students at the Translation School and the Egyptology School, employees of translation bureaus attached to various government departments, newspaper editors, schoolteachers (especially of English and French) and educational administrators. 10 The journal also served readers (who were, ideally, students in the expanding government advanced edu- cation system) in offering installments of longer pedagogic works attached to each issue, for example translated engineering textbooks. Exhibiting the pervasiveness of translation to culture production, polemics and pedagogy in 1870s Egypt, Rawdat al-madaris al-misriyya is a microcosm of the broader field of activity our volume addresses. Translation was everywhere in the multilingual, multi-ethnic late-Ottoman Mediterranean world: new audiences demanded reading material and new presses sought it. As a set of practices, ‘translation’ embraced a range of adaptation and invention – of genres, themes, writing styles, concepts, lexica, narratorial voice – as translators worked between Middle Eastern languages and from European languages into them. As in so many times and places, translators were inventors and entrepreneurs, and translation was but one activity in their spectra of culture-production energies. In myriad ways, multi-tasking translators were authors of an age. Indeed, ‘translation’ bore such cultural cachet (and also might offer a protec- tive scrim) that sometimes original works (especially fiction) were called translations on their title pages. Across the nineteenth century, translation was a growth industry, if one that was often pursued as an individual project. Circuits of exchange were expanding and intensifying. With growing literacy across the region, cul- tural commodities proliferated; presses were founded; books, newspapers and magazines emerged in all languages of the Empire (including French) and circulated beyond it; theatres were built and improvised. Arabic works might be translated into Turkish and Persian and vice versa, while writings produced in Europe of salience to reformist, emergent nationalist and gender-activist groups were translated nearly simultaneously into Arabic, Turkish (in various community-specific scripts) and Persian as well as Greek, Armenian and other tongues. Through acts of translation, and the 5 Introduction genres selected for it, Ottoman readers were being made aware of con- nected histories and travelling legacies. As a volume and as an ongoing project, Migrating Texts brings together scholars of translation, literature and intellectual history to investigate how circulations of key texts through linguistically differentiated rewritings facilitated – and possibly deterred, deflected or shifted – conversations around key issues for readers at the time. These include the meaning of ‘women’s rights’ and of masculinity/femininity, identity, personal autonomy and patriarchy; the sources of national efficacy and ‘self-help’ and their relationships to imperial presences; the nature and transferability of ‘morality’ and how best to train the young into ethical conduct; the optimal relations between rhetorical styles, familiar expressive forms, and public communication; indeed, the very meaning and import of ‘literature’ and the kinds of language(s) that a modern society entailed. Considering intersecting themes, emerging genres and circuits of exchange, and focus- ing on historical agents of change, our work connects with recent scholarly initiatives in global, transnational, and transregional intellectual history, attentive to ‘intermediating agents or modes of circulation . . . that allow for new conceptual movement or networking practices’. 11 While we examine movements in translation from Europe to the Ottoman region, this volume joins other recent research in challenging views of translation and text dis- semination that centre ‘the West’ as privileged source of knowledge and societies in most of the world as belated, derivative or passive recipients. ʿAbd al-Raziq Efendi rendered the Journal des débats article for a local agenda as he perceived it, modifying the text substantially in the process. Implicitly, such work also asks what this discursive entity or symbol called ‘the West’ was for observers, and how they appropriated and challenged it through translation. Politically resonant adaptations of canonical texts from Europe formed one element in this lateral cosmopolitanism, while another element com- prised reworkings of European novels that some contemporary pundits scorned as decidedly non-canonical if not downright dangerous – while readers just went on buying, reading, hearing and enjoying them. A hover- ing question for those engaged in ‘official’ translation projects as well as individual initiatives was how to use translation productively as a social tool – as intellectuals were arguing over how best to confront and receive ‘Europe’ as a set of technologies, a set of cultures (often homogenised representationally), a political space with frightening and appealing implications. The chapters collected here resulted from two workshops held at New York University Abu Dhabi and the University of Edinburgh in 2015, Marilyn Booth 6 stimulating an ongoing project on translation that takes the lands around the eastern Mediterranean Sea as hubs of linguistic and cultural exchange. Indeed, these are intercultural sites where ‘translation’ marked hybrid and variegated adaptation practices that – we have found consistently – cannot be taken for granted in their specific outcomes and proliferations, even if patterns might be discerned. As the project continues to study the eighteenth- to early-twentieth-century saliences of text transmission from western Europe (and North America) to the poly-linguistic Ottoman Empire, it critically scrutinises centre-periphery models of cultural diffu- sion by examining complexly circulating local-regional text migrations, or lateral and culturally ‘adjacent’ transmissions including to and from South Asian venues. The sites we study can be envisioned in terms of what Francesca Orsini has called ‘the multilingual local’, in a synchronic sense. 12 Diachronically, they represent the urbane historical trajectory of Ottoman letters as an intercultural space, in Saliha Paker’s formulation. 13 Although this is not the same as the ‘Islamic cosmopolis’ of co-existing languages and re-told texts united by a common (if internally various) religious outlook that Ronit Ricci has described for communities in south and south-east Asia, it does arguably bear affinities to that rich history, where multiple languages co-existed and shaped one another through acts of retelling. 14 Local (and evolving) cultures of translation might reflect (and reshape?) not so much a set of discrete monolingual identities in exchange as a polyvocal context in which languages and scripts some- times overlapped; 15 where intellectuals working across these languages grappled with questions of how inherited languages ought to be retooled (or not) for contemporary purposes; and what the relationships were or ought to be between spoken and written idioms, particularly since texts were communicated orally and received aurally as well as through written manuscripts or printed books. Ottoman Turkish itself was already a forma- tion dependent on earlier translations, borrowings and rewritings from and into Persian and Arabic, a broadly translational culture that Paker has argued should be conceptualised through the Ottoman Turkish term terceme As texts and their producers travelled amongst geographically and cul- turally adjacent languages, they fostered commonalities and recognitions. Perhaps they also nurtured distinctions at a time of emergent, differentiat- ing political nationalisms or an ethno-linguistic self-consciousness that could itself be enhanced through translation as an act that highlighted the text’s new linguistic home. Yet, as we explore in our first section, ‘terri - tory’ and ‘community’ – and their intersections with language and transla- tion, attribution and product – could not in the Ottoman case be mapped