Impostures - al-Ḥarīrī Library of Arabic Literature

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this means translating the verse as verse, and finding equivalents for the puns, riddles, and palindromes. Admittedly, such equivalents rarely have the same lexical meaning as their originals. But the lexical meaning, in these cases, is not the point. In Imposture 16, for example, al-Ḥārith is amazed that Abū Zayd can produce spontaneous palindromes; what they mean is barely relevant. That is why a translation like “Won ton? Not now!” (§16.5) works perfectly well even though the original says something else (which happens to be almost equally nonsensical). 68 Similarly, the alternation of dotted and undotted letters in §6.6 can be imitated by alternating words of French and words of Germanic origin. Fortunately, there are enough of both in English that the translation can say reasonably close to the lexical meaning of the original. 69

      But how does one deal with rhymed prose? In Arabic, Hebrew, and French, there are more rhymes to work with; in German and Russian, words in a sentence can be more freely rearranged to put a rhyming word at the end. But rhyme in English, being harder to produce, calls a great deal of attention to itself. In prose, moreover, it “introduces an air of flippancy,” as Preston put it. 70 The solution I have chosen begins with the recognition that rhyme in Arabic prose produces a kind of markedness, in the sense that linguists use the term. In the Impostures, al-Ḥarīrī’s Arabic is marked for literariness by (among other things) rhymed prose. To replicate it does not require rhyming one’s own prose; rather, it requires finding some other kind of markedness to use instead. In other words, the way out of the untranslatability trap is to give up on the idea that one has to make the English distinctive in the same way as the Arabic. Arabic has rhymed prose, which English (mostly) lacks. But English, unlike the kind of Arabic al-Ḥarīrī is using here, can (for example) be written in a bewildering variety of historical, literary, and global styles. 71 One way to show off English as al-Ḥarīrī meant to show off Arabic is to exploit these possibilities. 72

      In putting this principle into practice I have been guided by Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de style. 73 Published in 1947, it tells the same odd little story ninety-nine times, each time in a different style or under a different constraint: as told, for example, by a speaker who cannot make up his mind, by another who is furious about the situation, and by a third who speaks with an English accent. As a model for translating the Impostures, an approach like Queneau’s has several advantages. First, it compensates for the fact that in many cases al-Ḥarīrī’s story is barely developed. What the reader hopes to enjoy is the verbal performance, not the plot. Second, it encourages the reader to look forward to the next story: one never knows what the next constraint will be, or how it will be applied. While both Queneau and al-Ḥarīrī experiment with a variety of styles, there is nothing obviously systematic in their approach, and thus no way to guess what sort of idiom will come next. 74 Third, once the reader knows what the constraint is, he or she can enjoy watching the author’s contortions as he strives to apply it all the way through, a sensation similar to watching someone “walk a tightrope with fettered legs,” as John Dryden described the work of translation.

      In applying Queneau’s method to the Impostures, I have adopted three kinds of idiom. The first consists of imitations of particular authors, for example Chaucer (see Imposture 10), Frederick Douglass (34), and Margery Kempe (50). The second consists of global varieties of English, including the Singaporean creole Singlish (3), Scots (14), and Indian (15). And the third consists of specialized jargons, such as management speak (22), legalese (32), and thieves’ cant (42). In each case, the choice of idiom is based on some feature of al-Ḥarīrī’s original. For example, Imposture 4 contains a debate about friendship and reciprocity. Since these are the themes of John Lyly’s Euphues, I rendered the Imposture as a pastiche of Lyly. Similarly, Imposture 27 involves horse thieving and camel rustling, so I put it into the cowboy slang of the American West. In some cases (e.g., Impostures 19 and 23) I have combined two or more styles, based again on some feature of the original. 75 Similarly, the verses in each Imposture are modeled on those of particular English poets, chosen for their connection to the theme or the style of narration.

      As the reader will notice, the English verses often use a different idiom than the speech that precedes them. Although this shift in register may be jarring, it corresponds to a fact of life in al-Ḥarīrī’s world as well as our own. In many parts of the world today, people write in Standard English but use a local variety, if not another language, for informal communication. Pre-modern Arabic speakers, similarly, spoke local languages and dialects in the market and at home, but read and wrote in formal Arabic. So when, for example, a Jamaican-speaking Abū Zayd and his “Jafaican”-speaking son produce a formal English poem in §23.6, they are simply being bi- or multi-lingual, as many speakers of both Arabic and English have always been.

      Although the periods, authors, and jargons I have imitated come from a wide range of times and places, I have not made a systematic effort to represent every major variety of English. Nor have I attempted to represent “world literature”: I have excluded writers known in English only through translation, since imitating, say, Don Quixote, would for me mean imitating Edith Grossman, rather than Cervantes (who is, however, cited in Spanish in Imposture 16). Apart from the near impossibility of including examples of everything, the most obvious reason for limiting my English sources is that al-Ḥarīrī did not make a systematic effort to represent every major variety of Arabic. Beyond that, some early experiments made it clear that certain English idioms would not work. John Milton, for example, is a major English author, but he is a writer of epics, and there is nothing epic about the Impostures. Also, he is not funny, while al-Ḥarīrī often is. So no Milton, except in a few quotations.

      Another self-imposed constraint was chronological. When imitating authors, I discovered that the older they were, the better they sounded as stand-ins for al-Ḥarīrī’s characters. Like al-Ḥarīrī, English authors from Chaucer to Austen lived in a world lit by fire (or gas lamp); the general sameness of the props—horses, swords, inns, and so on—made it possible to put the Impostures into the language of these authors without too much distortion. But as we approach the world of factories, nylon stockings, and Gatling guns, only a few authors could be relied on to supply an idiom that would not be too jarring. These include Melville, who wrote deliberately archaic English; and Woolf, whose stream-of-consciousness technique can arguably be applied to any kind of content. As a practical matter, moreover, the closer we come to the present, the more likely it is that a poem, song, or novel is protected by copyright. Slang and jargon, fortunately, are open-source; and some modern varieties of English, despite being of recent origin, turned out to be extensive enough to supply equivalents for everything al-Ḥarīrī says without relying on modern props. These include Nigerian Pidgin, and—to my surprise—University of California, Los Angeles, slang, circa 2009. Unfortunately,

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