Ottoman Translation: Circulating Texts from Bombay to Paris

by Marilyn Booth (Editor), Claire Savina (Editor)

Overview

A vigorous translation scene across the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire—government and private, official and amateur, acknowledged and anonymous—saw many texts from European languages rewritten into the multiple tongues that Ottoman subjects spoke, read and wrote. Just as lively, however, was translation amongst Ottoman languages, and between those and the languages of their neighbours to the east. This proliferation and circulation of texts in translation and adaptation, through a range of strategies, leads us to ask: What is an ‘Ottoman language'
This volume challenges earlier scholarship that has highlighted translation and adaptation from European languages to the neglect of alternative translations, re-centring translation as an Ottoman ‘hub’. Collaborative work has allowed us to peer over the shoulders of working translators to ask how they creatively transported texts between as well as beyond Ottoman languages, with a range of studies stretching linguistically and geographically from Bengal to London, Istanbul to Paris, Andalusia to Bosnia.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399502580
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	08/15/2024
Series:	Edinburgh Studies on the Ottoman Empire
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Marilyn Booth is Khalid bin Abdallah Al Saud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World, University of Oxford. Her most recent monograph, The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz: Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt (2021), is amongst numerous publications on early feminism, translation, and Arabophone women’s writing in Egypt and Ottoman Syria. Initiator of the Ottoman Translation Studies Group, she edited Migrating Texts: Circulating Translations around the Ottoman Mediterranean (Edinburgh UniversityPress, 2019). Translator of eighteen published works of fiction and memoir from the Arabic, she was co-winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies.

Claire Savina is a translator and independent researcher. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature and Arabic Studies at the University of Paris-Sorbonne in 2018. She is co-editor (with Frédéric Lagrange) of the bilingual Les Mots du Désir la langue de l'érotisme arabe et ses traductions / Words of Desire: the language of Arabic Erotica and its translations (Diacritiques Editions, 2020).

Table of Contents

Note on Translation, Transliteration and FormAcknowledgements Notes on Contributors

Introduction: Ottoman Central: Circulating Translations from the Indian Ocean to the Eastern Mediterranean and on to the Far West of EuropeMarilyn Booth

PART I PROLIFERATING CLASSICS

1. A Pilgrim Progressively Translated: John Bunyan in Arabic, Urdu, Hindi, and BengaliRichard David Williams and Jack Clift

2. ‘Pour Our Treasures into Foreign Laps’: The Translation of Othello into Arabic and Ottoman Turkish Hannah Scott Deuchar and Bridget Gill

3. Shared Secrets: (Re)writing Urban Mysteries in Nineteenth-century Istanbul Etienne Charrière and Şehnaz Şişmanoğlu Şimşek

PART II MEDITERRANEAN MULTIPLES

4. Khayr al-Din al-Tunisi’s Muqaddima to Aqwam al-masāik fi ma‘rifat aḥwāl al-mamālik (The Surest Path to Knowing the Condition of Kingdoms), in Arabic, French and Ottoman Turkish

Part I: Khayr al-Din al-Tunisi’s Aqwam al-masalik/Réformes nécessaires: A Dual Intervention in Arabic and French Political DiscoursesPeter Hill

Part II: The Muqaddima of Khayr al-Dīn Pasha´s Aqwam al-masālik fī ma‘rifat aḥwāl al-mamālik and its Ottoman Turkish translationJohann Strauss

5. Finding the Lost Andalusia: Reading Abdülhak Hamid Tarhan’s Tarık or the Conquest of al-Andalus in its Multiple Renderings Usman Ahmedani and Dženita Karić

PART III WOMEN IN TRANSLATION

6. Translating Qasim Amin’s Arabic Tahrir al-marʼa (1899) into Ottoman TurkishIlham Khuri-Makdisi and Yorgos Dedes

7. Muslim Woman: The Translation of a Patriarchal Order in Flux Maha AbdelMegeed and A. Ebru Akcasu

8. Fatma Aliye’s Nisvan-ı İslam: Istanbul, Beirut, Cairo, Paris, 1891–6 Marilyn Booth and A. Holly Shissler

Index

Editorial Reviews

Ottoman Translation is a unique collection of essays that engages a wide range of languages, texts, contexts, and literary worlds in the Ottoman Empire. This volume consciously refocuses the discussion of translation from Eurocentred approaches typically favoured in translation studies. It presents important new ways of understanding translational dynamics by offering fresh language pairings and materials to advance our thinking about translation.

Michelle Hartman