Portraying multilingualism in Ottoman literary culture: Qasidat al-burdah translations in ornamented manuscripts

One widely acknowledged aspect of Ottoman Turkish is its incorporation of three languages: Turkish, Arabic, and Persian. Ottoman literary culture is therefore inherently multilingual, at least trilingual, reflecting the linguistic diversity of the Ottoman Empire along with other languages spoken, including Bosnian, Kurdish, Armenian, Greek, etc. In this paper, I argue that the Ottoman literati leveraged multilingualism as an aesthetic tool. To illustrate this point, I will analyse two ornately designed manuscripts of the Qaṣīdat al-burdah (The Poem of the Mantle), highlighting the aesthetic role of multilingualism. These manuscripts, adorned with geometric patterns, underscore the visual and aesthetic importance of manuscript and calligraphic art, but also the aesthetic value of proliferating translations in multilingual Ottoman society.