In a Better and Older Language: The Redemptive Potential of Arabic and Its Translated Fictions

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La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures,and Cultures, Volume 43, Number 1, Fall 2014, pp. 179-199 (Article)

P bl h d b L r n : J rn l f d v l H p n L n ,L t r t r , nd lt rDOI: 10.1353/cor.2014.0027

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I N A B E T T E R A N D O L D E R L A N G U A G E :

T H E R E D E M P T I V E P O T E N T I A L O F A R A B I C

A N D I T S T R A N S L A T E D F I C T I O N S

S.J. PearceNEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y

LA CORÓNICA 43.1 FALL 2014 179-99

“The dead shall be raised”.— I Corinthians 15:15, inscribed in the lintel of the Grove Street Cemetery gate, New Haven, CT

A man in possession of a strange, esoteric and rare medieval manuscript written in an indecipherable old language is approached by a literature-loving friend who beseeches him to make the incredible text accessible by translating it and adding a suitable prologue. It was once a widely-read and -regarded text, but now, owing to social, religious and intellectual controversy, most of the copies have been destroyed –burned or sold for rag– but this hardly matters as so very few people would have been able to read it in its original language, anyway. The man gives in and labors away translating – or does he? The manuscript tells a story of books and death; and

P E A R C E L A C O R Ó N I C A 4 3 . 1 , 2 0 1 4

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when you read it, you hardly know where its own contours end and where they begin to infiltrate the simulacrum of life that it refracts and sends up as much as it represents. Who, exactly, are the translator, the narrator, and the friend? Sword and lance, or paper and pen? The literary and the literal bleed.

O, idle reader, you think you know where this is going, don’t you?

You’re wrong.

***

The text is not the last, lost Morisco-Aljamiado translation of the Arab author Cide Hamete Benengeli’s history of a landed son of something (or other) from a place whose name I do not care to recall; but rather, it is one of those texts written in that older and better language that the fictional Miguel Cervantes, narrated to life by the eponymous literary alter-ego of the man who invented him, knew he could have found if he had wanted. Rather, it is an unimagined imaginative prefatory story told by a narrator with a tenuous connection to a flesh-and-blood writer who, like Cide Hamete and like the fictional Cervantes, stepfather of the book and author of its prologue, meditates upon translation, comments on the relationship between the promise of literature and the promise of religion, and offers a throaty, vociferous vindication of the role of the Arabic language and its literary traditions in the salvage and salvation of a second-diasporic national identity of exiled Andalusi Jews in a wider late medieval and early modern European setting.

The text purports to be a preface to the Treatise on the Doctrine of Resurrection, Moses Maimonides’ 1198 Arabic-language self-defense against the fanatical anti-rationalist followers of Samuel ben ‘Alī ibn al-Dastūr, head of the famed and influential talmudical academy in the legendary round city of Baghdad that was also home to the scientific academy founded by the Abbassid caliph al-Ma’mūn (786-833), an institution so prolific and rigorous that it came to be known as the House of Wisdom.

No, that’s not quite correct. The text is a preface to the Treatise. Clearly it is that; but that is the only thing about the relationship between text and

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pretext that is sure. The preface is narrated in the voice of Joseph ben Joel, a name otherwise unattested in co-local contemporaneous sources but quite possibly the literary alter-ego of the otherwise anonymous author; it is dedicated to a patron, a certain Meir ben Sheshet, also otherwise unknown to history. The text is written in rhymed prose with borrowed and original poetry interspersed throughout and tells a story about one particular branch of transmission of the Treatise, a story that raises a variety of questions about the relationship of fiction to historical writing, about reading and reception, and about the place of language choice within individual and community religious identities. It also raises broad questions about the relationship of subject matter to authorial process that are articulated specifically in this case through a complex interplay between not just translation but retranslation and reviving the dead: revitalizing corpse and corpus. By inventing a fictitious process of translating and retranslating and retranslating a seminal articulation of a mostly-orthodox Jewish doctrine of life given twice, the text ultimately places the Arabic language on a religious and cultural par with other central tenets of religion such that the preservation and promulgation of a language of culture beyond its Andalusi seat becomes a matter of faith.

