Sankt Ignatios College in Stockholm and the Retracing Connections Progarmme are co-organizing a one-day workshop on the Poetics of Eastern Christianity. The workshop will take place on February 11, 2026 at Sankt Ignatios College, Nygatan 2, Södertälje.
V. T. How do universal themes (like love) get expressed differently and interpreted differently across diverse cultures? How does intertextuality in the Persian romances of the early 11th century mediate this?
C. C. Not to overgeneralize, but one of the things that first got me started on this line of inquiry was precisely how similar were the descriptions of love, beauty, heroism, virtue, and so on, across linguistic, geographical, and confessional lines. Just look at scenes of love at first sight, dissertations on the nature and effects of love (entering through the eyes, destabilizing the humours, etc.), or descriptions of a beautiful person as a graceful cypress with a moonlike face, arched bows for eyebrows, and a rosebud mouth, and you’ll see what I mean. It really belied any notion of an East-West divide that has been such a ubiquitous, and in my view misleading trope in modern discourse. Carolina Cupane puts it well, I think, when she posits a “common narrative koine” running across much of southwestern Eurasia and its adjacent regions.
Some of my earliest published work sought to explore this similarity — and the fine-grain differences that emerge from the comparison — on a purely thematic and literary level, such as the concept of divine providence between episodes in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, or the many ‘kinds’ or ‘colours’ of love between Dante’s Divine Comedy and Nezami’s Haft Paykar.
For a long time, I was content to keep my attention focused on these thematic and literary similarities: in fact, I preferred this, as I was not so interested in falling into the rabbit hole of source research, attempting to delineate lines of influence (a problematic term from many angles) or anything of that nature. Instead, I attributed these connections to large-scale and overlapping matrices of meaning-making, which I sometimes described as a kind of grammar or series of networks (“spiderwebs”) that held these literary cultures together in some loose and decentred way. This scenario would speak very well to the notion of intertextuality as theorized by Kristeva and Barthes: we’re not looking for text-to-text relationships like allusion or translation, but for how every text emerges out of a textual ‘sea,’ assembling fragments and pieces from a nearly infinite reservoir of prior significations. My first book, Love at a Crux, sought to situate the early Persian romance Vis and Ramin within this larger body, using it to show how it brings various narrative, thematic, and conceptual components together in ways that anticipate and help to establish a set of features that we moderns have come to ‘recognize’ or associate with the romance, broadly conceived. These features include re-thinkings of the code of chastity, particularly by female characters (cf. Kallirhoe or Cligès), investigations into the limits and paradoxes of masculine authority (cf. figures like Arthur or Lancelot), fragmentations and ‘doublings’ of the self (cf. the “hall of statues” in the Tristan cycle or the “twin” effect of Floire et Blancheflor), and tensions between lyrical and novelistic representations of love (cf. Aucassin et Nicolette). All this can be found in Vis and Ramin and other Persian texts.
V. T. Your take on the concept of the ‘border’ offers an interesting perspective that I would like to learn more about. What is the relationship between the Persian romances, particularly those that are translations and adaptations from Greek and Arabic sources and their geo-political context? What narrative techniques are used in these romances to make sense of the complexities of living in a borderland?
C. C. You’ve put your finger on the core questions underlying my current project, and I wish I had more developed answers to give you! My tentative idea going into this is that romances play an interesting and perhaps overlooked role in modelling encounters with difference — with the Other — that are not predicated on violence, nor necessarily destined to eradicate or domesticate that difference through the processes of marriage or conversion. For example, the Persian adaptation of Metiokhos and Parthenope seems to portray “pagan” Greek life in terms that are neither alien nor inimical to Islam; reviving this story in an environment of close contact between Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus may have promoted a kind of triangular engagement, mediated by Islamic attitudes towards ancient Greek culture. And, just as Ghaznavid coins expressed their religious commitment in both Abrahamic and Hindu cosmological language, the wide range of sources that went into this nascent literature seems to construct a kind a ‘layered’ narrative culture in which people from multiple perspectives and backgrounds might have been able to see themselves. Onsori’s versification of the local story of the Buddhas of Bamiyan suggests such a hypothesis. These stories may also play some role in the formation of historical memory, suturing various images of the past into the present: the era of antediluvian wisdom, the life of Alexander, and the career of the Prophet all come together in interesting ways in these texts. From this angle, they may be placed in productive conversation with other genres of writing such as praise poetry, anthropology, and travel literature, genres that frequently make use of the ‘border’ as part of their core conceptual apparatus. In staging these conversations, I hope to challenge myself to probe the generic ‘borders’ of romance itself with these other discursive fields. I have every expectation that those borders will prove to be far more porous and unstable than they might appear from a distant ‘literary systems’ approach.
