Papers by Sam Hodgkin
Kairos: A Journal of Critical Symposium, 2024
My contribution to a forum responding to Auritro Majumder's book Insurgent Imaginations: World Li... more My contribution to a forum responding to Auritro Majumder's book Insurgent Imaginations: World Literature and the Periphery (2021). I focus on the question of how non-Western verbal art forms contributed to the transregional repertory of agitational literature. The piece concludes with a brief case study from the reception of the Indian poet Iqbal by the Uzbek writer ‘Abd al-Ra‘uf Fitrat. View the full issue here: https://kairostext.in/index.php/kairostext/issue/view/15
Tulips in Bloom: An Anthology of Modern Central Asian Literature, 2024
A brief introduction and translations of two ghazals by the brilliant Indo-Persian poet ‘Abd al-Q... more A brief introduction and translations of two ghazals by the brilliant Indo-Persian poet ‘Abd al-Qādir Bēdil, each paired with a response poem by a Central Asian poet, first Yakdil Bukhārī (fl. early 19th c.), then Ṣadr al-Dīn ‘Aynī (1878-1954). From a field-transforming new anthology of the modern literatures of Central Asia, co-edited by Gabriel McGuire, Kristen Fort, Naomi Caffee, Emily Laskin, me, and Ali İgmen. See the table of contents for the astonishing range and coverage of the anthology: there's something for any literature or history class!
Literary Modernity in the Persophone Realm: A Reader, 2024
Christine Nölle-Karimi, Thomas Loy, and Roxane Haag-Higuchi have edited a marvelous new reader of... more Christine Nölle-Karimi, Thomas Loy, and Roxane Haag-Higuchi have edited a marvelous new reader of Persophone critical texts on literary modernity in English translation with annotations, introductions, short biographies of their authors, and bibliographies. I contributed the introductions, bibliography, and translation for Manāfzāda, and the introductions and bibliography for Braginskii (Thomas Loy translated that text).
Comparative Literature Studies, 2024
My introduction to a forum in Comparative Literature Studies on the brilliant Alexander Jabbari's... more My introduction to a forum in Comparative Literature Studies on the brilliant Alexander Jabbari's The Making of Persianate Modernity (2023). Other contributions come from C. Ceyhun Arslan, Fatima Burney, Allison Kanner-Botan, and Levi Thompson, as well as a response from Jabbari himself.
Comparative Literature Studies, 2024
This article considers the national poet as surrogate: the rhetorical and poetic repertory that e... more This article considers the national poet as surrogate: the rhetorical and poetic repertory that enables speaking for the national collectivity, and the ease with which this repertory is redirected to speak on behalf of other collectivities. It is a commonplace to attribute to Soviet multinational culture a Romantic nationalist genealogy, but this continuity or revival has generally been located in genre, intertextuality, and theories of the nation. Here, the author focuses instead on the tool kit of representation, and surrogacy in particular, arguing that the Soviet multinational literary system was a crucible that transformed the representational resources of Romanticism for the postcolonial age. The author's account draws on the distinctively neo-Romantic approaches to representation proposed by Lukacs and Ankersmit to consider the Soviet reception and translation of the major national poets Robert Burns, Victor Hugo, and Taras Shevchenko. It also follows the Soviet Eastern (Kyrgyz, Tajik, and Iranian émigré) writer-functionaries who translated the Romantics through their own acts of surrogate representation in the Third World. The result is an account of how the Soviet Union, simultaneously anti-colonial and semicolonial, bridged the transition from the Romantic figure of the national poet to the postcolonial figure of the literary representative.
Comparative Literature Studies, 2024
Philological Encounters, 2023
Across the Persianate regions of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Eurasia, the discour... more Across the Persianate regions of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Eurasia, the discourse of modernization had a deep, perhaps even dominant aesthetic dimension. Apparently disparate anxieties about oriental indolence, homosexuality and unmanliness, flattery and unmeaning speech, and submission to despots all may be understood as elements of a coherent critique of a single literary mode: taghazzul. Insofar as ghazal was a "royal genre" (Ireneusz Opacki), it provided the formal-aesthetic framing for numerous literary and speech genres, and thus for the social and political order. In case studies from across the Persianate zone, this article considers how writers' refusal of taghazzul, or its excision from their texts, became a recognizable gesture of disaffiliation from the Persianate. In the resulting reordering of the literary field, taghazzul took on new functions in relation to the Western category of lyric.
