Translation, Annotation, and Critical Introduction to Rashid al-Din Watwat’s Magic Gardens: On the Nuances of Poetry (Watwat 1984)
In Berlin, Gould will continue her work on classical Persian and Arabic rhetorical and literary-theoretical traditions. Her current project involves translating and introducing to a comparative literary readership medieval Persian treatises on Islamic rhetoric (‘ilm al-balagha). Additionally, Gould will document how literary theorists from the medieval Persianate world revised Arabic textual traditions to suit the new exigencies of Persianate literary culture. Though primarily concerned with Persian and medieval Islamic literary cultures, Gould also translates from Georgian and Russian literature, and is interested in the comparative study of literary knowledge in European intellectual history, with a particular emphasis on Giambattista Vico’s project to create a new form of disciplinary knowledge by combining philosophy and philology. This second project is provisionally entitled “The Consequences of Contingency in Philology’s Intellectual History”.