The preface opens with four lines of poetry borrowed, unacknowledged, from a book called Taḥkemoni, a collection of rhymed prose tales written by the Toledo-based literary jack-of-all-trades Judah al-Ḥarīzī, author of one of two competing translations of Moses Maimonides’ theological summa, the Guide of the Perplexed, and his aforementioned Treatise on the Doctrine of Resurrection. Both in the original and in the borrowing, the verse praises Maimonides’ intellect and piety:

From you, o prince, come all our praises and through you and from you all our greatnessThe height of your path in your deeds and the superiority of your deeds above our deedsYou are an angel of God created in God’s image even though you appear in our formBecause of you God said: “Create man in our image and our mold”.

Joseph also introduces us to the other, the first, Hebrew translator of the


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Guide of the Perplexed and of the Treatise on the Doctrine of Resurrection; that translator, Samuel ibn Tibbon (c.1160-1232), was the Provence-born scion of the Granadine family of translators whose patriarch entered a self-imposed exile after the advent of Almohad rule in al-Andalus in 1148. We first meet Samuel anonymously, through a description of his style of translation: “The one who translated it to the sacred language added depth to its content but did not clear away the stones from the path”. This is a clear reference to Samuel, who was famous for adopting his father’s word-for-word approach to translation over Maimonides’ own objections and preference for a sense-for-sense approach to translation. A method such as Samuel’s renders the source text, one word at a time, largely preserving the original order of the words, into a target language. It is an approach that intervenes in the text not by explicating it into a second language, Hebrew in this case, but rather by seeking to preserve all the features of the text and the nuances of the original Arabic into the new translated text. It is an approach that preserves, rather than clarifies, ambiguities in the text, leading to Joseph’s biblically-inflected description of Samuel as one who did not clarify the content of the work. Centuries later, the Cuban poet José Martí would be described similarly; his prose, and specifically the letters he composed in English to Anglophone interlocutors, so closely mirrored the Spanish-language origins of his ideas, translated into English when translated from mental abstractions to words on paper, that they have been described as texts that are in Spanish, but using English words. So, too, are Samuel ibn Tibbon’s translations: Arabic texts using Hebrew words, in which the translator clears away none of the rocky problems of Arabic grammar that might be impenetrable to a non-Arabophone reader. Al-Ḥarīzī, the finer Arabist of the two, preferred to translate sense-for-sense, in effect following Maimonides’ directive on translation that the translator should first understand the text in the source language and then explain it in the target language, using coherent phrases and ideas, rather than single words, as the basic unit to be translated. Al-Ḥarīzī thus created infinitely more readable texts than Ibn Tibbon did but also, some say, composed texts that were so much more imprecise that he alone is responsible for all of Latin Christendom’s subsequent misunderstanding of Jewish philosophy.


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Joseph ben Joel is initially critical of Samuel ibn Tibbon, characterizing his translation as “complex and enigmatic, and the forms of its subject matter were foolish, and they were held up in the marshes of their words and caught up in their corruptness.” However, ultimately Joseph recognizes the benefits as well as the flaws of word-for-word translation and positions himself as an ally to his own fictional representation of the historical Samuel ibn Tibbon.

We learn that the narrator received his copy of Samuel ibn Tibbon’s Hebrew-language version of the Treatise from the translator himself:

this letter did not make it to me in the Arabic language, though in truth, seeing it in the language of its author would be the fulfillment of my desires. But my learned, honored interlocutor Rav Samuel ben Tibbon, our faithful companion, knowledgeable in every field, translated it as it came to him from the Rav into the sacred tongue, and he sent to me.

In this passage, Joseph characterizes himself as an interlocutor and correspondent of Samuel ibn Tibbon, establishing his own bona fides and aligning himself with the authorized translator and with word-for-word translation as the best method. And while he acknowledges that Samuel has translated the Treatise into Judaism’s “sacred tongue,” he remains unsatisfied with the translation; despite the hundreds of new Hebrew terms that the Tibbonid translators had coined for religious and philosophical concepts that had, before their work, been expressed and expressible only in Arabic, Joseph is still cognizant of the intellectual and cultural history of the language and writes that it would be “the fulfillment of my desires” to see the text in Arabic, proper, rather than in Arabizing Hebrew. He clearly values the Tibbonid project but also values the source texts as artifacts of the culture from which they emerged.

