Salaam friends and colleagues,
Please join this Thursday at Persian Circle where Thibaut d’Hubert will give a presentation in English entitled:
“Stylistic reworkings of a Persian dāstān: Sayf al-mulūk between Persian and Middle Bengali”
Thursday November 21st, from 5:00-6:30pm
Pick Hall 218
(5828 S. University Ave, Chicago, IL 60637)
About the talk: The story of the Egyptian prince Sayf al-Mulūk and the fairy Badīʿ al-Jamāl circulated throughout the Muslim world from at least the 13th century onward. The story became an important vector of Islamization of local narrative traditions and was adapted in many literary idioms, in prose and verse, in the form of anonymous and authorial texts, but also in purely oral traditions. Under the aegis of the National Endowment for the Humanities, I am currently preparing a scholarly edition and translation of a Middle Bengali version of the story from the mid-seventeenth century and the edition of two Persian versions from South Asia: an anonymous prose text from seventeenth-century Deccan (Staatsbibliothek, Berlin), which provides a basic version of the narrative, and a more elaborate prosimetrum from nineteenth-century Bengal (Rājnārāyaṇ Basu Smr̥ti Pāṭhāgār, Medinipur EAP921/CSSS, Calcutta). After a brief introduction, we will read excerpts of the same narrative section (in Persian) from each version and comment on the stylistic reworkings performed in the Middle Bengali poem and the prosimetric text.
As always, tea and refreshments will be served – hope to see you there!
Be omid-e didaar,
Allison