V. T. How did the Persian adaptations of the Greek novel Metiochus and Parthenope and the tale of ‘Urwa b. Hizam incorporate existing Persian literary and cultural traditions? Were there attempts to make these stories more relevant to Persian audiences?
C. C. The wonderful advantage with these particular texts — and here I should specify that I’m speaking about Onsori’s Vameq and Azra and Ayyuqi’s Varqa and Golshah — is that we have the evidence available to conduct text-to-text comparisons. In the case of Vameq and Azra, for example, one of the story’s most fascinating moments is at a symposium in which the host (in a manner quite reminiscent of Plato) invites a debate on the nature of love. One speaker, the male hero Vameq, offers an account of Eros as a young archer that Hägg and Utas have described as “completely Greek in its imagery.” But then Vameq’s lover, Azra, counters this presentation by insisting that Eros is best understood as a concept, not as a figure with a body: this strikes me as a kind of ‘teachable moment’ in which the author stages a diegetic ‘correction’ to the text in a way that maintains the Hellenistic understanding of love in its broad contours, while steering the participants in the symposium away from polytheistic models — a concept that would seem particularly relevant in a borderscape like medieval Afghanistan.
The differences between Varqa and Golshah and its Arabic antecedents are quite striking: while the core episodes of the Arabic versions are maintained, they are padded out, both front and back, with extensive scenes of warfare. These scenes are not as action-oriented as they might sound: they really act as platforms on which the characters take turns vaunting about how manly they are and then perform their manliness in hand-to-hand combat. Through these dialogues, a rich constellation of masculine virtues emerges: physical strength, honourable comportment, endurance and fortitude, control over one’s emotions, and zeal in defending the ‘right’ side. And the most manly of them all, it turns out, is Golshah, who first slays her abductor and then his son for good measure. These virtues resonate strongly with the persona of the ghazi warrior adopted by Mahmud of Ghazna (who drew inspiration from the tales of the early Islamic conquests, generically called Maghazi) and then by the Seljuqs in Anatolia, or with Greek stories of ‘bordermen’ like Digenis Akrites, and of ‘border-women’ too, like those found in the Arabic epic of Fatima Dhat al-Himma (Remke Kruk has a great book about this called The Warrior Women of Islam). It is through these resonances that I think very interesting conversations can be held between texts written in multiple languages (Greek, Arabic, Persian, Georgian, Armenian, and Turkish among others) that all investigate the ‘border’ from various angles.
V. T. I have been fascinated by your book Love at a Crux on the narrative poem Vis and Ramin and the emergence of the versified love story as a genre of New Persian Literature. Could you explain how the book positions the Persian poem in relation to the development of romance in other medieval cultures, such as Greek, Arabic, and Western European literature?
C. C. I alluded to some of this above, but to articulate my basic idea behind the book, I saw the New Persian literature — a literary language that was only starting to emerge in earnest by the tenth century — as sitting at a convergence of multiple lines of storytelling, best represented by textual traditions in Greek, Arabic, and Middle Persian (the latter only scantily accessible as literary witnesses, but abundantly available via translations and material culture); it would gather and combine these discourses in novel ways over the eleventh century, and then, with the aid of the Seljuq-propelled spread of New Persian across southwestern Asia and the hugely prestigious work of Nezami (fl. 1160–1209), disseminate this tradition across a wide geographic expanse in the twelfth century, perpetuating ever-new moments of contact and exchange with the extraordinarily diverse literary cultures of the eastern Mediterranean region. It was thinking about this X-shape of convergence and divergence that led me to the metaphor of the crux, and the Greek novel was an absolutely essential piece of the puzzle in assembling this account. Perhaps in retrospect I let it overdetermine my use of the term ‘genre,’ since it is after all only five texts that are quite internally different from each other, but still, in terms of setting up some simple baselines of ethos and mythos, going back to the similarities you first asked me about, it was an important body of work to become familiar with. I really think that without that starting base of comparanda, specialists in any literary tradition risk missing part of the broader context in which their areas of study occur, and I can at least personally attest to how useful it has been to read scholarship in fields adjacent to my own.