In order to fulfill his desires and spurred into action by an equally fictional friend, Joseph sits down to make a re-translation into Arabic and corrals that friend into helping him. The narrator speaks directly to the addressee of his preface, a friend who, within the fictional framework of the text, had also sent him a copy of Maimonides’ Treatise; he notes that his friend, whom he refers to as a lover of literature –an amateur in the most literal sense of the word– was the one who first asks him to translate the work from Hebrew


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into Arabic. He establishes his own principles of translation, defends them, and corrals his friend into a partnership in translation, saying:

So an amateur [’ohev] and friend from the congregation of the cultured asked me to return it to its origins in the Arabic language… Any translation that is not based on a solid foundation will go over the head of the reader who cannot understand its contents. But here it is set out before you, and how good and pleasing it would be should you find it meritorious, and how much more so if you could be an editor for me and help to correct the distortions that come from the duplication of its words and to fill in the lacunae of the language and the shortcomings that threaten to overtake it. You will help me, o, the pure-hearted amateur, according to the code of our friendship, and it will be for you to judge every deed and account for every misdeed; and the concerns of the amateur will be illuminated at the fount of reason. From time immemorial, we have known that the first goal of every translator in his translation is the subject matter, which is the pillar upon which the whole building will stand. And he has to take the plain sense of the parts of the language –the words of which he is translating– and to gather them together, in complete form, in the language into which he is translating and to dress it up in garments that make clear every word that guides it completely. And if it is possible to continue every action like this, to translate word for word, then the expressions poured out will be clear, and this is the fulfillment of all the goals of this effort. In this vein, it is incorrect for the translator to pursue words according to his own reasoning and to turn his eyes away from the subject matter, lest there be loss of the matter but preservation of its accidental qualities. As such, I have chosen, for this translation of mine, to privilege the words so that they are caught up in clarity and approximate keeping together

This passage, especially the attention to the solid foundations of translation, is characteristic of the careful, if confused, attention given throughout the text to questions of language and to operative and alternative modes and theories of translation. Joseph places a premium upon Samuel’s preferred method of translation, namely working word-for-word. Here, Joseph hedges, though. He goes on to write that it is not up to the translator to interpret the text for himself, a comment which, taken alone, would seem to conform to adopting a word-for-word position; but the final clause and the following sentence contradict it. Joseph qualifies his comment about the limits of the


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translator’s brief by modifying his devotion to word-for-word work: If the translator relies upon it too heavily, Joseph explains, all that will be left of the original text will be its accidental qualities, that is, the syntactical and grammatical shape of the text, without its inherent characteristics, that is, the content and the ideas it expresses. Joseph concludes by reasserting the value of words and his intention to translate word-for-word, cautiously. In this passage, Joseph admires and supports Samuel ibn Tibbon and asserts, over and over, his love for Arabic; but he simply cannot go as far as Samuel ever did. Word-for-word translation is best, but not when it destroys the ideas of Arabic philosophy and Islamicate theology conveyed in the source texts.

That is not the only instance of the text hedging or backtracking. The retranslations back and forth also necessitate machinations within a consideration of the historical-material record and the way that the constructs of the fiction relate to it. Despite the fact that Joseph claims to have access to Samuel ibn Tibbon’s first translation of the Treatise into Hebrew, his opening paragraph of his own introduction to the text introduces yet another retranslation. First there was the Treatise in Arabic; then the aforementioned “one who… did not clear away the stones from the path” translated it into Hebrew. But then, Joseph tells us that an unnamed group:

translated it from our tongue to the Arabic language with lovely expressions and nice words, emptying it from vessel to vessel; and thus it proceeded in exile until someone would redeem it. Now, we have translated it into the sacred language and it has come around again to the place where its tents originally stood, and the Torah returned to its lodging.

The only one of these translations for which we have a historical record is the first one, Samuel ibn Tibbon’s. (We also know of a second, parallel translation that is not reflected in this fictional sequence of translation back and forth; that other rival translation made by Judah al-Ḥarīzī is documented in one manuscript witness.) The material record of the preface betrays its fictional construct. In both of the surviving manuscripts, the preface comes before a Hebrew translation of the text rather that the supposed Arabic one that Joseph tells us he was sitting down to prepare and to which his


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discourse was meant to be the preface. Furthermore, even during a period of time when the loss of libraries was accentuated by Jews burning their own books, culminating in the Maimonidean auto de fé of 1232, it is difficult to believe that so much loss –four recensions in the space of half a century!– could have occurred so quickly and so permanently. The fictional construct of the text is less a comment on medieval book culture and more a way for an anonymous author immersed in it to explore the relationship between languages, and sacred and secular writing, and the nature of Jewish religious practice in al-Andalus and in its doubly-constructed exile in Provence and elsewhere in Europe.

