‘On My Frail Body’: An Early Attempt to Translate the Turkic Poetry of Navā’ī into Persian

There can be found among the many manuscript copies of the dīvān of 'Alī Shīr Navā’ī an early attempt to translate his Turkic poetry into Persian. The manuscript in question contains some 250 of Navā’ī’s ghazals, each followed by a rendering in Persian by a translator known only from his pen-name (takhalluṣ), Sā'il, which he substitutes for Navā’ī’s in the final couplet of each ghazal. The subject of a brief study by Tourkhan Gandjeï, MS. British Library Or. 3492 is an example of the many ways in which Persian litterateurs sought to engage with the work of Navā’ī through the mediums of interpretation and translation. Other modes of engagement included the compilation of dictionaries based on his work, the incorporation of his poetry into chains of ‘response’ poems, and his inclusion in massive biographical dictionaries (taẕkira) of poets. But what accentuates the uniqueness of this particular manuscript is that it is the reverse of a phenomenon that was much in evidence throughout Iran and Central Asia in the medieval and early-modern periods, namely the translation of Persian works into Chaghatay Turkic. Works of translation in the opposite direction are far and few between, and although Gandjeï is dismissive of this particular effort, even going so far as to question the identification of the translator with the individual known from biographical dictionaries as Sā'il Hamadānī, on the grounds that the latter was too good a poet to have produced these translations, the work is an important relic of a little-studied and poorly-understood phenomenon. Translation is a difficult process and inexact science, and the choices Sā'il made while attempting to render these ghazals in Persian produced an entirely new work, one that had to appeal to a Persian audience that may not have had knowledge of the Turkic originals, and therefore would have judged the translator’s efforts by Persian literary norms. In effect, the translator was working under the pressure of having to meet audience expectations.