Between Fantasy and Philosophy: Saʿdi,Translator of Voltaire’s Zadig

Zadig ou la Destinée opens on a preface supposedly written by Sadi (sic), who seems to suggest he is the translator of the story which is to follow. The article will investigate the role played by Voltaire’s reference to Sa?di in Zadig as an Oriental prop for the narrative’s exotic setting, but also, more importantly, as participating in its philosophical content. Travelers’ accounts had brought growing interest in Persia, and Sa?di would not have been unfamiliar to an educated public; the Orient more generally became an experimental space for Enlightenment thought. Playing on the notion of the translator as cultural bridge, the article examines the uses Voltaire makes of Sa?di in Zadig and whether these correlate to the eighteenth-century French reader’s perceptions of the Iranian poet.     

The Social and Literary Context of German Translations of Saʿdi’s Golestān

Sa?di’s Golestān has been translated into German numerous times since the seventeenth century. The purpose of this article is to examine the social and literary context of three German translations and translators: Karl Heinrich Graf, a theologian and researcher of the Old Testament, published his translation of the Golestān in 1846 during German Romanticism; Dieter Bellmann, a professor of Oriental studies, published a revision of Graf’s Rosengarten in 1982 in the German Democratic Republic, where literature was strictly regulated; Kathleen Göpel published her indirect translation from English, prepared by the Afghan translator Omar Ali-Shah, in 1997, at a time of intercultural literature, also called “bridge literature.” Through examples the article shows how the context may have influenced their translations and how the text has changed when traveling across linguistic and cultural borders.     

Beyond Orientalism: When Marceline Desbordes-Valmore carried Saʿdi’s Roses to France

This article follows a thread of translation and intertextual dialogue, taking us from the thirteenth-century Persian poet Sa?di to the nineteenth-century French poet Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. It reads Desbordes-Valmore’s poem ‘Les roses de Saadi’ (1860) with the two passages from Sa?di’s Golestān from which it was inspired, shedding new light on the poem’s metapoetic subtext. The original Persian text is compared to two French translations that were circulating at the time when Desbordes-Valmore was writing. This analysis of the Golestān’s reception forms the basis for the argument that Desbordes-Valmore recast in secular terms Sa?di’s discourse on poetic language, emphasizing the continuity, rather than difference, between her concerns and Sa?di’s. The case of Desbordes-Valmore thus reveals a forgotten facet of nineteenth-century French engagements with Middle Eastern culture: one of identification and literary influence, which existed alongside the processes of “othering” for which the period is better known.     

The Temporality of Eternal Prosperity: Prospero’s Labors of Love in The Tempest

In this essay, I examine the role of providence in Shakespeare’s The Tempest alongside the concept of history that Kierkegaard develops in Philosophical Fragments. I argue that the art of the play is contained in Prospero’s historical and loving engagement with the past. In short, I undertake to show that, in stark contrast to the Greek and Roman conception of time as fate, it is in viewing love as both the temporal origin and the eternal goal of existence that the time of our lives is rendered providential, that is, meaningful and historical.     

Persian Monshi,Persian Jones: English Translations of Saʿdi’s Golestān from the Late Eighteenth to the Mid-Nineteenth Centuries

From the seventeenth century, Mosleh al-Din Sa?di Shirazi (d. 1291), a key figure in Persian classical literature, became the center of Europeans’ attention: his name appeared in travelogues and periodicals, and selections of his tales were published in miscellaneous Latin, German, French, and English works. To follow Sa?di’s impact on English literature, one needs to search for the beginning of the “Sa?di trend” and the reasons that led to the acceleration of the translation process of his works into the English language in the nineteenth century. This article examines the role of the British educational institutions in colonial India in the introduction of Sa?di and his Golestān to the English readership, and, in parallel, it uncovers the role of the Indo-Persian native scholars (monshis) who were involved in the preparation of translations. The article discusses how the perception of the British towards Sa?di’s literature developed in the first half of the nineteenth century and how their approach towards the translation of the “text” and its “style” evolved in the complete renderings of the Golestān.     

The Preaching of the Master: Thomas Aquinas’s University Sermons on Happiness

ABSTRACT

The single task of the Parisian masters of the thirteenth century was to read Scripture, a task they performed by way of the famous legere, disputare, praedicare. Although intimately connected these three are rarely studied in relation to each other. Thomas Aquinas’s sermons on the beatitudes (Matthew 5. 1–10) can be compared to his commentary on Matthew and the Summa Theologiae. This opens up a new perspective on the sermons, addressing some of the questions they raise. The edition of Aquinas’s sermons by Louis Bataillon is instrumental in performing this task and will therefore be considered in greater detail. The present article seeks to contribute to Medieval Sermon Studies by way of a more theological approach and to present to theologians the importance of a greater appreciation for the sermons of the masters.     

Lampon’s Episode in Xenophon’s Ephesiaca: The Reformulation of a Goatherd

The article examines the figure of Lampon, an uncharacteristic goatherd appearing in a folk-tale-like story in Xenophon’s Ephesiaca 2.9–12. It has long been recognized by critics that the circumstances of the Euripidean Electra are recalled in the episode under discussion. Comparisons are made with the Euripidean scene and the “reshuffling” of the main roles is expounded, including the novelist’s decision to make Anthia the partner of a goatherd and not the wife of a lowly farmer. On the basis of thematic and verbal similarities, it is argued that Xenophon appears to have a direct knowledge of Euripides’ Electra, which he imaginatively exploits. Subtle details of occupation and name are also discussed in relation to the stereotypical α?π?λο? and the ?γροικο?. A characteristic feature recalling the Aristotelian notion of ?γροικ?α is pointed, and it is concluded that Xenophon skilfully subverts the stereotypes, as he does not endow Lampon with the traditional negative marking of ?γροικοι and α?π?λοι, and indeed moulds an anti-aipolos.     