The most Andalusi cast of characters that populate this preface –Samuel ibn Tibbon, Judah al-Ḥarīzī and Moses Maimonides, not to mention the two literary alter-egos of ahistorical ghosts whose names contain onomastic elements characteristic of the names of Andalusi Jews in Provence– further places this text in the cultural orbit of al-Andalus even as it was most likely composed in its diaspora, at a distance, and by an admirer of Andalusi literary culture rather than a full participant in it. The narrative of this preface talks about five versions of the text, the original plus four translations back and forth between Arabic and Hebrew: Samuel ibn Tibbon’s translation of Maimonides’ original into Hebrew, made without “clear[ing] the stones from the path”; the translation by the anonymous “they” into Arabic “with lovely expressions”; the version that brought it back into Hebrew –a language that Joseph at that point characterizes as “our tongue” as distinct from Arabic– in a fraught move that complicates notions of the sacred and of religious identity, and finally, the translation that Joseph was sitting down to prepare at the behest of his friend.

What Joseph seeks to retrieve from the flames of the book pyres and from the inertia of diasporic forgetting is the Arabic language itself. Even though he calls Hebrew “our tongue,” Arabic is clearly his tongue, too. Joseph describes the first Arabic retranslation made from the first Hebrew translation as an exilic state for the text and calls the possibility of its retranslation into Hebrew the text’s redemptive potential. However, the narrator’s linguistic predilections, both for literary-aesthetic and theological purposes, are not


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so clear cut. He tells his reader, as we have seen already, that it would be the “fulfillment of my desires” to see the Treatise in Arabic –in any Arabic form, whether that was Maimonides’ original mellifluous Arabic or an increasingly babel-ish retranslation based upon a translation. A sophisticated play-on-words, characteristic of the opening lines of this preface (and likewise and uncoincidentally characteristic of the work of the historical translators whom Joseph implicates in his narrative) complicates the religious dimension of Joseph’s preference for Arabic. Although he writes that a retranslation into Hebrew would represent redemption of the text from his exile, he describes that ultimate retranslation with an inescapable double entendre: The sense of the text being returned to its beginnings when it “comes around again” is rendered with the Hebrew phrase ḥazar ḥalilah which, through a pernicious homophony, also evokes the sense “turned into a sacrilege”. The Hebrew language as both redemption and sacrilege stands in sharp contrast with the unqualified good, secular and religious, that is the Arabic language. In a brief comparative history of the languages Joseph is critical of the inability of Hebrew to express all of the philosophical, scientific and religious ideas that Maimonides committed to writing:

As the boundaries of Arabic widened, the footsteps of Hebrew became too close together to keep up with it. None of it [the text] remains in our hands, not even a little bit. But rather, this translation has come down to us, complex and enigmatic, and the forms of its subject matter were foolish: held up in the marshes of their words and caught up in their corruptness.

Arabic is a vast open space in which sophisticated ideas can be articulated with precision and it is sacred while Hebrew is a corrupt, mucky, narrow passageway.

Samuel’s great complaint about the relationship of Arabic to Hebrew is the same as Joseph ben Joel’s: For Samuel, the languages are not similar enough and he often laments, in his translator’s notes and prefaces, changes he was forced to make as concessions to grammatical correctness. For Joseph, Hebrew is too unlike Arabic to be useful in expressing religious ideas. Furthermore, they use virtually identical terms to articulate their opposing discomforts, with the author of the preface to the Treatise perhaps even


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drawing upon Samuel’s earlier writing about his life and work as a translator.

However, a crucial difference emerges: while Joseph writes about the increasing narrowness of Hebrew, Samuel, in his commentary on the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, writes about the narrow path down which Arab poets had forced themselves:

I have written all this for you because it seems that at the time of David and Solomon, their poems were of this sort, for their poems will not be found to contain either meter or rhyme. It might well be said that in this their poems had an advantage over those that are produced nowadays, because their path was not so narrow. They could set forth in their poetry exactly the meaning they wished to set forth and in its complete form. But nowadays [poets] have accepted upon themselves many preconditions, things they must do or avoid doing, and have thus greatly narrowed the path before them so that they cannot move to the right or to the left. This leads them to force [the meanings of the words], to abbreviate and leave out, and they permit themselves [to say] foolish things. All of this leads them to destroy the meanings, or at least to make them difficult to understand. I have written at length about this in order to honor the poems of David and Solomon and establish means to defend them. (trans. James T. Robinson)

