Translating the Image: Art, Science and Global Imagination in the first Islamic Description of the New World (Tarih-i Hind-i Garbī / History of the West Indies), 16th-20th Centuries

America-Islamica investigates a little-known and unstudied corpus of illustrated and painted books known as The Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi (History of the West Indies) or the New Hadith, and in Persian translation as the Tarjuma-yi tā’rikh-i yangī dunyā (Translation of the History of the New World). The first non-indigenous and non-European history of the Americas, this account of the Spanish conquest and colonization was composed in Ottoman Turkish in Istanbul based on Italian translations of Spanish sources in the 1580s. Manifesting rich layers of multidirectional translation, the work’s journeys, crossings, and circulations in text and image, geographically and temporally—from Spanish and Italian to Ottoman Turkish, Persian and French, from the Americas to Spain, Italy and the Ottoman capital to Iran and India, and more recently to Europe and the U.S., and from manuscript to printed editions in form that span three centuries—speak to the esteem, admiration, wonder, and appeal it exuded. Inherently interdisciplinary, this study will introduce the work to a wider contemporary audience. An in-depth analysis of its text and image in various formats, languages and canons, will enrich our understanding of early modern travel and colonization from the perspective of the non-colonizers, who were acutely curious and interested in knowing about the confines of the earth, and in competing for its domination.