Approximation and Interleaving

Abstract

This article examines instances of multilingual literary comparison practiced by critics in late medieval Iran and argues that the methods of these premodern comparatists can help scholars of World Literature today to connect texts across languages and temporalities. The sources used for this inquiry are three bilingual anthologies compiled between the turn of the fourteenth century and the late sixteenth century, which intermix—and create dialogues between—Arabic and Persian poems. The modes of thinking that are recovered here may be representative of larger theoretical and pedagogical paradigms that were current in medieval Iran, speaking as they do to concerns raised in other premodern writing in both Arabic and Persian, including texts on metapoesis and doxography. I suggest that late medieval understandings of multilingual comparison hinge on the idea of “approximation” (muqāraba), which preserves the alterity of literatures while allowing them to be brought into conversation with one another through the act of “interleaving” (insilāk). The result is an autochthonous form of multilingual comparison, predating modern European empiricism, which can nevertheless speak to the concerns of contemporary comparative method.