Paradoxically, Samuel is able to say this while creating Hebrew renditions of Arabic-language philosophical and religious texts that, in the literalness of their translation, are Arabizing to the point of unreadability. He is able to defend biblical poetry with a poetics deeply grounded in the Arabic-language poetics developed and modified by the Jews of al-Andalus. Explicitly and implicitly, Arabic is the language of culture and the language of disseminating powerful ideas. Thus, one of the ways to write later about the dissemination of ideas about resurrection in the wake of Maimonides’ death is to tie it, as Joseph does, to the rivalry between Judah al-Ḥarīzī and Samuel ibn Tibbon, competing for control in spreading esoteric ideas: debates over which translation will spread those ideas and the prestige of Judaeo-Arabic culture and language becomes a proxy for ambivalences over death and the possibility of life thereafter.

Ultimately this fictive preface to the Treatise on the Doctrine of Resurrection articulates two relationships: One in which the Arabic language is crucial


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to a sense of religious-national identity for Andalusi Jews, and the other in which acts of translation and retranslation are made parallel to vivification and revivification. As in much of the literature to emerge from al-Andalus and influenced by its literary trends, Hebrew never cleanly or simply signifies Judaism while Arabic, even more so, is never wholly correlated to Islam; rather, authors –Arabophone Andalusi Jewish authors, in this instance– navigated a complex palette of religion and religious principles and the language in which those might be delineated. The preface reflects the evolving and resolving tensions between Jewish readers and the sacral status of Arabic and Hebrew within Islam and Judaism. As narrator, Joseph’s allegiance is to the Arabic language, no matter whether it was Maimonides’ Arabic or that of a translator. A close reading of the preface reveals the importance of fidelity to the language for the narrator. By the dawn of the fourteenth century, building upon the work of those who came before him, Joseph has wholly inverted the relationship between language and religion that emerged at the origins of Islam and the early Jewish responses to it. For Jewish readers and writers, that relationship and their relationship to the Arabic language began to elide very early on with Jewish readers initially reacting forcefully against the claims that Arabic was not only a sacred language but the one divine one, moving to adopting Arabic as a liturgical language as early as the ninth century, lowering the hackles that were raised at the initial perceived challenge to their sacred tongue, wholly embracing the range of possibilities, sacred and secular, of Arabic.

Where our narrator stands out is only the degree to which he situates himself at the far end of that spectrum. For him, the Arabic language and reading in the Judaeo-Arabic canon is the key to the religious redemption that Maimonides’ learned thoughts on the doctrine of resurrection might offer. In an Islamicate setting, Hebrew is the one language that is never only one language while Arabic, notoriously multiglossic, becomes the metonym for linguistic and religious monolingualism. With this fictional translation history of Arabic retranslations that were dreamed up but never dreamed into existence, a scenario so wild and fanciful and nostalgic as to inspire a deep sense of pathos, Hebrew is the only language that our narrator could


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ever speak; but with its Arabizing inflection and literary underpinnings, Hebrew is never only just the one language. Hebrew is Arabic without being Arabic; translation is inherent in Joseph’s setup. He divorces the language of the text from the text itself and then seeks to rejoin them.

Joseph is in possession of the text, but he wants it to be in Arabic more than anything else. Any Arabic will do. For when Joseph cries out that Arabic is above all else, he is crying out for redemption and, wherever he is, for Spain.

***

This is not the only instance in which these three figures, remembered from al-Andalus, are marshaled into service in the context of a fictionalized transmission history that serves to weigh in from a somewhat later period on the Maimonidean controversies: The colophon of a Hebrew-language translation of a now-lost Arabic version of the Historia Proeliis, the Latin life of Alexander the Great, falsely implicates Samuel ibn Tibbon in the creation of that text, claiming that he translated it at the same time as he translated the Guide of the Perplexed, and condemning Judah al-Ḥarīzī for translating more freely, sense-for-sense. The colophon reads:

This book was completed, having been translated by the sage and the true investigator of the secrets of life and wisdom, R. Samuel bar Judah Ibn Tibbon (of blessed memory) of Rimon-Sefarad [Granada]; he translated it at the same time as he translated The Guide, which cannot be valued in the gold of Ofir. This book is found in the hands of few people in the translation of al-Ḥarīzī, which is very error-ridden because he adapted it from its language, but the excellent above-mentioned translator (let his recompense be complete!) translated it from Arabic into Hebrew. Perfected and completed, praise be to the Lord of the Worlds. He alone is God and there is no other.

