In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, intellectuals around the eastern Mediterranean and points east were paying close attention to what was going on in other capitals, especially as transportation links and publication possibilities increased vastly: books and magazines circulated, and so did people. Works published in Arabic were translated into Turkish and Persian, while works produced in Europe of salience to reformist, emergent nationalist and gender-activist groups were often translated near-simultaneously into Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Greek, Armenian, Hebrew, and other languages.
This workshop — possibly initiating a larger research network — brings together scholars of translation and of the era’s political-cultural discourses to investigate how circulations of key texts and their translations facilitated and perhaps sometimes deterred conversations around key issues: women’s rights and masculinity/femininity, identity and personal autonomy, national efficacy and ‘self-help,’ etc.
We move away from a center-periphery model of cultural transmission in favor of the concept of ‘lateral cosmopolitanism,’ and from a narrowly linguistic perspective to a focus on ‘cultural translation/transmission,’ through a focus on text production and dissemination at a key moment for the crystallization of ideological outlooks and political activisms that continue to dominate in today’s Middle East.
This approach transcends traditional area studies foci, reaching across geographical, disciplinary, and linguistic boundaries, to study spaces in-between and how they were created and maintained (or not). Translation is often spoken of these days but rarely do scholars attend closely to their internal fabric. We ask not just what but how of translation — and for whom?
Participants
"From Liberation (tahrir) to Training (tarbiyat): Yusuf shtiyani's 1900 Persian translation of Qasim Amin's Tahrir al-mar'a and its late Qajar context."
Dominic Parviz Brookshaw, University of Oxford
This presentation will examine Tarbiyat-i nisvan, the 1900 Persian translation of Qasim Amin's Tahrir al-mar'a, with specific reference to the translator's purposeful omissions. Drawing on the work of Najmabadi, Kashani-Sabet, and Vejdani, Tarbiyat-i nisvan will also be contextualized through a comparative reading of slightly earlier and contemporaneous texts produced in late Qajar Iran that advocate women's education within the framework of tarbiyat ("training").
"How to speak to the Jewish women of Arabistan and Hindustan?" — Jewish-Iraqi reading culture and the women's question, 1869-1908
Orit Bashkin, University of Chicago
My paper deals with the reading practices of the Iraqi Jewish community in the 19th century. I argue that various products in the increasingly global Baghdadi-Jewish print market reflected new ideas about translation, gender, and language.
The first part of my paper explores newspapers, journals, and books which were published in Hebrew, Arabic, Judeo-Arabic (Arabic written in the Hebrew script), and French, and circulated between Baghdad, Palestine, India (where many Iraqi Jews settled after 1857), and Europe. I demonstrate how the ideas of Iraqi Jewish reformers about gender found their expression in these new mediums, ranging from letter correspondence to books about formidable Jewish women (such as Qissat Hannah and Qissat Esther).
The second part of my paper focuses on one text, Qanun al-Nissa, a book in Judeo-Arabic written by the great Baghdadi scholar of Jewish law and mysticism Rabbi Yosef Haim (1835-1909). Printed in Livorno (Italy) in 1905, the text included short segments in fusha (especially in saj') and long sections in the Baghdadi colloquial. The text was meant to be read by and to women in order to teach them about Jewish law, the relations between Jewish law and the modern age, and proper conduct (matters that became very important after the opening of the French Jewish Alliance School for girls in Baghdad in 1893).
I show how three interrelated processes of translation shape the text: first, translation of Hebrew Biblical and post-Biblical materials (especially tales) from Hebrew into colloquial Iraqi; second, translation from the classical register into the colloquial, and third, the interlacing of Arabo-Islamic texts, such as The Arabian Nights, into the Jewish text. I speculate on who was the audience of this text. In conclusion, I consider how the Baghdadi case-study fits into broader discussions about readership, authorship, orality, and translation practices in the Ottoman world of letters and in India and their effects on gender perceptions.
Gender, Diaspora and Colonialism: Greek women writers and translators in late nineteenth-century Egypt
Alexander Kazamias, University of Coventry
This paper examines the work of Greek women writers and translators in Egypt from the 1860s to the 1890s. It highlights the core gender themes in the poetry of Eleni Goussiou, the fiction of Maria Michanidou, the chronicles of Penelope Delta, and the translation of Eleni Argyridou and Emilia Frangia. The paper explores the different ways in which these writers sought to construct a female diasporic identity in their works during the emergence of the colonial era in Egypt. Particular attention will be paid to the tensions between a Eurocentric perspective on gender based on French and British orientalist leitmotifs and a Greek nationalist counter-narrative which sought to define female diasporic identity in the context of Egypt’s late Ottoman society.
Educating Rayya: Fénelon’s 17th-century treatise De l’éducation des filles as an Egyptian work, two centuries later (1901, 1909)
Marilyn Booth, NYUAD Institute
François Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon (1651-1715) is remembered for his opposition to the harsh treatment of Huguenots following Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes which had given them protection; for his novel Les aventures de Télemaque, fils d’Ulysse (1699) which was widely interpreted as a critique of monarchic absolutism (and translated into Arabic and into Turkish in the 1860s); and for his famous quarrel with his mentor Bossuet over Quietism (1696-99), specifically the doctrine of ‘pure love’ espoused by the mystic and writer Jeanne Marie Guyon de Chesnoy.
Some years before taking up these controversial issues in writing, Fénelon penned his first work, De l’éducation des filles (1687, possibly written in 1678), which also knew a long life in France and elsewhere. As a nineteenth-century French editor of the work noted, the work was prescient in its attention to child psychology, and the question of girls’ education specifically was less marked in the text than was an overall programme of childrearing and education from the cradle to puberty: more than a manual on girls’ education, it was a training programme for parents and other child-minders.
Amongs its many lives thereafter, De l’éducation appeared twice in Arabic translation within a single decade, when the issue of girls’ education was intensely debated although — some commentators said — it was no longer a new issue, at least not in public discourse. In an era of intense cultural translation in Egypt, what was the valence of this work? How did it operate as an Egyptian and Arabic text? Why was it useful?
What kinds of editing — appropriation — did its intercultural travel require or encourage? In particular, I consider how — and again, in one decade — this work shot through with the Catholic Christianity of 17th-century France becomes first a sort of Arab/ic secular work of masculine-reformist nahda rhetoric, and second, a primer for (some) Egyptian parents that attempts to model a modernist Islamic pedagogy.
Gendering Untranslatables: Reflections on the Conceptual Languages of Cultural Transfer in the 1890s
Ayman El-Desouky, SOAS
My presentation builds on my recent work on the hermeneutical activation of conceptual untranslatabilities in the languages of knowledge production, reflecting on the arguments M. Booth has put forth over how in the discourses of the 1890s 'gender' becomes "a theme and an organisational analytic" for nationalising and modernising discourses.
Offering certain issues for reflection, the paper brings the gender debates to bear on the recent work in world literature and comparative literature which are seeking to offer different approaches to the literatures of the region, also by looking at modes of circulation within and among these literatures.