Bilingualism, Translation, and Diglossia in the Nahda
Panel 148, 2019 Annual Meeting
On Saturday, November 16 at 8:30 am
Panel Description
This panel addresses the issues of bilingualism, translation, and diglossia in intellectual and cultural production in the Arabic-speaking cities of the Ottoman Empire and Egypt during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most excellent scholarship on the Nahda mentions the translation movement from European languages, recording the direction of translation and inspiration as from French and to Arabic. However, the local anchoring of the Nahda meant that cultural works had transregional resonance within the multilingual Ottoman Empire and Egypt. Furthermore, scholarship also emphasizes the Arabness of the Nahda, and while both a canonization of classical Arabic texts and a creation of new genres relied on the literary Arabic, there were creative stirrings in the Arabic vernaculars as well.
Building upon this necessary scholarship, this panel approaches the Nahda though ideas in language, but more importantly, through ideas about language and how it moves knowledge. As the emphasis on an Arabic cultural renewal and enlightenment would undoubtedly occur in Arabic, it is crucial to look at the inspirations that come from regional languages and heritages. An examination of translators and intellectuals in Istanbul, Cairo, and Beirut points to the connected genres, trends, themes, and texts that were translated between Arabic and Ottoman Turkish. An analysis of the activities of a monolingual intellectual consuming various translated cultural production demonstrates the strength of multilingual translation networks in socializing intellectuals to new and different ideas. Furthermore, it is crucial to look beyond the Egypt-Levant channels because these translation activities and multilingual interests occurred elsewhere too. A study of translations from Ottoman Turkish to Arabic in Baghdad illustrates the increasing transculturation of the values of modernity while decreasing the transculturation of Arabic and Turkish themselves, which the Ottoman elites claimed as part of their cultural capital. A consideration of a Baghdadi journal’s compilation and translation of vernacular Arabic posits its legitimation in writing and printing.
This panel proposes new examples for the Nahda through accepting the multilingual context of the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, for translation moving between Ottoman Turkish and Arabic, and through making room for vernacular Arabic in print. Through bridging sub-fields, this panel presents the Nahda within both Arab Studies and Ottoman Studies, and this panel offers a multidisciplinary approach through bringing together frameworks from translation studies, literary criticism, and history.
What kinds of ties connected intellectuals in Istanbul, Cairo and Beirut in the last decades of the Empire? To what extent did these intellectuals follow each other’s debates and engage with (or simply read) each other’s works? Is it possible to think of a common Ottoman intellectual field that is not confined by linguistic barriers? I propose to broach these questions by looking at translations between Arabic and Ottoman Turkish published in the three aforementioned cities, a topic that has elicited virtually no attention within the historiography of the late Ottoman Empire. This silence is particularly remarkable, when contrasted with the considerable (and well-deserved) attention paid to translations from European languages, and especially French, into both Arabic and Ottoman Turkish during this period.
My paper will identify general trends, genres and themes among the texts that were translated and published in the period under study, as books or articles. It will also dwell on certain translators, their choices and reasons given for undertaking such translations, as well as the role of the state and specific ideologies in promoting translation projects. The paper will also give an idea of how specific concepts and texts were translated, and the translators’ strategies and interventions into the original text. Finally, I will raise the question of bilingualism and multilingualism in the last decades of the Empire.
The nineteenth-century Syrian polymath Mikha’il Mishaqa knew only Arabic and never travelled outside Bilad al-Sham and Egypt. But he was an active participant in debates that ranged across many languages and several continents. He was able to participate in these debates through two means: written translations and conversation with bilingual, or multilingual, individuals.
This paper explores Mishaqa’s intellectual networks as he moved from Damietta to Dayr al-Qamar to Damascus. It examines his encounters with different sets of translated texts which profoundly shaped his views: first European Enlightenment writings rendered into Arabic by the ‘Damietta Circle’ of translators; later American Evangelical Protestant texts translated by Nahda writers such as Faris al-Shidyaq and John Wortabet; plus religious writings drawing on Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac sources. It reconstructs his acquisition of scientific, medical, and religious knowledge through conversation with bilingual friends and acquaintances; and traces how his own writings and speech were translated and propagated across multiple languages.
