![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author would like to extend a warm thank you to Rabbi Scott Aaron and to Rabbi James Ponet for their insights and time. The author would also like to thank Jill and Peter Braasch.
Notes
1. Rainer Schulte, “What is Translation?” Translation Review 83 (2012), 1.
2. Walter Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 77.
3. In the nineteenth century, most American universities had robust Latin and Greek requirements in their curricula.
4. In Empire, Hardt and Negri indicate that western capitalism does not just wash over the non-capitalist world but that it absorbs it organically by considering the varied economic modalities of non-capitalist societies. Immanuel Wallerstein also distances himself from the “cultural homogeneity” thesis in World-Systems Theory. Also, the argument that globalization categorically homogenizes underestimates the increasing multipolarity of the world and the increasing spaces of difference, dissent, and defiance.
5. Neil Lazarus, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool, UK: University of Liverpool Press, 2015), 27.
6. I put “original” in “original text” in quotes to connote my rejection of the very notion. “Source” text is the preferred term of most people who theorize and practice translation, myself included.
7. I do not mean to categorically invalidate nationalisms and certainly recognize that many have had restorative functions for those who have fought for self-determination and self-articulation.
8. Besides being a sacred text, the Qur’an is regarded as a monumental work of Arabic poetry.
9. The literal meaning of Qur’an is “recitation.”
10. Qur’an 16:103: “We know very well that they say, ‘It is a man who teaches him,’ but the tongue of the person they maliciously allude to is incapable of expression, while this revelation is in clear Arabic.” 26:193-195: “The Trustworthy Spirit brought it down to your heart, so that you could bring warning in a clear Arabic tongue.” 12:2: “We have sent it down as an Arabic Qur’an so that you may understand.” 41:2: “A revelation from the Lord of Mercy, the Giver of Mercy; a Scripture whose verses are made clear as a Qur’an in Arabic for people who understand, giving good news and warning.” 42.7: “So we have revealed an Arabic Qur’an to you, in order that you may warn the capital city and all who live nearby.” *This last verse suggests that Mohammad had no reason to believe that Islam would spread beyond the frontiers of the Arabic-speaking world, which at the time was mainly Arabia. **I use M. A. S. Abel Haleem’s translation of the Qur’an for citations in this article.
11. Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013), 253.
12. Apter, Against World Literature, 254.
13. Benedict Anderson, too, speaks extensively about “sacred” languages—Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic—in Imagined Communities, without really explicating whether the idea is an institutional practice or if it comes from religious texts.
14. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Garden of Truth: The Vision of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition (New York: Harper One, 2007), 14.
15. In Al-Bukhari III, cited in A. L. Tabawi, “Is the Qur’an Translatable?” The Muslim World 52 (1962), 1–16.
16. Mishnah (Tractate Sotha), trans. Jacob Neusner (Yale University Press, 1988), 457.
17. This sensibility is also celebrated by Amos Oz, as expressed in his talk at Monash University (Australia) Centre for Jewish Civilisation in August 2011.
18. George Steiner, “Our Homeland, the Text,” Salmagundi (1985): 19.
19. Steiner, “Our Homeland, the Text,” 17.
20. 1001 Arabian Nights is an interesting text because it has neither a single author nor an “original language.” The stories were amassed from Persian, Arabic, Hindi, Turkish, and perhaps even Ethiopian (Abyssinian) sources, and across several centuries.
21. Matthew Reynolds, The Poetry of Translation: From Chaucer and Petrarch to Homer and Logue (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011).
22. Borges also made crucial statements about translation in his essays “The Homeric Versions” and “The Translators of the 1001 Nights.”
23. Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” 69.
24. Efrain Kristal, The Invisible Work: Borges and Translation (Vanderbilt University Press, 2002), 33.
25. Borges, “The Homeric Versions.”
26. See Françoise Massardier-Kenney’s essay “Towards a Rethinking of Retranslation.” In Translation Review 92.1 (2015), 73–85.
27. Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” 73.
28. Here I am thinking of the organic and easy Persian-to-English translation of Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl (1937) by D. P Costello.
29. Johann von Goethe, “Translation,” in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, ed. John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte (University of Chicago Press, 1992), 61. Emphases mine.
30. Joshua Cohen and Peter Cole, “The Art of Translation No. 5,” Paris Review (2015), 148–176.
31. Lawrence Venuti, Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (London: Routledge, 1998), 10. Inspired, no doubt, by Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the novel form’s heteroglossia and polyphony as developed in The Dialogic Imagination.
32. “World Anglophone literatures” is an increasingly common job descriptor for literature professorships in the MLA job list, the Chronicle of Higher Education, etc.
33. Simon Gikandi, “Provincializing English,” PMLA 124, no. 1 (2014), 11.
34. Please see Mario Saraceni’s World Englishes: A Critical Analysis for a thorough discussion of this matter.
35. David Damrosch, “World Literature in a Postcanonical, Hypercanonical Age,” in Comparative Literature in the Age of Globalization, ed. Haun Saussy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 48.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Emad Mirmotahari
Emad Mirmotahari is associate professor of World and Postcolonial Literature at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA. He received his doctorate in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. His main areas of teaching and research are African fiction, fiction from throughout the African diaspora, as well as narratives of immigration and exile. He is also interested in translation theory.