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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 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. But as these essays show, translators were inventors. And their efforts might yield surprising results.
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 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. But as these essays show, translators were inventors. And their efforts might yield surprising results.
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 University Press, 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.
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