As a monolingual Arabic speaker who was an avid consumer of translated texts and speech, and a prolific producer of texts and words for translation, Mishaqa provides a unique test-case for the role translation and bilingualism could play in nineteenth-century Arabic cultural production.
Much of the scholarship on Arab modernity of the nineteenth and early twentieth century has almost exclusively emphasized translations from European languages as the driving force behind cultural transformations throughout the Arab world. To demonstrate that translations from Turkish played a crucial role for Arab modernity, my paper gives a close reading of two works by the Iraqi intellectual, Maruf al-Rusafi (1875–1945), Daf’ al-hujna fi irtidakh al-lukna (Overcoming Flaws in Speech Defects, 1913) and al-Ruya fi bahth al-hurriya (Dream in the Search for Freedom, 1909). In particular, I examine the sections in Daf’ al-hujna in which al-Rusafi describes the characteristics of the Ottoman language and lists the mistakes in the use of Arabic language that arise from the influence of translations from Turkish to Arabic. Later, I compare both in terms of content and linguistic style al-Rusafi’s Ruya with the Turkish source text from which it was translated, Rüya (Dream, 1908) by Namik Kemal (1840–1888). Through this comparative analysis, my paper argues that the increasing number of translations between Arabic and Turkish during the late Ottoman Empire allowed a transculturation of ideals and values of modernity, while ironically decreasing the transculturation of Arabic and Turkish languages that has characterized the cultural cosmopolitanism of the Ottoman cultural elite. These translations thus generated a common repertoire of themes, imagery, and style that constituted what I call a language of modernity in Arabic and Turkish writings, while their translators also set up a role model for their respective languages by excising “foreign loanwords” that come from source texts and languages. In addition to reframing the Arab modernity (nahda) within the context of a multilingual Ottoman cultural milieu, my paper also contributes to translation theory as it demonstrates that translations can substantiate the boundaries of source or national languages. Furthermore, while Iraqi intellectuals played a key role for modernity in the late Ottoman Empire, they received less attention in the Anglophone scholarship that has often focused on intellectuals from Egypt, Beirut, and Istanbul. I thus demonstrate that a shift of focus toward the writings of Iraqi intellectuals will reassess the key assumptions about what the prominent critics Nurullah Ataç and Jamal al-Din al-Shayyal have called “the age of translation” of the Ottoman Empire.
In encouraging a canonization of the Arabic literary heritage through print, the Nahda prioritized fusha, a pure, eloquent, literary Arabic. While popular genres used colloquial (‘ammiyya) Arabic in drama and dialogues in journals, scholarship and prestigious literatures were written and printed in a standardized literary Arabic. In this paper, I examine intellectual curiosity legitimating language hybridity and heteroglossia in print as a part of the trends of the Nahda.
In Baghdad, the editor of the journal Lughat al-‘Arab (“The Arabic Language”) Father Anastas Mari al-Karmili, together with his chief staff writer Razuq ‘Isa, took on the issue of language. While the journal’s typeface is bilingual (French and Arabic), the editorial staff addresses diglossia through accepting both literary and colloquial Arabic language as contributing to Arab cultural heritage and Iraqi regional present and future. In this paper, I argue that the articles concerning etymologies embrace classical Arabic and its history. Furthermore, I argue that the articles containing glossaries of Baghdadi colloquialisms, Arabic portmanteaux, and proverbs unique to Iraq due to the presence of Syriac and Ottoman Turkish words all support the recording of colloquial Arabic for scholarship and as a part of a prestigious literary journal. Colloquial Baghdadi Arabic becomes legitimated by analyzing the opinion pieces inquiring into the permissibility of writing in vernacular Arabic alongside the other articles in eloquent prose and neoclassical poetry as well as the collection and examination of colloquialisms.
Through reframing some of the producers, print channels, and consumers of the Nahda as engaging with more than literary Arabic, this study acknowledges the imperial Ottoman context in which the print culture arose and the local Baghdadi context that is preserved in the language, both of which exhibited their own multilingualisms and diglossias. While language questions were central to the Nahda, this continual investigation into the Arabic languages and presentation of it paves the way for later print works in colloquial Arabic, in Baghdad and beyond.
