Migrating Texts
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MARILYN BOOTH MARILYN Explores translation in the context of the late Ottoman Mediterranean world EDITED BY EDINBURGH STUDIES ON THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE Fénelon, Offenbach and the Iliad in Arabic, Robinson Crusoe in Turkish, the Bible in Greek-alphabet Turkish, excoriated French novels circulating through the Ottoman Empire in Greek, Arabic and Turkish – literary translation at the eastern end of the Mediterranean offered worldly vistas and new, hybrid genres to emerging literate audiences in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Whether to propagate ‘national’ language reform, circulate the Bible, help Migrating audiences understand European opera, argue for girls’ education, institute pan-Islamic conversations, introduce political concepts, share the Persian Gulistan with Anglophone readers in Bengal, or provide racy fiction to schooled adolescents in Cairo and Istanbul, translation was an essential tool. texts But as these essays show, translators were inventors. And their efforts might yield surprising results. Circulating Translations around the Key Features • A substantial introduction provides in-depth context to the essays that Ottoman Mediterranean MIGRATING TEXTS follow • Nine detailed case studies of translation between and among European EDITED BY MARILYN BOOTH and Middle-Eastern languages and between genres • Examines translation movement from Europe to the Ottoman region, and within the latter • Looks at how concepts of ‘translation’, ‘adaptation’, ‘arabisation’, ‘authorship’ and ‘untranslatability’ were understood by writers (including translators) and audiences • Challenges views of translation and text dissemination that centre ‘the West’ as privileged source of knowledge Marilyn Booth is Khalid bin Abdullah Al Saud Professor in the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at the University of Oxford. She is author and editor of several books including Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces: Writing Feminist History through Biography in Fin-de-siècle Egypt (Edinburgh University Press, 2015). Cover image: Sultan Mahmud II Leaving The Bayezid Mosque, Constantinople, Auguste Mayer, 1837. Private Collection © Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images Cover design: Stuart Dalziel MIGRATING TEXTS Edinburgh Studies on the Ottoman Empire Series Editor: Kent F. Schull Published and forthcoming titles Migrating Texts: Circulating Translations around the Ottoman Mediterranean Edited by Marilyn Booth Ottoman Sunnism: New Perspectives Edited by Vefa Erginbaş The Politics of Armenian Migration to North America, 1885–1915: Sojourners, Smugglers and Dubious Citizens David E. Gutman The Kizilbash-Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia: Sufism, Politics and Community Ayfer Karakaya-Stump Çemberlitaş Hamami in Istanbul: The Biographical Memoir of a Turkish Bath Nina Macaraig Nineteenth-Century Local Governance in Ottoman Bulgaria: Politics in Provincial Councils Safa Saraçoğlu Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire: Microcosms of Modernity Kent F. Schull Ruler Visibility and Popular Belonging in the Ottoman Empire Darin Stephanov Children and Childhood in the Ottoman Empire: From the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Centuries Edited by Gulay Yilma and Fruma Zachs euppublishing.com/series/esoe MIGRATING TEXTS CIRCULATING TRANSLATIONS AROUND THE OTTOMAN MEDITERRANEAN 2 Edited by Marilyn Booth Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com We are committed to making research available to a wide audience and are pleased to be publishing an Open Access ebook edition of this volume. © editorial matter and organisation Marilyn Booth, 2019, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence © the chapters their several authors, 2019, under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f ) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in Jaghbuni by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 3899 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 3901 5 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 3902 2 (epub) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents List of Charts and Maps vii Acknowledgements viii The Contributors ix Note on Translation and Transliteration xii Introduction: Translation as Lateral Cosmopolitanism in the Ottoman Universe 1 Marilyn Booth PART I. TRANSLATION, TERRITORY, COMMUNITY 55 1. What was (Really) Translated in the Ottoman Empire? Sleuthing