V. T. I would love to learn more about your ongoing research. Could you share what projects you’ll be working on and how your work connects with RC? Do you enjoy your experience at UU? What are you hoping to achieve during your visit?
C. C. Much of my time here has been devoted to thinking, reading, and discussion: I’m trying to absorb new bodies of literature and new ways of doing scholarship, to reflect on what I’ve done so far and to think ahead as to what I might do differently in the future, and to lay the groundwork for what I hope will become another book project. This includes producing a new edition and English translation of Varqa and Golshah, which has been a sheer delight: nothing generates closer intimacy with a text than translating it. It has been an incredible pleasure to have these regular meetings with the RC team, through whom I’ve been exposed to whole new vistas of texts and methods; their expertise in Greek and Arabic literature of late antiquity and the medieval periods has been especially impactful and appreciated. It has also been nice to change my internal focus from “output” to one of “input,” which I think can easily get unbalanced in academia, and yet is ultimately the key for sustained and productive research. Many seeds have been planted during my stay at UU, and the traces of Retracing Connections will be visible in my scholarship for years to come.
V. T. Which is your favourite love story among this rich corpus of epic and romance that you are looking for at your project?
C. C. Great question! Let me offer a couple suggestions, depending on your tastes and interests. Anyone who likes the Greek novel would definitely enjoy reading Tomas Hägg and Bo Utas’s book The Lover and the Virgin, which includes side-by-side translations and editions of the Greek fragments of Metiochos and Parthenope and the Persian fragments of Vameq and Azra; I can’t say exactly why, but I am reminded of Longos’s Daphnis and Chloe when I read it. For a complete text that “rhymes” extremely well with the conventions of the Greek novel — particularly Kallirhoe — I think Vis and Ramin is wonderful read, particularly in Dick Davis’s verse translation. Rereading Hysmine and Hysminias this semester reminded me of Nizami’s Layli and Majnun, which has also recently been translated by Davis, in the way both texts felt highly dialogic and conceptual: love becomes a threshold for plumbing the infinite mysteries of the self. If your jam is love and adventure, such as what we see in the Palaiologan romances, check out Samak the Ayyar, a popular medieval tale recently translated by Freydoon Rasouli and Jordan Mechner (of Prince of Persia fame): it dialogues tremendously well with Shota Rustaveli’s Man in the Panther Skin. Perhaps the work that brings these facets together — the romance and adventure, the philosophy and cosmology, the highs and lows of love in all its forms — is Nizami’s Haft Paykar (Seven Figures), translated by Julie Scott Meisami. It is something of a snow-globe of Persian romance, in all its richness and complexity.
Our colleague and the friend of the programme Markéta Kulhánková (Czech Academy of Sciences/Masaryk University Brno) has been awarded the 2025 book prize for Outstanding Research Results by Masaryk University Brno. The award was granted for her most recent book Cease Writing of Achilles: A Narratological Commentary on the Byzantine Heroic Poem Digenis Akritis.
This volume offers a narratological commentary on Digenis Akritis, a Byzantine heroic poem that blends epic and romance. How does the narrator shape the story? What roles do characters, space, and time play in creating meaning? In a detailed introduction followed by a linear commentary, Markéta Kulhánková answers these questions through a close reading of the poem’s structure and techniques. She also examines how Digenis Akritis engages with earlier traditions through imitation and transtextuality, while presenting a unique frontier hero. Offering clear, accessible tools for understanding Byzantine narrative, the book is an essential resource for students and scholars alike. It invites readers to view Digenis Akritis as both a product of its time and a timeless tale.
The book has been published in the Brill Narratological Commentaries on Ancient Texts series, where it will soon be joined by our programme’s narratological commentary on The Life of Saint Theodore of Edessa. We extend our warmest congratulations to Marketa! We wish her many more brilliant academic achievements and look forward to working with her in the future!
