Bo Utas, born May 26, 1938, in Höglunda, a village in

Jämtland Jämtland () is a historical provinces of Sweden, province () in the centre of Sweden in northern Europe. It borders Härjedalen and Medelpad to the south, Ångermanland to the east, Lapland, Sweden, Lapland to the north and Trøndelag and Norw ...

, Sweden, is a Swedish

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

, Iranologist and chess historian. He is

professor emeritus ''Emeritus/Emerita'' () is an honorary title granted to someone who retirement, retires from a position of distinction, most commonly an academic faculty position, but is allowed to continue using the previous title, as in "professor emeritus". ...

Iranian languages The Iranian languages, also called the Iranic languages, are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family that are spoken natively by the Iranian peoples, predominantly in the Iranian Plateau. The Iranian langu ...

Uppsala University Uppsala University (UU) () is a public university, public research university in Uppsala, Sweden. Founded in 1477, it is the List of universities in Sweden, oldest university in Sweden and the Nordic countries still in operation. Initially fou ...

, and a scholar on Persian

historical linguistics Historical linguistics, also known as diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of how languages change over time. It seeks to understand the nature and causes of linguistic change and to trace the evolution of languages. Historical li ...

and classical

Persian literature Persian literature comprises oral compositions and written texts in the Persian language and is one of the world's oldest literatures. It spans over two-and-a-half millennia. Its sources have been within Greater Iran including present-day ...

Career

Bo Utas got acquainted with Persian literature in secondary school. In 1959, he started to study Persian at Uppsala University for his mentor Henrik Samuel Nyberg and defended his PhD thesis in 1973. His thesis is a

critical edition Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants, or different versions, of either manuscripts (mss) or of printed books. Such texts may range i ...

of the

Sufi Sufism ( or ) is a mysticism, mystic body of religious practice found within Islam which is characterized by a focus on Islamic Tazkiyah, purification, spirituality, ritualism, and Asceticism#Islam, asceticism. Practitioners of Sufism are r ...

masnavi The ''Masnavi'', or ''Masnavi-ye-Ma'navi'' (, DIN 31635, DMG: ''Mas̲navī-e maʻnavī''), also written ''Mathnawi'', or ''Mathnavi'', is an extensive poem written in Persian language, Persian by Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi, also known as Rumi. I ...

'' poem ''Tariq to-tahqiq'' which has been ascribed to Hakim Sanai of Ghazna. Utas travelled extensively in

Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) and also known as Persia, is a country in West Asia. It borders Iraq to the west, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia to the northwest, the Caspian Sea to the north, Turkmenistan to the nort ...

and

Afghanistan Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. It is bordered by Pakistan to the Durand Line, east and south, Iran to the Afghanistan–Iran borde ...

in the 1960s and 1970s. From 1988 he became the first professor in Iranian languages at Uppsala University, a chair that he held until he retired in 2003. Under his supervision, no less than eight PhD candidates defended their theses successfully. Bo Utas is a member of several learned societies, including the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters, Societas Iranologica Europaea, and the Royal Society for the Humanities in Uppsala. He was the first secretary of the Societas Iranologica Europaea. Bo Utas knows several languages, including

Avestan Avestan ( ) is the liturgical language of Zoroastrianism. It belongs to the Iranian languages, Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family and was First language, originally spoken during the Avestan period, Old ...

Old Persian Old Persian is one of two directly attested Old Iranian languages (the other being Avestan) and is the ancestor of Middle Persian (the language of the Sasanian Empire). Like other Old Iranian languages, it was known to its native speakers as (I ...

Middle Persian Middle Persian, also known by its endonym Pārsīk or Pārsīg ( Inscriptional Pahlavi script: , Manichaean script: , Avestan script: ) in its later form, is a Western Middle Iranian language which became the literary language of the Sasania ...

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; stem form ; nominal singular , ,) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in northwest South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cultural ...

