Beyond the Travel Narrative: Poesis, the Comparative and Global Literature

Nigel Smith (Princeton University)

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We might compare anything we choose to compare, inevitably and fundamentally part of cognition, of making sense of things. After all, analogy is central to Sir Francis Bacon’s theory of knowledge making. I’ve sought some limit to such openness by looking at encounters between people from very different cultures, usually a great geographical distance apart. The question is how did they compare each other? What shape did their words take when they did so in these circumstances? I’m writing a history of global early modern literature, in which I move beyond the generic and information constraints of the travel narrative (in this period usually but not always written by traveling Europeans). To this end, I explore the instrumental use of comparison in the past.

The interaction of such people produced a cross-cultural human awareness, a cross-faith appreciation of sacred texts, and a series of works of literature that presumed trans-ethnic and global relevance. I began to see that in some urban centers, groups of heterodox lay figures produced cross-cultural literary pictures of the entire world against the grain of the orthodoxies that prevailed. I’ve been looking at the poesis that occurs when the encounter is put into words. The history of such encounters is littered with extraordinary poetry, in which a trauma of both connection and disconnection is elaborated. There are of course unbalanced power relations, involving subjection and oppression, but also resistance, bonding, desire and understanding.

I’ll use two examples. First, the end of the convivencia and the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from the Iberian peninsular produced a diaspora with a literature of exile and of cultural fissure. Ibrahim Taybili, originally from Toledo, produced in the Tunisian village of Testour in 1628 a long poem in Spanish against Christian theology but borrowing a poetic form from Spanish CounterReformation verse, yet where the conceptual source was an Arabic treatise from Marrakesh written by Muḥammad Alguazir answering an invitation from Prince Maurits of Nassau, the Stadholder of the Dutch Republic, to state Islamic theological positions: a complete network of HispanoMoroccan-Dutch geopolitical and intercultural comparisons.

Second, in early modern south Asia a double cultural inheritance across so many different territories eventually led the heir apparent of the Mughal Empire, Dara Shikoh, to facilitate the translation of several texts from Hindu culture, some of the Upanishads, into Persian. This was an attempt to assimilate the Hindu system of belief into Islam since Dara Shikoh believed that the principles of Islamic belief were in Sanskrit literature. A few decades earlier, Portuguese priests translated sections of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana so that they could be used to build sermons that made sense to the local residents of Goa and the Malabar coast. Across 17th century South Asia epics of integration and also of resistance, as well as Bengali Sufism-inflected laments of subjection, and Dutch poetry concerned with personhood and politics in the Buddhist kingdom of Arakan, mingled and may be regarded as maps of fiercely contested cross-cultural politics. Here comparison was an instrument of calibration, and a means of acknowledging subjection, or the refusal of it.

Sponsored by the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford University.

(co-sponsored by Renaissances, the Department of English, and CMEMS).