The italicized phrase –he adapted it from its language– is key in the contrast between Ibn Tibbon and al-Ḥarīzī as translators. The anonymous author of this colophon praises Samuel for his word-for-word translation that preserves the ambiguities of the original text and the particularities of the Arabic language while condemning his rival Judah for adapting, that is, translating sense-for-sense in a way that necessarily distorts the original language in the interest of intelligibility in the related but unidentical target


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tongue.

This colophon comes at the end of a life of Alexander the Great, the all-things-to-all-men literary and historical figure par excellence, made local, current, and unrecognizable by every new teller of his tales and singer of his songs; and here, this life of Aristotle’s most famous pupil becomes the locus for a referendum on disseminating Arabic Aristotelianism in translation. In this Hebrew Alexander romance, the hero returns to Babylon to slay Darius –to effect his death– via Provence, cutting a fatal swath through the land of Samuel ibn Tibbon’s inherited exile from al-Andalus and the focal site of Joseph’s nostalgia. Alexander’s is a foundational tale in every time and place; for the anonymous colophonist, and by extension for the anonymous author of Joseph’s preface, he is a local harbinger of doom and translation. The notion of Alexander as a Levinasian meditation upon death, one that “should have functioned as a kind of symbolic tool to help Iberian writers and readers to work through and confront the awful limitations imposed by the disruptive alterity of various forms of the Other –and mortality itself ”(Barletta 17)– pulls this colophon and its text –otherwise not too preoccupied with the deaths of Darius or Alexander or with whether Maimonides believed literally in the bodily resurrection of the dead– into that same orbit of death and translation as the operative mode of discourse for Andalusi writers and their readers in exile.

***

Death in Babylon and Provence give way to death and resurrection in Babel. Medieval readers and writers frequently conflicted the biblical toponyms Babel and Babylon and all that those topoi contained and encompassed. We modern readers are under no obligation to read our sources as their medieval readers did nor to adopt their literary confusion as our own, but it is our own: as in Derrida’s reading of Voltaire, simply invoking the name evinces confusion. What’s more, here the threads of death and language –resurrection and translation– run intertwined through both, binding together a modern “Babylonian Babel” that exists in literary parallel to the medieval one. Babel may be an accurate metaphor for this particular


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redemptive role of Arabic in the memory of medieval literature, implying as it does that all language contact is a product of the torpor of the sacred. But it is also a facile and overworked shorthand for the rendering of tongues and death and tragedy conjoined to language. So, too, is resurrection-as-translation a superficial equivalency that suggests itself in all of these texts, an easy way out.

Joseph is located outside of the Andalusi and Iberian literary canons, even if we read within their broadest parameters –remarkably still contested fully three decades after the publication of The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History and more than half a century after Américo Castro tried to make us see and accept the realidad histórica of the literary and linguistic situation in which multilingualism and free flow were the norms– but the canon contains other examples of these same relationships. But where Ramón Llull, for example, writes about translation as a manifestation of revelation that, in falling away miraculously approximates death, Joseph sees it as an act of redemption that should never have been made necessary. Within this framework, translation is tantamount to redemption. But if translation is redemption, it is not resurrection, despite the easy reach in this text from one to the other.

Translation is not resurrection. Translation is hardly even a metaphor for resurrection: if it is at all, then it is, unironically, a dead metaphor. It is an easy metaphor, a facile one, a metaphor turned metonym. But it is the ease of that metaphor that makes resurrection the playing field upon which points about translation can be made and scored and contested. By revisiting –obsessionally, creatively, fictionally– translation on the plane of resurrection, the text elevates its own translated self to the level of life and death; suddenly translation matters more than acculturation and more than assimilated religious polemic that has become the local, hybrid, mode of cultural production. The most intense quiddity of that local culture, unique in the supersession and transcendence of its once- and fleetingly-separate component parts. Within that framework, Judaism and Arabic literature combine to speak al-Andalus. Suddenly, Arabic matters not even because it is a path to resurrection but because it is on a par with it.