The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation, 2022
Before the post-WWII watershed of decolonization, the Soviet-led translation system stood alone a... more Before the post-WWII watershed of decolonization, the Soviet-led translation system stood alone as a systematic, reciprocal attempt to establish a canon of world literature in which “world” did not practically coincide with “Europe.” Persian played an integrating role in this system, second only to Russian, as a prestige language of world classics, the language of a Soviet nationality (Tajik), a common second language among Soviet Eastern nationalities, and a bridge between the Soviet and international East. The result was a fundamental transformation of the relationship between the Persian literary classics and their readership across the Persianate world and beyond. This essay introduces the network of intellectuals responsible for this transition: Soviet Eastern writers and bureaucrats, Russian and foreign leftist orientalists, Russian poet-translators, and anticolonial writers and scholars across West and South Asia. It then surveys the forms and venues whose skopoi and production conditions informed the varied styles of Soviet and Second-World translations of Persian classics: Russian, Azerbaijani, and Uzbek scholarly annotation-translations, prestige editions of literary translations from interlinear ponies, school textbooks, and so on. Finally, it briefly situates Persian classics translations in relation to Second-World literary translations into Tajik/Persian.
Nov 3, 2020 12:00 PM in Eastern Time (US & Canada) RSVP at: https://yale.zoom.us/webinar/... more Nov 3, 2020 12:00 PM in Eastern Time (US & Canada) RSVP at: https://yale.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_3QSJXjZYQJyCzxcvNSQDtg Join us for a reading and discussion of modern Iranian poetry and translation with Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould, both scholars and practicing poets based at the University of Birmingham, who frequently collaborate on their translations of Persian poetry. They will read poetry by Tahmasebian, as well as their translations of verse by Bijan Elahi and Hasan Alizadeh. They will be joined in conversation by Sam Hodgkin and Robyn Creswell from Yale’s Department of Comparative Literature.
Iranian Studies, 2022
In scholarship on post-Persianate literary modernity, the emergence of the new institution of lit... more In scholarship on post-Persianate literary modernity, the emergence of the new institution of literature is often conflated with the delimitation and reification of national cultures as different manifestations of a single process. This article examines three anthologies of Persian literature from the interwar Persophone Soviet Union to reconsider the relationship between state cultural institutions' procedures of literary modernization and nationalization. The anthologies mark out the stages by which classical Persian literature was portioned out to Soviet Eastern nationalities, and in particular the advent of Tajik literary history, but they also reveal the degree to which national literatures coevolved with new post-Persianate literary cosmopolitanisms and internationalisms.
Persian Literature and Modernity: Production and Reception, 2018
Formal studies of the arts in the Soviet national republics have focused on the unidirectional tr... more Formal studies of the arts in the Soviet national republics have focused on the unidirectional transfer of genres and forms from the Russian centre to the national periphery. This article explores how vernacular and non-European cosmopolitan genres altered the imported forms in translation, by examining three Stalin-era musicals, Tajik, Uzbek, and Azerbaijani, all adapted from the same Persian romance. The librettists’ approaches to the transposition of classical mathnawīs each drastically modified the theatrical form and tragic genre. Their shared aesthetic assumptions suggest a vision of Soviet “world literature” that accommodated a Persianate zone of cosmopolitan culture whose centre was not Moscow.
Book Reviews by Sam Hodgkin
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2025
A review of my book by the poet and scholar Kayvan Tahmasebian.
Iranian Studies, 2024
A review of Alexander Jabbari, The Making of Persianate Modernity
International Journal of Persianate Literature, 2022
Comparative Literature Studies (CLS), 2022
Journal of Islamic Studies, 2022
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Papers by Sam Hodgkin
Book Reviews by Sam Hodgkin