This panel discusses connectivities that characterize early modern Eurasia and Afro-Eurasia. The four 12-minute papers followed by a 27-minute discussion reflect different forms of intercultural translation. Contributing to the growing scholarly interest in global, transcontinental literary and intellectual relations, the linguistic and discursive continuities the papers present reveal the existence of interregional, global networks between different linguistic, religious, and political traditions, that produced striking similarities and parallels in political, religious, and literary discourse across the globe.

Ferenc Csirkés’s paper, “Language Connects and Divides: Language Ideologies in the Early Modern Persianate World,” offers a comparison between the West and the Islamic East in the early modern period, discussing the social imagination about and the hierarchy of vernacular and cosmopolitan languages as part of political theologies. Focusing on a handful of bilingual (Persian and Turkish) and trilingual (Persian, Arabic and Turkish) poems from 17^th- and 18^th-century Iran, Csirkés suggests that that there were two main types of language ideologies in the Persianate Muslim world, which extended from the Ottoman Empire to India. Similar to western models, one type understood language as belonging to an ethnic, social, or political group; the other, different from western counterparts, considered language as part of the hierarchical fabric of the universe and as a means of classifying phenomena. Since Arabic and Persian—as part of the religious and cultural profile of urban literati—heavily informed vernacular languages and literatures like Turkish, multilingual litterateurs considered languages to have porous boundaries, connected by a shared religious and literary vocabulary, rhetorical toolkit, and esoteric meaning.

Paul Babinski’s paper “A Shared Tradition: Reading Islamic Literary Commentaries in Orientalist Europe” discusses the uses of Islamic literary commentaries in orientalist translations from Persian and Arabic in Western Europe from the early seventeenth to the early eighteenth century. Babinski challenges scholarly narratives that present such early orientalist translations within their respective national literatures and as part of a moment of cultural openness fostered across a transnational network of humanist scholarship. He argues that these translations should be read in a different light: as the reception of a corpus of Persian, Turkish and Arabic literary commentaries in continuity with an earlier Islamic tradition. He demonstrates that for the orientalists who discovered them, often with the help of their Ottoman teachers, these commentaries served multiple functions: as a resource for advanced language instruction, a foundation for translation, and a repository of philological information. Charting these practices over time offers a view of the shifting priorities of orientalist scholarship, a development that culminated in the eighteenth century in an acrimonious debate between two prominent Arabists about the uses of commentaries that was later mythologized as a rupture in the emergence of modern oriental philology.

Nigel Smith’s paper, “Mrauk U, Arakan: Early Modern Encounter Zone,” discusses the transnational “global Renaissance,” focusing on Mrauk U, a kingdom that dominated what is today Rakhine State in Myanmar, the east of the Bay of Bengal, and parts of Bangladesh. Smith analyzes what western visitors and residents knew about literary activities at the multilingual (Sanskrit, Awadhi, Persian, and Bengali) and highly cosmopolitan court of Mrauk U, relying on early modern sources such as the Dagregister of the Dutch emissary Jacobus Hensbroeck (c. 1650). He reconstructs this reception by drawing attention to a Portuguese translation of the Mahabharata produced in India with marginal comments showing how to use its narratives in sermons, to the visit to Mrauk U by the important collector and transmitter of indigenous manuscripts, Pieter Willemsz Floris of Elbing, as well as to records of Europeans being required to be familiar with local culture when they attended the court of Mrauk U, where literature was frequently discussed.

Sandra García Gutiérrez’s paper, “The Flight of Talmir-Alisca: ‘La bohemiana de Trebisonda: o un sequin por cabeza de cristiano’ (1831) by Agustín Pérez Zaragoza,” centers on a Spanish Gothic story. She argues that Gothic serves in the story as an aesthetic that highlights the dangers that threaten women, while the Orientalism of the narrative represents how the author projects the concerns, thoughts, and behaviors of bourgeois Spanish society on Eastern Europe and Asia. Delving into the debauchery of the heroine Talmir that takes her to a journey through Europe and Asia and ends in tragedy, Gutiérrez reads the story as a reaction to marriage policies in Spain during the Enlightenment and as a reaction to how old and new ideas fluctuated during the absolutist monarchy of Ferdinand VII in the so-called Ominous Decade (1823-1833), with a direct consequence for the image of Spain.