Event

In this presentation, Mahdi Ganjavi will historicize and explore the lesser known Henriyah Translation‌ (tarjumah hinrīyah), the earliest translation of the 1001 Nights into Persian. Patronized by Henry Russell, 2nd Baronet (1783–1852), British Resident in Hyderabad, Muhammad Baqir Khurasani Buzanjirdi (b.1770) finalized his translation in 1814 almost three decades before Abdul Latif Tasuji embarks on a similar project in Iran. Overlooked by historians of literature, Henriyah Translation‌ happens to be not only the earliest Persian translation, but one which is based on a significantly older family of Alf Layla Wa-Layla Arabic manuscripts. Through manuscript and archival study, and textual analysis of the two manuscripts available from this translation, this presentation will narrate an interregional story that remained hidden for two centuries about Nights in Persian.

Mahdi Ganjavi is a distinguished historian specializing in education, literature, print, and translation within the Middle East and a well-established editor of Persian manuscripts. Mahdi Ganjavi holds a PhD from the Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education at the University of Toronto. A former postdoctoral fellow at the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, he currently teaches at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the transnational history of books, print, translation, and education. In the last seven years, he edited and oversaw the publication of six little-known Persian novels from the 1920s-1940s. These novels shed light on the origins of historical and utopian fiction, science fiction and detective fiction in Persian. 

He has recently finalized the first critical edition of Henriyah Translation‌ (tarjumah hinrīyah), the earliest Persian translation of “One Thousand and One Nights” (Maniahonar, 2022), based on two manuscripts of this translation. One is included in the Sir Edward Henry Whinfield Collection, which was bequeathed to the Indian Institute, Oxford, in 1922, and later transferred to the Bodleian Library. The second copy of Henriyah Translation is held at Houghton Library, Harvard University (MS Persian 11). Its former owner had been Mary Pratt, who gifted it to Harvard College along with another 59 manuscripts of his brother, Herbert J. Pratt, back in 1915, a few months after the passing of Herbert.