Impostures. al-Ḥarīrī
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of the famous Imposture of Baghdad: “Abû Zaid! Que Dieu te prête vie! D’ou viens-tu donc ainsi? Qui t’abrite? Quand es-tu arrivé? Viens chez moi prendre gîte” (Hamadhânî, La Parole est d’or, 55).
66.[Ḥarīrī], Mài kǎ mǔ cíhuà, 88. My knowledge of the Chinese translation is based entirely on generous personal communications from Prof. Ailin Qian, who is preparing her own rhymed translation of al-Hariri’s Impostures.
67.This may be the time to say a word about the title. To translate the word maqāmah, translators into English have used “assemblies,” which made sense in the nineteenth century but today suggests something that one does to furniture. Translators into French use séance, “session,” which grates on the ear since it involves sitting, not standing. With characteristic brilliance, al-Ḥarīzī uses maḥberet, “bringing together,” a term that invokes both a compilation of written material and a coming together of scholars. Rückert gave his recasting the title Verwandlungen, “Transformations,” which is quite apropos as a title though not as a rendering of the word maqāmah. The pre-modern Persian interlinears simply adopt the Arabic word, as do the modern translations into Russian and Chinese. “Impostures,” suggested to me by Shawkat M. Toorawa, conveys both the substance of Abū Zayd’s activities (the term appears in this sense in Zakharia, Abū Zayd, and Kennedy, Recognition) and the embodied character of the Arabic (standing being a kind of posture).
68.On the translation of nonsense see Steiner, After Babel, 196–206.
69.This approach is of course nothing new. When Gilbert Adair translated Georges Perec’s 1969 novel La disparition into English, he had to address the fact that the original is written entirely without the letter e. In French, avoiding e means not using many extremely common words, including une, le, les, de, et, and est (“a,” “the,” “of,” “and,” and “is”). The resulting contortions mean that the prose is constantly calling attention to itself. And this, it turns out, is the point: The missing e (pronounced in French identically with eux, “they”) is a metaphor for the Jews exterminated in the Holocaust, among them Perec’s mother, who died in Auschwitz. The book, in other words, is about a world without them (“sans e,” “sans eux,” pronounced the same way). This is why the constraint has to be replicated. And indeed, Adair’s English translation, entitled A Void, brilliantly eschews the letter in question. As I argue in the Introduction, al-Ḥarīrī’s use of constraint is equally thematic, and must therefore also be duplicated.
70.[Ḥarīrī], Makamat, tr. Preston, 2. For evidence, see the compulsively rhymed translation of Alḥarizi’s Taḥkemoni, by David Simha Segal, a work I otherwise admire, and which anticipates my approach here in several respects. The problem is visual, too. Unless one can consistently match Gertrude Stein’s or James Thurber’s uncanny mastery of prose rhythm, the rhyming clauses need to be set off by some kind of punctuation or special typography (as Rückert’s are, with dashes). If they are not, the reader does not know that a particular word is the first rhyme word and so may not notice the second. But special signaling generates its own problem: if the first rhyme word is marked, the reader will feel an irresistible urge to skip ahead to the second, and so lose track of the sense. Another way to make the rhyme scheme clear is to indent after each rhyme. But that would produce a text graphically identical with poetry, which sajʿ is not. One solution is that of Humphrey Davies, whose translations for the Library of Arabic Literature put the rhyme word in italics. His renditions work well because they use off rhymes as well as full rhymes, and because they do not insist on rhyming everywhere the originals do. It also helps that the rhyming passages are embedded in ordinary prose texts: in other words, the rhymed-prose effect does not need to be sustained across an entire work, as it would have to be with the Impostures.
71.Of course Arabic can be written in such a way as to bring out the historical, social, or geographical positionality of its speakers. But formal Arabic of the kind al-Ḥarīrī uses was constituted by the presumption that it was unvarying across time and space, and identical to the language of the Qurʾan. So, while the Impostures contains several passages in jargon (specifically the jargon of the Banū Sāsān, the underworld of beggars and thieves), it remains morphologically and syntactically standard at all times. In this respect my translation differs radically from the original. See Micallef, “Essential Achille Mizzi,” for the thought-provoking argument that literary translation should be understood as a carrying forward of purposes intended, if not fully realized, by the original work.
72.I owe this idea of showing off a language to Jeannie Miller. I am also grateful to Amy Richlin, whose translations of Plautus into a variety of modern idioms (e.g., Spanglish) showed me that this sort of thing could actually be done. See Rome and the Mysterious Orient: Three Plays by Plautus. In an important review, Vincent Hunink makes the point that in bringing “an ancient text very close to present day readers” Richlin “excludes very many such readers who do not share exactly the same cultural background,” in this case membership in “an educated, American, Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking audience of 2005 that is also thoroughly familiar with Hollywood movies and cartoons, TV and show business, and mass culture in general.” He adds: “Perhaps the status of English as the lingua franca all over the world is part of the problem here. Many readers will initially feel that an English translation is accessible to them, whereas in fact it may be meant for local and temporary use.” In the present translation I have used English idioms from a variety of times and places, in the hope that readers who find some episodes hard to follow will find others enjoyably familiar.
73.Raymond Queneau, Exercices de style. Paris: Gallimard, 1947. On constrained writing in general, see Mathews and Brotchie, Oulipo Compendium; and Hofstadter, Le ton beau de Marot.
74.I’m not sure that I agree with Kilito that “chaque séance . . . tourne autour d’un genre” (Séances, 244), though if the claim is true it would help make the case for my approach.
75.Translating into a particular historical or literary idiom is of course nothing new either. For examples and discussion see Steiner, After Babel, 352–71. Note, however, that the cases he discusses involve putting the entirety of the foreign work into a past register of the target language, not using many different registers in the course of a single translation. By using some of the “many voices, standard and nonstandard, that constitute English speech and writing,” I am hoping, among other things, “to interrogate the unified appearance that English is given” in naturalizing translations (Venuti, Translator’s Invisibility, 190; see also 235 and 273).
76.Kroll, “Translation, or Sinology,” 561.
77.I suspect that Kroll might describe my work as an example of what Dryden calls “imitation” (see “Translation, or Sinology,” 561). But an imitator “assumes the liberty not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion” (cited in Steiner, After Babel, 267–68), while my English Impostures, though cast in a variety of idioms, strives always to maintain the sense. (Forsaking the words, it seems to me, is inevitable.) Being put into non-Standard English