John Curry (History) organized and presented in a roundtable aimed at publicizing and discussing the progress made on a translation project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities at the Middle East Studies Association in Denver, CO, on December 4. The project aims to publish an annotated translation of the Khataynameh of Sayyid `Ali Akbar, which was an account of the Iranian author's visit to the court of the Ming Dynasty in the early 1500s that was later presented to Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent in the Ottoman Empire in 1518. The roundtable included perspectives on the Persian-language original copies of the manuscripts, the Ottoman Turkish translations of the texts, and the East Asian language sources that can be used to corroborate or critique the narrative. Curry discussed the variant information that could be found from Ottoman Turkish translations of the Persian original text that date from the 16th through the 19th centuries as part of his participation in the roundtable.
