Concurrent with the formation of Persian literature as an academic discipline in early twentieth-century Iran and Afghanistan, literary journals developed a novel poetic practice called eqterah (a test of poetic talent). The first time this practice appears in print appears to date back to 1918 when the journal Daneshkadeh featured a prose translation of a French-language fragment by Boileau and accompanied by a versified translation by Mohammad Taqi Bahar. Daneshkadeh asked readers to compose a poem that would capture the meaning of this fragment in Persian poetry. Literary journals used eqterah to create and connect with their reading community and establish adabiyat as a new discourse of literature entangled with communal identity. This talk examines two instances of this practice in the journals Ayandeh and Kabul, respectively published in Tehran and Kabul. It analyzes how Iranians and Afghans were engaged as co-conspirators in a shared literary project to nationalize Persian literature as their own.