, Chinese,

Russian Russian(s) may refer to: *Russians (), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *A citizen of Russia *Russian language, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages *''The Russians'', a b ...

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

, Turkish,

Hebrew Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...

and

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

. A full list of his publications shows his broad and diverse scholarship on

and

New Persian New Persian (), also known as Modern Persian () is the current stage of the Persian language spoken since the 8th to 9th centuries until now in Greater Iran and surroundings. It is conventionally divided into three stages: Early New Persian (8th ...

language and literature, manuscript tradition and text edition, culture and religion in

Greater Iran Greater Iran or Greater Persia ( ), also called the Iranosphere or the Persosphere, is an expression that denotes a wide socio-cultural region comprising parts of West Asia, the South Caucasus, Central Asia, South Asia, and East Asia (specifica ...

. Bo Utas has translated several Persian classical and modern literary works into Swedish, including the ''Buf-e kur'' (Blind Owl) by Sadeq Hedayat. Bo Utas collected essays on and translations of Persian literature in Swedish has been published with the title ''Persiska litteraturen: Essäer och översättningar'' and edited by his pupil

Ashk Dahlén Ashk Peter Dahlén (born 3 June 1972 in Tafresh, Iran) is a Swedish scholar, linguist, Iranologist, translator, and associate professor ( docent) in Persian language at Uppsala University. He is quadrilingual in Swedish, Persian, English la ...

.Bo Utas, ''Persiska litteraturen: Essäer och översättningar'', 2 volymer, Stockholm: Molin och Sorgenfrei, 2011.

Selected publications (in English)

*The Jewish-Persian fragment from Dandan-Uiliq, ''Orientalia Suecana 17'', Uppsala, 1968. * ''Tariq ut-tahqiq. A Sufi Mathnavi ascribed to Hakim Sana’i of Ghazna and probably composed by Ahmad b. al-Hasan b. Muhammad an-Naxcavani''. A critical edition, with a history of the text and a commentary, Lund: Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies, 1973. *On the composition of the Ayyatkar i Zareran, ''Monumentum H.S. Nyberg II'', (= Acta Iranica, 5), Tehran-Liège 1975. * ''A Persian Sufi poem: vocabulary and terminology. Concordance, frequency word-list, statistical survey, Arabic loan-words and Sufi-religious terminology in Tariq ut-tahqiq (A.H. 744)'', London-Malmö: Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies, 1978. * ''Women in Islamic societies: social attitudes and historical perspectives'', London-Malmö: Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies, 1983. * Verbal ideograms in the Frahang i Pahlavik, ''Middle Iranian Studies = Orientalia Lovanensia Analecta'', Skalmowski-van Tongerloo (eds.), 16, Leuven 1984. * Jang u asti: War and peace in Iran, in E. Kahrs (ed.), ''Kalyanamitraraganam. Essays in honour of Nils Simonsson'', Oslo (The Institute for Comparative research in human culture) 1986. * ''Frahang i Pahlavik, edited with transliteration, transcription and commentary from the posthumous papers of Henrik Samuel Nyberg'', with the collaboration of Christopher Toll, Wiesbaden 1988. * The Munajat or Ilahi-namah of ’Abdu’llah Ansari, ''Manuscripts of the Middle East'', Leiden, 1988. * New Persian as an interethnic medium, ''Ethnicity, minorities and cultural encounters'', I. Svanberg (ed.), Uppsala 1991. * Arabic and Iranian elements in New Persian prosody, Johanson, L. & Utas, B. (eds.), ''Arabic prosody and its applications in Muslim poetry'', Stockholm: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, 1994. * ''Traces of evidentiality in Classical New Persian, Evidentials: Turkic, Iranian and neighbouring languages'', Johanson, L. & Utas, B. (eds.), Berlin & New York, 2000. *

Notes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Utas, Bo Swedish male writers Swedish Iranologists Linguists from Sweden Chess historians Linguists of Persian People from Ragunda Municipality Uppsala University alumni 1938 births Living people