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If translation is not resurrection, if retranslation upon retranslation irrespective of the practical linguistic needs of readers who are the most whatever-it-is that they are, then nor is it xenoglossia, at least not in the conventional sense of a speaker or writer finding himself in the unrelenting, unyielding grasp of a language he did know he knew; it is more literal that, relating to a language because it is at once foreign and one’s own and in a sense where the possession is not only linguistic but religious as well: Joseph’s memory of Andalusi Arabic is a zombified marshaling, more undead than fully revived, of literal uses of the doctrine of resurrection and the doctrine of Arabic as God’s language simply taken on as a plain-sense transferrable fact from Islam to Judaism: Arabic as a literary and liturgical language because Arabic is a literary and liturgical language, rather than the earlier Andalusi formulation in which Arabic was a literary and liturgical language because generations of machinations made it possible for that to be so and to be acceptable. This xenoglossic production is, as conventional xenoglossic production (if such a thing can be said to exist), necessarily monolingual. It speaks Hebrew as though it were Arabic to speak about the Arabic no longer accepted in a Spain that had already ceased to exist. Even absent, Arabic is the only language.

Arabic is the necessary catalyst for redemption and resurrection. The dissolution of the Arabic language and the culture and prestige it encoded is a kind of death, and living on in legend or through a divine vita nuova is but a seductive textual fantasy. And so when that early-modern hidalgo of the canon –that son of something (or other)– lies down on his bed, disillusioned, to die and to never again be resurrected by any false Tordesillan writer, but to live on in the literary present tense of once and future readers, his death rattle is a cry and a lament for Spain, bound in tight. There is nothing left to live for now that the promise and narrative of the Arabic manuscript has ended and that very particular Spanish partner of resurrection –the Arabic language itself– is a closed book, a closed canon, and a closed gate.


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Readings and Sources, or Works (Not) CitedThis intervention in the fields of translation theory, Judaeo-Arabic literature and Hispanic studies was intended to be as much a nod to María Rosa Menocal’s "Writing Without Footnotes" as to her The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History; as much as an exploration of her principled manifesto of footnotelessness and readable, thoughtful, creative academic prose as one of the roles that Arabic plays in medieval literature against the literary-historical backdrop that she worked so tirelessly to tie into place. In Shards of Love, the book that made her name in the widest literary-critical circles, and more recently in The Arts of Intimacy, she wrote bibliographic essays containing “readings and sources” that were meant to be bibliographies rather more in the ponderous, discursive mode of the medieval glossators and in the mode of Erich Auerbach, authentic in exile without his library, than in the mode of the conventional scholarly apparatus that leaves a trail of crumbs so that the scholarly traveler will never find herself in exile but will, at the same time, offer her tradition and received wisdom as a crutch and brick her into the walls of her own discipline, a modern invention that may well not serve the study of the medieval. The bibliographic essays have been roundly criticized as being unscholarly and untraceable by medievalists who routinely trace down their favorite medieval scholars’ uncited quotations and encounter other texts and ideas along the way. This is one of those all-too-common instances in which literary and intellectual needs are at odds with the profession, but in this case it would be wholly inappropriate to do anything but to serve the former. Let this essay not count and let it curry disdain from historians and from very serious scholars of literature, so long as it might also (inshallah) honor and implement, at least on a small scale, what María sought to effect on a broader and wider scale intellectually and professionally, together.

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First, a word about the works it was necessary to cite directly to facilitate discussion of them: Citations from Joseph ben Joel’s preface are based upon Neubauer 2496 (Adolph Neubauer. Catalogue of the Hebrew Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. Oxford: UP: 1886) and upon Joshua Finkel’s 1938


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edition that appears as Appendix B in his edition of Maimonides’ Treatise on Resurrection (Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 9 (1938): 64ff). The last few lines of the text exist in a second edition now housed at the National Library of Israel, MS Hebrew Octavo 3941. Finkel’s edition faithfully replicates some orthographic oddities of the Oxford manuscript and as such, must be handled with as much caution as the hand-written copy; a new edition of this text is sorely needed.

