Empire and the Dialogic Imagination: Rereading Russian Literature in Azeri Translation

While wearied by a spiritual thirst

I dragged myself across a gloomy desert.

Suddenly the six king-feathered Israfil,

Appeared in sublime mercifulness.

With a gentle heavenly body,

Like a dream with a light hand

Very slowly he touched my eyelashes,

The light of grace came to my eyes,

I looked with premonition to the length of the heavens,

I was aware of the truth of things.

– Abbas Sehhet, “The Prophet,” 1912

How does poetry make us aware of the truth of things? This is the conundrum of both the poet, who attempts to envision society, and the literary theorist, who reads poetry as a window into the social or institutional structures of the world. This talk takes up the politics of comparative reading practices and offers a model for reading “on the threshold” inspired by the work of theorist Mikhail Bakhtin.

A period of liberal censorship during the years following the 1905 revolution triggered a press boom across the Russian empire resulting in the proliferation of Turkic language publications. In the south Caucasus, a series of literary journals began to popularize works of Russian and European literature in translation. This talk considers the Azeri poet Abbas Sehhet’s translations of Aleksander Pushkin’s poetry and the dialogue about the relationship between religion, literature and politics in the Russian empire, which these verses generate.

Leah Feldman is currently a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study at CEU. Her research interests include comparative literary and cultural networks across the Russian/Soviet empires and the Turko-Persianate world, the relationship between aesthetics and politics, theories of modernity, theories of translation, comparative (post)colonialisms, and semiotics. Her current book project On the Threshold of Eurasia: Orientalism and Revolutionary Aesthetics in the Caucasus, 1905-1929 exposes the ways in which representations of the figure of revolution informed the interplay between orientalist and anticolonial discourses in Russian and Azeri poetry, prose, and propaganda. She is the author of “Orientalism on the Threshold: Reorienting Heroism in Late Imperial Russia" in Boundary 2 39.2 (Summer 2012), and the forthcoming “Red Jihad: Translating Communism in the Muslim Caucasus in Boundary 2, as well as a forthcoming collection of translations of Azeri plays. After completing her PhD in Comparative Literature at UCLA in 2013, Feldman held a fellowship at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. In the fall of 2015 she will join the University of Chicago as Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature.