Book Panel on Zrinka Stahuljak's Les Fixeurs au Moyen âge - Histoire et littérature connectées
Zrinka Stahuljak (UCLA), Jawanshir Rasikh (Independent Scholar), and Arezou Azad (Oxford)
Discussant: Domenico Ingenito (UCLA)
Thursday, February 17, 2022
9:30 AM - 11:00 AM (Pacific Time)
Click here to register
Translation as Authorial and Scribal Intervention: The cases of Fada'il-i Balkh and New Manuscripts from Afghanistan (11th-13th century)
Arezou Azad
The late Persianist Jerome Clinton reminded us that translation is not principally a matter of thematic content, "but often what is most influential in shaping a new tradition or reshaping an old one, is the importation of new forms." In this paper, I will explore what happened when in 12th-century Afghanistan authors of books and scribes of documents used and translated Arabic content and form into Persian texts. Did these authors and scribes act as invisible translators, and if not, how were they intervening in the narrative or form? Were their interventions part of an agenda, or just the result of human error? And why should modern editors and translators show these deviations, and readers be cognizant of them? I will end with a brief reflection on my own experience of making translation decisions and annotations of these texts for publications in English.
