Translating the Controversial: Turkish Translations of Sexual Norms in the Persian Mirror for Princes Qābūsnāma

Bockholt, Philip

Abstract

The Qābūsnāma is a well-known mirror for princes dating back to the Ziyārid ruler Kay Kāvūs, who ruled over a principality of regional importance on the south-east coast of the Caspian Sea in the mid-eleventh century. The Qābūsnāma, written for his son Gīlānshāh, deals with statesmanlike affairs, commercial transactions or family and friendly obligations and became one of the first works of the genre Andarznāme, Pandnāme or Naṣīḥatnāme in Persian. It was translated into Old Anatolian Turkish several times in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. With a particular focus on Chapter 15 of the work, which deals with bodily pleasures, and on the various statements made by the translators in their engagement with Kay Kāvūs’ sayings about inclinations towards men and women, the article examines the different forms that the Qābūsnāma took in its journey from Iran to Anatolia during the beylik and Ottoman periods, and whose actors were involved in the translation processes.