A telling example of the basic factual errors that plague discussions of world literature: a 2021 essay, by a senior scholar at a major research university, on Adam Olearius's 1654 Gulistān translation as case study for understanding world literature onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.11… A good premise, but the author mistakes a German translation of Daniel Havart's Dutch translation of an entirely different work by Saʿdī (Būstān) for a later edition of Olearius's 1654 Persianischer Rosenthal, i.e. he misidentifies the very text that's the focus of the essay.

In the Ottoman Empire, commentaries on Persian works such as the Gulistān of Saʿdī or the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ, besides providing a comprehensive guide to canonical works of literature, offered the non-native speaker a course in the Persian language. Accordingly, orientalists who studied and collected manuscripts in the Ottoman Empire used Ottoman commentaries and translations as a way of learning Persian. There’s a good example of this in Oxford...

I can’t recommend enough Ormsby’s translation of Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan. The Divan is an extraordinary work of literature that hasn’t been given its due (until now) among anglophone readers. lareviewofbooks.org/article/glorio… It’s also an example of how translation choices can determine a work’s reception. Earlier ones left out the accompanying “Notes and Essays” & translated into verse, giving the impression that the work was a volume of orientalizing poetry. (1819 edition: digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/werkansicht/?P…)

The ownership inscription of the overseer of the Hafız Paşa endowments, in a copy of Sām Mīrzā’s taẕkira (Tuḥfa-i Sāmī) from the library of Antoine Galland (BnF, ms Persan 247). The note‘s interesting, because it’s likely that a waqf devoted to the dissemination of Turkish literary commentaries at the Hafız Ahmed Paşa mosque in Istanbul (described by Galland in his journal) played a role in the orientalist reception of Persian literature...

Here the focus is on historians, but I think archive photography will fundamentally change the study of literature. I’ve been thinking a lot about this in my own research...

https://twitter.com/dancohen/status/1214202045818953729

There are many manuscript sources that cast light on how and why writers write, but they often don’t lend themselves to transcription. For instance, imagine trying to record the revisions to this translation from Persian (Georg Gentius - Rosarium politicum, 1651) in a notebook.