The Kashkul of Bahaʾ al-Din ʿAmili is a five-volume anthology which was compiled at the end of the sixteenth century. Its author, one of the famous emigres from the Jabal ʿAmil region in Lebanon to Iran, counted among the best-known writers of the Safavid period and as a reference-point for Shiʿi scholars in the centuries after his death. Consisting of many different extracts drawn from across the spectrum of textual production, the Kashkul is mostly dedicated to narrative prose and poetry in both Arabic and Persian, forming an archive of literary history. The poets featured range from Rudaki (d. 329/940-941), perhaps the earliest author of verse in New Persian to enjoy substantial courtly patronage, to ʿAmili’s contemporaries, including Malik Qummi (d. 1024/1615), who emigrated to the Deccan and became a leading panegyrist to the ʿAdilshahs of Bijapur. The bilingual aspect of the Kashkul also offers a pre-modern attempt at doing comparative literary history, speaking to ʿAmili’s ideas of how poetic texts in Arabic and Persian were connected. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the writer Ahmad b. Muhammad ʿAmili, another scholar whose family hailed from the Jabal ʿAmil region, made a full Persian translation of the Kashkul under the patronage of the Qutbshah Sultan ʿAbd Allah (d. 1083/1672), ruler of Hyderabad in the Deccan. Ahmad b. Muhammad ʿAmili expanded the corpus of Persian poetry quoted in the Kashkul, and also translated most of the Arabic texts that it contains. This translation and expansion of the Kashkul offers a window onto understanding how poetry in Persian, its historic and contemporary centers, the networks of writers who produced it, and the relationships between verse in Persian and Arabic, were seen from the perspective of multilingual Hyderabad, where Arabic, Persian, Dakani and Telugu all served as languages of high culture. This paper compares and contrasts Ahmad b. Muhammad ʿAmili’s edition of the Kashkul with Bahaʾ al-Din ʿAmili’s original, and argues that the Persian translation should be understood as an attempt to restate the locus of literary authority, and to re-conceive literary history for a cosmopolitan, multilingual audience. This text helps us to interrogate overly simplistic divisions of Persian literary history into regional styles and schools, instead offering the paradigm of a continuum, in which places and periods were linked through the circulation of people and texts.