Two Retracing Connections members have had the chance to translate Isabella Hammad’s essay Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, which was mentioned in one of our earlier blog posts. This erudite and poignant text was originally presented as Edward W. Said memorial lecture at Columbia University in September 2023. It was rendered in Swedish by Ingela Nilsson as Främlingskap och igenkänning: att berätta om Palestina (Faeton: Stockholm, 2025) and in BCMS by Milan Vukašinović as Prepoznavanje stranca: o Palestini i narativu (Raštan; Belgrade, 2025).
The Belgrade edition has been accompanied by a Preface, written by Selma Asotić, Sarajevo-born bilingual poet, who’s poetry book Say Fire (Archipelago Books, 2025) has recently been published in English, as well. We bring you the text of the Preface, intimately engaged with the topics of Retracing connections, rendered in English by the author.
On October 12, 1492 Christopher Columbus and his crew made landfall in present-day Bahamas, mistakenly believing it was the East Indies. In the following weeks, he sailed from one Caribbean island to another, encountering indigenous tribes and a natural world infinitely exotic to the European eye. From the very beginning, the encounter between the Old and the New World was marked by misunderstanding. Upon hearing of the existence of the Carib people, Columbus’s medieval European imagination, through the Latin canis, conjured images of mythical dog-headed creatures and of anthropophagy. Carib became cannibal, and under the gaze of the European explorer, indigenous people transmogrified into monstrous maneaters. The interactions with Amerindian tribes described by Columbus in the journal he kept for his Castilian royal sponsors reflect an almost comical inability to account for, or even conceive of, the differences between the two parties in the encounter. The same refrain emerges. Columbus writes repeatedly: I could not understand them at all, but I could conclude that they were very satisfied. Or: We did not understand them, nor did they understand us, but I realized that, should I need anything, the entire island was at my disposal.
Although removed from us by oceans of time and space, this episode from the very beginning of the European colonial enterprise—the original sin of modernity—remains relevant. It lays bare the fundamental divide that still rules our world. On the one side is the colonizer, attributing to himself the exclusive right and power of meaning-making. On the opposite side are the colonised, condemned to muteness. From Caribs to cannibals. From men to maneaters. The reality of the colonised is buried under the phantasmagorical projections of the coloniser, and in one fell swoop entire peoples turn into ghosts, while in their place the colonizer’s feverish imagination sculpts figures in the shape of its deepest fears.
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free – millions chant around the world, while the colonizers hear what they want to hear. Not an appeal for freedom and equality, but a declaration of war, as if the war hasn’t been thundering for a long time now, as if it hadn’t been declared the very moment Columbus set his European foot on unknown ground, as if it had started on October 7, 2023 and not with the terrifying exodus of 1948, when over 700.000 Palestinians were forced to flee their homes. We debate the “controversial” slogan in op-eds and TV shows, waste our patience and energy on social media and in the streets, yet words remain just words: a tightening of the throat and a line on a piece of paper, essentially unimportant and impotent against the force of arms that has reduced Gaza to a mass grave. Whatever slogan or symbol Palestinians choose will be met by the same reaction—relentless contestation, obfuscation, and denunciation. It’s not about the slogan. It’s about not allowing the colonised to speak about and for themselves. Only the coloniser has the right to determine meaning. The definition of the term intifada in an Arabic dictionary is irrelevant. What matters is the delicate soul of the colonizer, the uncomfortable stirring in his stomach when from the comfort of his European, American, or Israeli home he watches the raised fists and the gaping jaws of the uncivilized mob on the streets of Gaza, Ramallah, Tehran, or Sanaa. How the colonizer defines civilization can best be derived not from the endless provisions of international law, which has proved itself useful only as a punchline to a bad joke, but from Columbus’s journal. For Columbus, the indigenous are uncivilized because they are, among other things, unskilled in weaponry and warfare.
Their spears and arrows prove themselves inferior against European lead, making the people who wield them inferior too. We should recall Columbus whenever an Israeli official or one of the many zealous imperial boot-lickers from European parliaments tells us that amidst the ruins of Gaza Israel is defending not only itself but the rest of the “civilized” world. That civilized world defined itself by its ability to kill and not be killed. To such a European, Western civilisation war is the raison d’ être and peace is a threat.
