29 Aug September Seminars
Retracing Connections begins a new semester with two exiting seminars on storytelling across languages in the medieval and early modern world at Uppsala University.
On September 9, 2025, at 15.15 İpek Hüner (Istanbul) will share her reserach on early Ottoman stories and their translation into French, titled “Talking to Oneself, to God, or to Act: Shifts in Speech Patterns Across Versions and Translations of the Same Story”.
On September 25, 2025, at 15.15, our guest researcher Cameron Cross (Michigan) will trace the itineraries of medieval romances in “Love at the Limits: Exploring Early Persian Romances on the ‘Borders’ with Greek, Arabic, Indic, and Old French Texts”.
Both events take place at Uppsala University’s Engelska Parken, room 9-3042.
This talk focuses on the dialogues and monologues in the versions and translations of an early modern Ottoman story. Two different variants of the version known as the Evḥad Çelebi story and the Yaḥyā Çelebi story, as well as two of the latter’s French translations, will be used for these purposes.
In my talk, I will focus on the protagonists’ dialogues and monologues and how they are utilized as a storytelling tool. My aim is twofold: First, I want to discuss the changing gendered representations among versions as they are made visible by the direct and indirect speeches; second, I want to question the frequent use of inner monologues in Ottoman versions, a feature commonly attributed to the late 19th century and to Western influence.
In this presentation, I will outline the contours of what I have in mind as a book-length project, the second stage of my investigation into the development and function of independent versified love-stories (or “romances”) as they became established in New Persian literature in the early eleventh century CE. Intriguingly, two of the earliest texts in this corpus are translations and adaptations from Greek and Arabic sources – the novel Metiochus and Parthenope, and the tale of ‘Urwa b. Hizam – and in both cases, part of the motivation behind their recasting into Persian seems to be connected with their geo-political context, as texts produced in borderlands trying to make sense of and grapple with Otherness, in both direct and indirect ways. Through a few brief case studies, I hope to consider with you how the concept of the “border” might be a useful heuristic in unpacking the dynamics of entanglement, exchange, tension, and yes, love as well, that are conveyed in this emergent literary tradition.