ალ-ჰარირის მაკამების როლი 21-ე საუკუნეში

Abstract

In 2020 the English translation of the Maqamat by Arab writer al-Hariri (1054-1122) was published in New York. From the moment of its appearance in Europe, this text was marked as untranslatable because of its eloquent language and play of words. Besides the rhymed prose, verses, different styles, there are sentences in which every word consists of entirely undotted letters (maqama 28); sentences in which every second word contains only dotted letters and the remaining words only undotted letters (6), there is a story or poem that contain so many words with a double meaning that it can be read as telling an equally coherent story about something else (8,25,43,44); there are palindromes (16,17), legal riddles (32) etc. According to M. Cooperson, if we want Maqamat to become popular in modern times, metaphrase or paraphrase wouldn’t help us. Such kind of translation might be used only with the students of Arabic. The ordinary reader wouldn’t read it and he’d never know anything about this wonderful piece of classical Arabic literature. The translator should use the method of imitation. That is why Cooperson used the possibilities of global English. He transformed Arabic wordplay into fifty different registers in English. Instead of Arabo- Persian proper nouns, he used Irish. Alternation of dotted and undotted letters he replaced by the alternation of Germanic and French words... The translator used three types of Idioms: 1) distinctive literary style of English speaker authors as Chaucer, Woolf, Dickens... 2) global style as Scottish, Indian, Nigerian, Singaporean, Spanglish, Kiwi, middle Harlem Jive 1940... 3) jargon as management speak, American college slang, Cockney, etc. The aim of al-Hariri was to show the uniqueness of Arabic as God’s Language. As literary Arabic was pure, canonical, the author couldn’t use too much jargon. Unlike him, Cooperson, besides the literary and historical English, used spoken or global styles to show opportunities of modern language just as al-Hariri tried to do that with Arabic. Impostures is not only a result of Englishing, but it is Transculturation as well. Cooperson explains in his Note, that his translation is a performance, first of all, which must be read as a celebration of language. Imposters has already earned good reviews and several important prizes as the best translation. This newest translation is a typical attempt of the so-called post-orientalist approach – to appreciate the original as a literary work and to preserve its spirit. But the translator underlines only linguistic advantages of the maqamat and he never mentions that the work of al-Hariri several centuries earlier than the Renaissance Spanish picaresque novel, presented second-rate personages, who represented different social strata; as well as not definitely bad or good generalized characters; created artistic reality and developed primitive social criticism, and all this was significant in the 12th century Arabic literature under the conditions of the supremacy of literary law. For Cooperson good translation is domestication.The domesticated translation is mostly ideologized. Whether he realized this or not,, Cooperson also accented his own language. As Oxford Emeritus Prof. van Gelder marked, “Reader of Imposters learns all about English but not much about Arabic.” al-Hariri’s Maqamat is a unique text, which was translated to show the opportunities of different languages in different ages. In the 21st century, it became the celebration of global English. American readers asserted it as a guidebook on linguistic deceit, which has to rescue English from its death in the Age of the Internet.