Conference paper presented at
Thresholds to Arabic Literary Criticism Conference
Panel 6: Reading the Text and the Paratext: The Role of Translation in the Development of Arabic Literary Criticism.
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society
Columbia University, 14-16 December 2022
Abstract
Sulaymān al-Bustānī’s historic translation of Homer’s Iliad has attracted the attention of many scholars since its publication in 1904 (Margoliouth 1905; Bāz 1925; Ṣawāyā 1948; Kraemer 1956 and 1957; al-Hāšim 1960; Hamori 1978; Jihad 1995; Kreutz 2004; Pormann 2006; Richardson 2017).
The reason lies both in the fact that it was the very first complete translation of the Greek masterpiece into Arabic, and in the many ideas that al-Bustānī advanced in the introduction and throughout the translation itself. Comparativism is one of these notions and al-Bustānī devoted a great deal of attention to it in his introduction (Fanus 1986). However, it is in the footnotes to the translation that he put into practice the theoretical guidelines of comparativism presented in the introduction.
Dr. Monaco’s contribution aimed at highlighting how al-Bustānī’s theories in comparative literature find a productive application in the paratext of his work. The many cases of comparison between the Iliad and Arabic poetry contributed to acquaint the Arab reader with Greek poetry and mythology, as well as to the rediscovery of the Arabic literary heritage. This practice proves the soundness of Noorani’s (2019) assumption that al-Bustānī’s comparison of Greek and Arabic poetry aimed ultimately at legitimizing the position of the latter in the framework of world literature.
