Paper Title: A Persian Text, an Ottoman Commentary, and the School of Arabic Grammarians: Ahmed Sudi and the Making of Ottoman Literary Criticism The subject of my paper is a sixteenth-century Ottoman literary commentary on the poetry collection of Hafez of Shiraz (d. ca. 1390), the most celebrated lyric poet of medieval Persia. The commentary is composed by the late sixteenth-century Ottoman scholar Ahmed Sudi (d. ca. 1600), who is renowned as a commentator on the works of the Persian poets Hafez and Sa'di (d. 1292). Completed in 1595, Sudi's commentary on Hafez is accepted as his most widely read and famous work. The commentary elucidates Hafez's text "according to the methods of the Arabic grammarians" and with an emphasis on the linguistic and grammatical aspects of his poems. In addition, Sudi translates every couplet of Hafez into simple Ottoman Turkish prose along with systematic annotations on the meaning and grammatical function of each lexical item. In my paper, first I will study and interpret Sudi's commentary within the idea of literary criticism and will focus on his method of analysis, interpretative strategies and exegetical tools. Second, based on my study of the commentary, I will explore and discuss the issue of Ottoman literary criticism and how it manifests itself in the context of Ottoman literary culture. This issue is significant in terms of understanding the ways in which Ottoman men of letters and their audiences studied, interpreted, discussed and theorized literary texts and issues. In this regard, Sudi's commentary stands as an important text for the study of Ottoman literary practices and their social and cultural contexts. Finally, I will argue that a critical study of Sudi's commentary from the perspective of literary criticism can make significant contributions towards understanding the ways in which literary criticism operated and was practiced within the Ottoman literary tradition.