The Demographics of Dystopia: The Muslim City in Asia’s Future

This essay argues that UN projected population growth will not only lead to more Muslims in Asia’s cities in a purely numerical sense, but also to more Muslim cities in a proportional and cultural sense through the continuation of existing trajectories of ‘de-cosmopolitanization’. Urban life will be deeply affected by this increasing shift from cities that are not merely majority Muslim, but are also increasingly Muslim in moral, social or political terms. Inevitably such changes will affect the lives of urban citizens, none more so than women. The essay then asks whether population growth will allow these cities to maintain their ‘globalizing’ trajectory of increasing interconnection. Having framed its analysis around the ‘hard’ outcomes of demographic change, the analysis then turns to ‘soft’ outcomes by tackling the question of the likely contours of the increasingly divergent versions of Islam produced by the competitive religious economies of the modern Asian city.     

‘The True Love of the People and the Motherland’: The concept of socialist patriotism,socialist nation and anti-nationalism in Hungary in the 1960s and 1970s

In the late 1950s, the concept of socialist patriotism in Hungary was reformulated as a basic political concept in the ideology and propaganda of state socialism. The definite appropriation of Leninist contraposition of socialist patriotism and bourgeois nationalism became paramount in the second half of the 1950s because of the nationalist sentiments of the 1956 revolution. I trace the history of the concept of socialist patriotism in the 1960s and 1970s in socialist Hungary. During this period, socialist patriotism served as a slightly undetermined, yet didactic counter-concept to set against ‘bourgeois nationalism’ which was characterised as a xenophobic sense of nation. From the late 1960s, the doctrine of socialist patriotism confronted a new ideological enemy: supra-nationalism or cosmopolitanism. In the mid-1970s, a new ideological equilibrium was elaborated in Hungary between socialist patriotism and proletarian internationalism, which served the economic and political integration of the Eastern bloc countries. In this sense, socialist patriotism was meant to express a link with socialist political order, its achievements and its institutions, in contrast to the ethnic character and revanchist tendencies of nationalism.     

The technologies of distance: new migrations in Conor O’Callaghan’s The Sun King

This article analyses Conor O’Callaghan’s collection The Sun King as an expression of contemporary migration practices. It places the poet’s technological mobilities within larger global movements and argues that the collection reconfigures poetic versions of migration for the twenty-first century. The Sun King (2013) is located in explicitly transient spaces, while its formal innovations serve to mimeticise contemporary dislocation. In reinventing the dual demands of memory and migration in the postmodern society, The Sun King recognises and pursues alternative poetic possibilities. The article suggests that O’Callaghan’s Twitter-poem “The Pearl Works” can be read as indicative of an expansive impulse towards ephemeral online works. In particular, the article raises questions around composition, stability and memory practices in the digital era, and highlights how both migration and memory are complicated by technological innovations.     

Routes of Resistance: Mobilizing Discourses of Opportunity in Ann Petry’s The Street and Austin Clarke’s The Meeting Point

Ann Petry’s The Street and Austin Clarke’s The Meeting Point provide important representations and affirmations of black people’s use of movements such as educational attainment and economic advancement to create routes to resist inequitable treatment and demand equal access to the benefits of belonging to American and Canadian national communities. In The Street, Lutie employs intellectual and economic movements to achieve her American dream but learns that systematic inhibitions block her intended ascension. In The Meeting Point, Bernice also tries to attain education and make financial strides to achieve her Canadian dream but finds herself barred from fully materializing that dream. Lutie and Bernice continue their quests to fulfill their mobility ideals, despite obstructions they face. Through that movement, which is driven by their knowledge of the implications of their exclusions from promises of the nations they call home, they counter boundaries intended to restrict them. While they do not accomplish fully their upward mobility ideals, their resistance demonstrates their refusal to be denied the benefits of American and Canadian discourses of opportunity. Petry’s and Clarke’s representations of this persistent resistance help inform and give voice to struggles against exclusionary practices blacks in the United States and Canada continually experience.     

The Origins of European Fascism: Memory of Violence in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon

Michael Haneke’s film The White Ribbon (2009) narrates violent attacks that disrupt the cyclical life of a German village in 1913–14. The narrator frames the violence as a study of the origins of fascism: the alleged perpetrators are children, who rebel against the disciplinary powers of patriarchal authority. Coming to maturity during World War I, they will have become the generation of Nazism’s followers. In contrast to psycho-historical readings of The White Ribbon as a cinematic exploration of the causal relationship between the authoritarian formation of the juvenile subject and her susceptibility to fascism’s redemptive illusions, I propose an anti-psychological interpretation of the film. This reading seeks to understand The White Ribbon in terms of Haneke’s aesthetic and formal choices, which underpin his notion of “ethical spectatorship.” I argue that the film offers a dual metaphorical construction of the nexus between memory and the cinematic image, and of the mnemonic and affective aspects of the history of violence. Haneke forges a link between the European attitude to its history of fascism and its ongoing politics of exclusion, arising from its covert fascist desire for the unified self. The significance of The White Ribbon in the ongoing debate on history/memory thus lies in its critique of Europe’s current self-understanding as having outgrown its violent past.