What is the place of poetry in world literature? World literature has been defined as writing as gains in translation, but this model excludes poetry tied to the language in which it is written. Poetry has also been said to be untranslatable, but this opposing model can’t account for the aspects of poetry that survive and even thrive in translation. Exploring lyrics in Persian, German, Latin, French, and code-switching English, this chapter tests the “gains-in-translation” and “untranslatability” models against poetry’s language-specific and language-crossing affordances. Proposing a more nuanced position that allows for both losses and gains, it argues that world literature can only be adequate to poetry if it’s attentive to comparative literary specificity.

This chapter examines the relationship between political and Sufi elites. Sufis relied on the financial support of Seljuq and Mongol officials, as is amply demonstrated by the correspondence of Jalal al-Din Rumi. It is often suggested that such support is rooted in practical advances for political elites such as legitimacy through association with Sufi saints. I argue that in fact the theology of Sufism itself could provide crucial legitimation to political elites, which helps explain its popularity. In the writings of Sultan Walad, Rumi’s son, we find the theory that the ruler can himself be not just a wali, one of God’s friends, as the saints were known, but even the qutb, the leader of the Sufi hierarchy, but will only be recognised as such by a Sufi saint, forming the ideological groundwork for this alliance. However, not all Sufis were automatically aligned with the status quo, and some sought temporal power for themselves; this chapter also takes up the story of the descendants of the rebel saint Baba Ilyas, and shows that despite his failure to seize secular power, his descendants succeeded in establishing a cult around his shrine that was sufficiently powerful to impress the Ottomans in the fifteenth century.