Barbarian. Terrorist. The coloniser’s imagination inscribes the tortured body of the colonised with meaning, according to its own needs and its own criteria. Not men, but maneaters. Always already monstrous, incriminated even before birth by their origin, language, or name. If we cannot march toward Gaza in international brigades, if there’s no Red Army to advance on the suburbs of Tel Aviv, if everything in us and around us is darkness and defeat, let there be, as in the beginning of all things–the word. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, first in language, then in olive groves, in courtyards and living rooms across the occupied land. That much we can do—we, who have so utterly failed Gaza and Palestine. We can let them speak, we can listen and amplify their words as much as possible. Maybe one day we will be able to look a Palestinian in the eye without crumbling to dust in shame.
Isabella Hammad was born in London. Her writing has appeared publications including Conjunctions, The Paris Review, The New York Times. She was awarded the 2018 Plimpton Prize for Fiction and a 2019 O. Henry Prize. Her first novel The Parisian (2019) won a Palestine Book Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Betty Trask Award from the Society of Authors in the UK. She was a National Book Foundation ‘5 Under 35’ Honoree, and has received literary fellowships from MacDowell, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Lannan Foundation. She was selected as one of the Granta ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ in 2023. Her second novel, Enter Ghost, was published in 2023.
Selma Asotić is a Sarajevo-born, bilingual writer, Selma Asotić earned dual BA degrees in English Language and Literature and Comparative Literature from the University of Sarajevo, and an MFA in poetry from Boston University, where she worked closely with Robert Pinsky. She’s interested in poetry and revolution. She’s taught writing to undergraduates at BU and NYU, and ESL to adult learners at community-based organizations in Sarajevo and New York. She’s also worked as a translator and interpreter. Her first book of poetry Say Fire was published in both Serbia (Raštan publishing) and Bosnia and Herzegovina in April 2022 and was awarded the Stjepan Gulin Prize in 2022 and the Štefica Cvek Prize in 2023. It was published in English by Archipelago Books in September 2025.
What happens when stories are translated into new languages? Is translating a narrative different from translating any other type of discourse? What techniques do medieval translators use to render narratives in different languages or linguistic registers? How does the transfer affect things like the narrative structure, the characters, and the spatial setting? What does such a transfer mean for the understanding of a story? Do narrative translations overcome the difference between languages or do they produce and reinforce it by construing languages as enclosed units? And how can we, as modern scholars, approach these issues from a well-informed and theorized position?
While narratology has gained ground in the study of medieval literature over the past decades, the combination of narratology and translation studies is still fairly unexplored. And yet, medieval texts are brimming with exciting examples of translation strategies that greatly affect both content and narrative form, ranging from ‘Translation Rigidly Conceived’ to creative adaptations and rewritings. Simultaneously, a curious affinity seems to exist between medieval translation practices and postmodern translation theory. Medieval practices and postmodern theory both seem to embrace the creative potential of translation, accept its non-linear and prismatic itineraries, defy the notions of single authoritative versions, and tolerate hybridity and ambiguity.
At this summer school, instead of dissecting the details of texts translated between specific languages, we rather wish to offer theoretical frameworks and methodological tools for working with translational material that can be considered from any narratological angle. A variety of medieval languages will be included, but the reading materials will be made available in English for the convenience of the participants. Since written translation was just one of the vehicles for traveling stories, its relation to other means of transport, such as images or objects, will also be considered.
The program will include keynote lectures by renowned scholars of narrative and translation, ambulatory workshops on pre-circulated medieval and theoretical texts, and doctoral thesis seminars where participants will receive comments on their ongoing research from tutors and peers. Confirmed keynote lecturers include Matthew Reynolds, Ingela Nilsson and Emilie van Opstall. The workshop topics will include material and political aspects of translation, cultural adaptations, the figures of translators, self-narratives across linguistic traditions, decolonial considerations and digital methodologies.
The summer school will take place at the Central European University in Vienna, 25–29 May 2026.
Doctoral students of any level whose work involves translated narratives are encouraged to apply. Funding for travel and accommodation (5 nights) for up to twelve participants is available.
Applications should be submitted as a single PDF document and include:
Application deadline is 30 November 2025. The results will be announced in early January 2026.
Applications and queries should be sent by email to: milan.vukasinovic@lingfil.uu.se.