Russifying the Radīf: Lyric Translatability and the Russo-Persian Ghazal

Abstract

Building on Earl Miner's insight that the lyric is a ‘foundation genre’ of world literature, this article develops this idea in the context of thinking about lyric translatability. I do this by examining the Russo-Persian lyric, a hybrid literary genre that developed within Russian literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Radically unlike its classical Persian prototype, the Russo-Persian ghazal is a case study in lyric translatability. I explore the development of this hybrid genre from its appropriation by the Russian Romantic poet Afanasy Fet (d. 1890) to its influence on Sergei Esenin's Persian Motifs (1925), a text that adds a new dimension to the Russian-Persian encounter. Moving beyond historicist treatments that focus solely on direct impact or empirical encounters, this exploration of the Russo-Persian lyric traces the movement of literary form as a process of cultural translation that sometimes misunderstands the original, but which also transforms it, generating new literary form for a receptive audience. Broadly, this research sheds light on how the ghazal and its adaptations modifies and extends our understanding of lyric form, and on what is and is not translated through the lyric genre.