The Book of Travels. Hannā Diyāb
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Abū Shahlā Jubrān (Beirut: Manshūrāt al-Jamal, 2017).
This edition, the readings and annotations of which rely heavily on the published French translation (see below), follows a diplomatic standard—that is, it reproduces the original handwritten text as closely as possible. It does, however, normalize some spellings such as the tāʾ marbūṭah and omits some of the hyper-corrective hamzahs. There are some typographical errors and omissions: misreading tajrīd for tajribeh, for example, and sometimes leaving out the colloquial bi- prefix of imperfect verb forms. Some terms, rarely attested in dictionaries, are not annotated.
Previous Translations
French translation: Hanna Dyâb, D’Alep à Paris. Les pérégrinations d’un jeune syrien au temps de Louis XIV. Récit traduit de l’arabe (Syrie) et annoté par Paule Fahmé-Thiéry, Bernard Heyberger et Jérôme Lentin (Paris: Actes Sud, 2015).
This meticulous rendering, on the basis of Lentin’s linguistic study of the text, is the result of collaboration by three expert scholars. The extensive apparatus contains linguistic explanations and historical remarks on the early-modern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Christianities as well as original biographical material on individuals mentioned in the text. Both the introduction and the note on the language are detailed but accessible. The translation is often literal, but captures the liveliness of the original. We record in the English endnotes those places where our translation adopts a different interpretation of the original.
German translation: Hannā Diyāb, Von Aleppo nach Paris: Die Reise eines jungen Syrers bis an den Hof Ludwigs XIV. Translated by Gennaro Ghirardelli (Berlin: Die andere Bibliothek, 2016).
This is based on the French translation, the introductions of which it reproduces. It emends the French rendering in a few places. The wording of the translation is occasionally archaic.
English translation: Hannâ Diyâb, The Man Who Wrote Aladdin. Translated by Paul Lunde (Edinburgh: Harding Simpole, 2020).
This book was published four years after the death of the translator, who apparently never planned to publish it.55 Caroline Stone added an introduction to the volume with a focus on historical keywords. The English text, which is structured into subchapters and indented secondary narratives, is followed by an appendix containing historical information.
This Edition
Our edition aims to preserve most of the distinctive features of Diyāb’s Middle Arabic text. Though often repetitive and marked by oddities carried over from oral performance, The Book of Travels is remarkably rich in its vocabulary, orthography, and linguistic variety, though the manuscript is generally unvocalized. Evidently, the author was familiar with the style of the coffeehouse narrator as well as with the conventions for telling stories in written form (see the introduction to the translation).56
Our paragraphing largely follows the structure suggested by the manuscript text, though we have added some additional breaks for the sake of readability, notably where there is a change of speaker (for example, from the general first-person narrator to the speech of a character in the text, creating an embedded narrative), and when a transitional word such as اخيرًا or حيندٍ, or the frequently used formula فنرجع الى ما كنا في سدده indicates a break in the narration.
In dealing with the linguistic particularities of the text, we have relied on the studies of Jérôme Lentin, Elie Kallas, and Paule Fahmé-Thiéry.57 Also useful were Adolf Wahrmund’s Handwörterbuch der neu-arabischen und deutschen Sprache, which contains a whole range of vocabulary of Turkish origin and from Arab-Christian contexts, and Adrien Barthélemy’s Dictionnaire arabe-français, which is especially valuable for its coverage of historical Levantine Arabic.58 In cases where water stains and marks made by the author have left some passages difficult to decipher, we have often benefited from the reconstructions in the French translation and the previous Arabic edition.
The footnotes to the Arabic record marginal additions as well as a few significant passages crossed out in the manuscript or added to the borders of the page. They also note cases where we have amended rare scribal peculiarities, such as the omission or addition of consonants.
The Book of Travels is one of many works composed in so-called Middle Arabic—that is, in a written form that diverges from the standard fuṣḥā (“pure speech”).59 It is often imagined to be the result of a failed effort to use the formal literary register. In reality, however, it is a semi-standardized idiom that was used at least until the advent of print culture in the nineteenth century, and that probably appeared along with Arabic book culture a millennium earlier. It combines elements of the standard grammar and lexicon with elements impacted by or stemming from the Arabic dialect spoken by the given author or scribe. It also contains hypercorrection—that is, the introduction of features mistakenly believed to represent standard forms.60 Middle Arabic texts vary widely, with some containing only minor spelling variation and others diverging markedly from normative orthography and grammar. Diyāb’s work falls at the furthest end of the spectrum from standard Arabic. A description of some of the distinctive features of Diyāb’s text follows.61
In the realm of orthography and phonetics, final a may be written with an alif (ا), a dotted alif maqṣūrah (ي), a tāʾ marbūṭah (ة), or its undotted form, ه. Certain lexemes are contracted: For example, the verb قال with a personal suffix frequently loses its alif (if it has one) and is written as one word, as in قلي (for قال لي, “he said to me”) and قلنا (for قال لنا, “he said to us”). In other cases, verbs receive an additional alifdue to vocalization, as in spoken colloquial, including احكالي (for حكى لي, “he told me”) and اتفرج (for تفرج, “to look at”). Second- and third-person plural imperfect forms appear without -ūn and are frequently written with an alif wiqāyah as if they were subjunctive forms, e.g., بتعرفوا (“you know”).
The tāʾ marbūṭah is used interchangeably with tāʿ maftūḥah in construct, as in the Ottoman-Turkish loanword ıskele: اسكلت صيدا (“the port of Sidon”), and strikingly when tāʾ marbūṭah is used for the suffixes of third-person and occasionally first-person perfect verb forms, e.g., استقامة for استقامت (“stayed”). In several cases, a hamzah appears where standard orthography does not call for it, e.g., اباء (for أبى, “to refuse”), and sometimes فرنساء (“France”), among other names. As they are repeated several times, these must be hypercorrections rather than arbitrary additions.
Another feature specific to Middle Arabic is the partial or full interchangeability of dental sounds, which may be pronounced and spelled differently from the fuṣḥā standard. This interchangeability may be, but is not necessarily, the result of interference from colloquial. However, other deviations from fuṣḥā require writing an entirely different letter and are therefore more likely to reflect colloquial forms. For example, the letter ṣ (ص) is often replaced by z (ز), as in زغير (conforming to the Levantine pronunciation of صغير, “small”).
The characters p (پ) and ç (چ), used to write Ottoman Turkish, occur a few times in the text, e.g., الپاپا