The writing of modern non-Western literary history has been afflicted by two reactionary theories: the first, reactionary in its Eurocentric worldview and the second, reactionary in its nativism. The first proposes that non-Western literary modernity came about solely as a result of contact with Western culture. If a classical tradition existed in the non-Western language, it is assumed to have fallen into a state of decline until Western contact through colonialism. The second theory reacts to the first by denying Western influence and positing solely pre-modern, native origins for the modern form. Lost in either approach is an appreciation of intertextuality, hybridity, and the transmission of ideas. These two tendencies have, surprisingly, shared a commonality in their approach to the translation movement. The “traditionalists” denounce the translators as crude imitators of foreign culture, while the “modernists” celebrate the translators as enlightened thinkers who brought superior Western culture to the masses of the Third World. What these two attitudes share is the notion that these translators were simply attempting to copy an original text into their native language and in the process were “forced,” by the nature of the original text, to alter and adapt their language. A “nahda paradigm” has been identified and discussed in the context of Arabic literary and socio-cultural modernity. The year 1798 and the French invasion of Egypt is the paradigm’s center of gravity – these become code for a series of ruptures from the past and, in the literary realm, a series of linguistic, formalistic, stylistic, and thematic transformations in literary Arabic. A similar tendency apparent in Persian literary history has so far been unnamed, and its characteristics have gone without analysis and critique. If indeed there was a Persian literary/cultural nahda, around what mystical date does it orbit? In this paper we will first compare the prevailing views associated with the Arabic nahda paradigm and its Persian analogue, paying particular attention to the role they cast for the translation movement. We will then look at strategies employed by scholars attempting to challenge these enshrined views. A close reading of Hajji Baba of Isfahan will provide an example of how certain translations have become canonized even while their linguistic features as translated texts have been ignored and misread, and how an approach based on stylistics can provide the missing link between the modernist thesis of “Western influence” and the traditionalist thesis of autonomous literary development.