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Balkan Rubaiyat. The post-Ottoman polysystem between East and West

Balkan Rubaiyat. The post-Ottoman polysystem between East and West. R. Mueller.
Paper, online available at Academia.edu, June 2014.

In the Balkans, two important national thinkers produced their own Rubaiyat translations. In 1920, Safvet-Beg Bašağić (1870-1934), Oriental scholar and father of Muslim nationalism in Bosnia, published the first translation of the acclaimed Rubaiyat in a South Slavic language. In 1926, Theofan Stylian Noli (1882-1965), ordained Orthodox priest, national intellectual and once-Prime Minister of Albania, published the first Albanian-language version of the Rubaiyat. What are we to make of the temporal and geographical convergence of these individuals and their text, their parallel projects of making a behemoth of modern world literature—itself situated in an unstable place between East and West—available to audiences in a newly post-Ottoman sphere?

Khayyam who thinks and speaks Albanian

Khayyam who thinks and speaks Albanian. Abdulla Ballhysa; Mirela Shella.
Anglisticum Journal 2 (2013) 2, pp. 6-13

According to the Albanologist R. Jokli, Noli’s Rubaiyat stands as the best of the many translations of Fitzgerald’ version, but this translation, almost a recreation, can be considered his dearest, closest and most spiritual. Probably in none of his works did Noli express himself the way he did while translating (or better say culturally adapting into Albanian) Rubaiyat. This is the work in which he expressed his thoughts and his troubles, his vulcanic character, his creative courage, his tolerance, his humanity and his longing for freedom.