Impostures. al-Ḥarīrī
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the Impostures as a specifically Oriental text would indeed have to explain all the cultural references, since al-Ḥarīrī, unlike Homer or Shakespeare, is culturally alien to German readers. But Rückert refuses to produce an academic treatise. Instead, he says, he decided to focus on the poetic elements: the “incessant word- and sound-play, the rhymed prose, the over-the-top images, and the hairsplitting, overwrought expressions.” The result, he says, is not a translation but a recasting (Nachbilding) of the Impostures. 52
True to his word, Rückert strives to replace al-Ḥarīrī’s special effects with equally elaborate tricks in German. To translate the palindromes, for example, he uses Doppelreim, a form where the ultimate and the penultimate stressed syllables in each line rhyme with their respective counterparts in successive lines. 53 Yet even Rückert could not come up with an equivalent for everything. Like al-Ḥarīzī before him, he throws up his hands at the dotted and undotted epistle. The German text faithfully reports that the challenge is to avoid certain letters, but not which ones or why; and, as far as I can tell, the German epistle obeys no constraint. 54 In other cases, the difficulty proved so insuperable that entire episodes had to be dropped. And Imposture 20 he appears to have omitted simply because of its sexual content. As a result of these avoidances and omissions, his translation contains only forty-three Impostures.
With Rückert’s German on his desk, Theodore Preston, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, produced the first English translation to acknowledge the formal properties of the Impostures. His 1850 rendering uses “a species of composition which occupies a middle place between prose and verse,” not rhyming, but “arranged as far as possible in evenly balanced periods.” But the more complex special effects—the puns, palindromes, and so forth—presented “almost insuperable obstacles,” leading him to omit three-fifths of the text. 55 And the copious notes betray his failure to heed Rückert’s warning that any translation that treats the Impostures as a text to be parsed for information about something else (the manners and customs of the Orient, for example) will produce an academic treatise rather than a work of art.
After Preston there was one more nineteenth-century attempt to put the Impostures into English. The initiative was that of Thomas Chenery, a Barbados-born polyglot who resigned from a position at Oxford to assume editorship of The Times of London. 56 Following de Sacy’s advice, he decided to treat the Impostures as a teaching text. 57 In 1866, he published a translation of the first twenty-six episodes, stating flatly that he had made “no attempt to imitate the plays on words, or the rhyme of the original” but rather composed “a literal prose rendering, intended primarily to help the student in Arabic.” 58 After Chenery’s untimely death in 1884, his work was carried on by the German-born Orientalist Francis Joseph Steingass, whose rendition of the remaining episodes appeared in 1898. In a preface, F. F. Arbuthnot tells us that Steingass “completed his portion of the work under great physical difficulties. . . . For some part of the time he was actually blind.” 59 Like his predecessor’s, Steingass’s rendering is strictly lexical. And, like Preston, both Chenery and Steingass append page after page of annotation, as if still laboring under the conviction that if the Impostures could not be translated they could at least be explained.
Whatever the merits of the lexical approach, it must be admitted that it has contributed nothing to making the Impostures part of Anglophone literary culture. Outside the narrow confines of medieval literary scholarship, I have never seen a reference in English to any of these translations, nor any other evidence that nonspecialists have heard of al-Ḥarīrī or, for that matter, of al-Hamadhānī (whose Impostures were translated, also lexically, by Prendergast in 1915), or of anything called a maqāmah.
In Russian, the situation is quite different: the Impostures exists as a full-fledged literary text. This is the result of work by Anna Arkadievna Iskoz-Dolinina (d. 2017) and Valentin Michaelovich Borisov (d. 1985), whose partial translation appeared in 1978, followed by a complete translation, with Valeria Kirpichenko (d. 2015), in 1987. 60 Like al-Ḥarīzī and Rückert, the translators render poetry as poetry and rhymed prose as rhymed prose. The latter, they say, can work in Russian, since Russian prose, like Arabic, can be made rhythmic by repeated sounds and parallel grammatical forms. Arguing, however, that too close an imitation of the Arabic form would result in unreadability, they unpack al-Ḥarīrī’s dense conceits and let his clauses go on longer than they do in Arabic before ending them with a rhyme word. 61 The result is a distinctively patterned yet still readable text—one that became a Russian bestseller and won, along with Dolinina’s translation of al-Hamadhānī, a major Saudi translation award in 2012. 62
As far as I know, the only other languages in which complete translations exist are Ottoman and modern Turkish, French, and Chinese. 63 The Ottoman translations include four complete and three partial renderings. Of these, the only one I have been able to look at is the partial translation published by Hâşim Veli in 1908 or 1909. It is intricately patterned, full of lightly rhythmical sentences and Arabic-style prose rhyme (Kaplan, “Roma Sefâreti Imami Hâşim Velî’nin Makâmât-i Harîrî Tercümesi,” 219–21). There is also a modern Turkish translation by Sabri Sevsevil (Kiliç, “Makamat”). The French translation, by René Khawam (d. 2004), appeared under the title Le Livre des malins (The Book of Rascals) in 1992. Like the English of Chenery and Steingass, it acknowledges the formal properties of al-Ḥarīrī’s work without actually trying to duplicate them. The prose is neither rhymed nor marked in any other way, and the verse is simply prose formatted as verse. Similarly, the special effects are noted but not imitated. In Imposture 16, for example, Khawam has al-Ḥārith explain the palindrome game (which he does incorrectly) but then translates all the Arabic palindromes literally into French, resulting, obviously, in phrases that are not reversible. 64 By contrast, the French translation of al-Hamadhānī’s Impostures, published by Philippe Vigreux in 2012, does a masterful job of reproducing both the rhythm and the rhyme. 65
The Chinese translation, by Wang Dexin, appeared between 2010 and 2017. It is partially rhymed and does not replicate all the special effects. Imposture 17, for example, includes a passage that can be read backward as well as forward. In its Chinese rendition, the passage is monorhymed but not reversible. 66
For a text that is supposedly untranslatable, al-Ḥarīrī’s Impostures has been translated many times. 67 At least four of those translations have succeeded in carrying over many of the original’s distinctive formal features. The more daring renditions have also been the most successful: as far as I can judge, the Hebrew, German, and Russian Impostures, at least, have had a good deal more resonance in those languages than the timid French and English ones have had in theirs. So, if it is worth translating al-Ḥarīrī again, there is no point in producing another literal version. Instead, any new rendering should take its cue from