Nineteenth-century Ottoman Translated Literature 57 Johann Strauss 2. Translation and the Globalisation of the Novel: Relevance and Limits of a Diffusionist Model 95 Peter Hill 3. On Eastern Cultures: Transregionalism and Multilingualism in Iraq, 1910–38 122 Orit Bashkin PART II. TRANSLATION AND/AS FICTION 149 4. Gender and Diaspora in Late Ottoman Egypt: The Case of Greek Women Translators 151 Titika Dimitroulia and Alexander Kazamias Contents 5. Haunting Ottoman Middle-class Sensibility: Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s Gothic 193 A. Holly Shissler PART III. ‘CLASSICAL’ INTERVENTIONS, ‘EUROPEAN’ INFLECTIONS: TRANSLATION AS/AND ADAPTATION 211 6. Lords or Idols? Translating the Greek Gods into Arabic in Nineteenth-century Egypt 215 Raphael Cormack 7. Translating World Literature into Arabic and Arabic into World Literature: Sulayman al-Bustani’s al-Ilyadha and Ruhi al-Khalidi’s Arabic Rendition of Victor Hugo 236 Yaseen Noorani 8. Girlhood Translated? Fénelon’s Traité de l’éducation des filles (1687) as a Text of Egyptian Modernity (1901, 1909) 266 Marilyn Booth 9. Gulistan: Sublimity and the Colonial Credo of Translatability 300 Kamran Rastegar Bibliography 318 Index 344 vi Charts and Maps Charts 1 First print translations of Don Quixote (to 1935) 97 2 First print translations of Télémaque 97 3 First print translations of Robinson Crusoe 98 4 First print translations of Bélisaire 98 5 First print translations of Anacharsis 99 6 First print translations of Paul et Virginie 99 7 First print translations of Monte Cristo 100 8 Translations of Qasim Amin’s Tahrir al-marʾa and al-Marʾa al-jadida 115 9 Translations of Jurji Zaydan’s historical novels (excluding reprints) 116 Maps 1 Inner core 101 2 Outer core 101 3 First semi-periphery 103 4 Second semi-periphery 103 5 First periphery (three or more out of four novels, 1850–1930) 105 6 Second periphery (one or two out of four novels, 1850–1930) 105 7 Print translations of Télémaque into languages of the Balkans, Mediterranean and Near East, to 1880 111 8 Translations of Qasim Amin’s Tahrir al-marʾa and al-Marʾa al-jadida 115 9 Translations of Jurji Zaydan’s historical novels 116 Acknowledgements I want to express my gratitude to all of the colleagues who have partici- pated in the four workshops that this project has entailed to date (a further volume will be based on the third and fourth workshops). The enthusiasm, intensity of discussion, and collaborative spirit at these events – continu- ing on into memorable dinners – have been the most rewarding kind of intellectual collegial exchange, reminding us of the excitement and sheer fun of research. That there is strong consensus to keep this ‘collective’ going speaks for itself. For generously funding and hosting those workshops, I am grateful to the Abu Dhabi Institute Humanities Research Fellowship Program, New York University Abu Dhabi, and to its director, Professor Reindert Falkenburg; to the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World, University of Edinburgh; and to the Higher Studies Fund and TORCH, University of Oxford. I am grateful to the Performing Arts Forum, St-Erme, France, for hosting the fourth workshop. I want to thank Alexandra Sandu, Manal Demaghlatrous, Marie McPherson, Claire Savina, Stephanie Yoxall and Amy Pennington for their invaluable help in not only making these workshops happen but in making them wonderfully pleasurable. I owe Claire Savina a special note of thanks for reading these chapters with close critical attention and helping with sources and details, as well as for her enlivening and encouraging presence as research associate on this project, an association I hope will continue. Finally, I want to thank Kent Schull and Nicola Ramsey for so warmly welcoming this book, the Press Committee of EUP and anonymous readers for their helpful and encourag- ing suggestions, and Eddie Clark, Sue Dalgleish, Rebecca Mackenzie and Kirsty Woods for their help and patience in the production process. Marilyn Booth, Oxford, August 2018 viii The Contributors Orit Bashkin is professor of modern Arab history in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago. Her publications include book chapters and articles on the history of Arab- Jews in Iraq, on Iraqi history and on Arabic literature. She is the author of The Other Iraq – Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (2009) and New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (2012). Marilyn Booth is the Khalid bin Abdallah Al Saud Professor of the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at Oxford University