The unique colophon to the Hebrew Alexander romance is found on folio 35v of the manuscript now known as Beinecke Hebrew Suppl. MS 103, referred to in scholarship published prior to 2000 as Jews’ College London MS 145. The work reflected here was carried out on the basis of the manuscript and Wout van Bekkum’s edition of the text: A Hebrew Alexander Romance According to MS London Jews’ College 145. (Louvain: Peeters, 1992). The preface of Samuel ibn Tibbon’s commentary on the book of Ecclesiastes, edited by Ruth Ben-Meir appears in Maimonidean Studes 4 (2000):13–44; James T. Robinson edited the complete commentary (PhD Diss., Harvard University, 2002) and his edition of the commentary on the first verse of Ecclesiastes appears in Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, vol. 3 (ed. Isadore Twersky. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000. 83–146). Here I cited the translation of Samuel ibn Tibbon’s Commentary on Ecclesiastes made by Robinson (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), the original text edition of which is found in Robinson’s PhD dissertation (Harvard, 1997). All other translations are my own.

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The fact of this text as a fiction, a presupposition that underpins this work and is taken for granted by my analysis of the text, is not a point that goes undebated in the limited amount of scholarly literature that treats this text. My analysis has assumed the fictional character of the text, a feature that will be discussed in far greater detail in the final chapter of my forthcoming monograph. To summarize briefly here: It shares certain characteristics with the humorously instructive anecdotes in Hebrew and Arabic known as maqāmāt, particularly in the nature of the relationship between the narrator


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and his picaresque interlocutor (for more on this, see James T. Monroe. The Art of Badī‘ al-Zamān as Picaresque Narrative. Beirut: AUB Press, 1983), the literary-linguistic tropes employed, and the form of the text itself, although perhaps not definitively enough for this to be a productive way to characterize the text. Precise modes or genres to which the text belongs aside, though, the simple conceit of the text –the number, pace and nature of the retranslations– places it firmly in the realm of fiction.

The editio princeps of the preface was made by Moritz Steinschneider and appears in the hard-to-find journal Israelitische Letterbode 8 (1882): 99; he further references it in Die Arabishe Literatur Der Juden. Kaufmann: Frankfurt-am-Maim (1902): 210. In his storied Hebraische Ubersetzungen, Steinchneider concluded that the text was simply “something that perplexes us completely” (ed. and trans., Charles Manekin. Leiden: Brill, forthcoming.) In his study of the Treatise on Resurrection, Finkel gives the text the earliest treatment that we might begin to describe as comprehensive, although the overwhelming part of the pages devoted to the preface (79–85) is composed of bewildered rhetorical questions about its character, origins, and purpose. Unlike Steinschneider, who considered the text to be a factual, if deeply flawed, accounting of events surrounding the production, dissemination, and translation of the Treatise on the Doctrine of Resurrection Finkel recognized the work for what it is: a work of fiction. However, later scholars read with Steinschneider, including David Zvi Baenth who, in his article “Judah al-Ḥarīzī and the Chain of Translations”, Tarbiẓ 10 (1942): 135–54, even went as far as to attribute the text to al-Ḥarīzī on historical grounds in spite of the overwhelming stylistic evidence that points away from al-Ḥarīzī as the author. Bernard Septimus, in his Hispano-Jewish Culture in Transition (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982), would also ultimately read with the factual school of thought regarding Joseph ben Joel’s preface, not only on the basis of the argument made by Baneth but also because the preface “tallies nicely with what we know from Ramah’s Sanhedrin commentary” (54). However, it is important to distinguish between a text that draws in details of a real situation and a historical accounting; in other words, even if the Arabic were available, the execution of five translations back and forth within the space

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of well under a century makes this out to be a work of fiction, even if it is grounded in reality and even if some of the details jibe.

The formal distinction is important but reading this text as a work of fiction does not diminish the power of its comment on a lived cultural and linguistic set of experiences. Short, humorous, character-driven rhymed prose anecdotes, in particular, represent a sort of “cult of truth”, as one might have it. In an overview of the form (“The Maqāma”, Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: The Literature of al-Andalus, ed. María Rosa Menocal, et al. Cambridge: UP, 2000.) Rina Drory observed that literary prose fiction is ultimately “a literary model that, although claiming to be fictional, nevertheless based on faithfully reporting reality”. As an example of the first approach to mediating between history and fiction, the preface to the Treatise on Resurrection reports the reality of the ongoing debate over the relative merits of Ibn Tibbon’s and al-Ḥarīzī’s translations of the Guide by inventing a fictional history for another of Maimonides’ texts that they both translated. Touching on a wide variety of the issues relating to proto-national, religious and linguistic identity that arose as readers chose between the two translations –particularly the stylized arguments over the merits of Arabic and Hebrew, the twin questions of exile and redemption, and even the question of the value of translated literature and the preservation of texts in the original– the preface mediates between word-for-word and sense-for-sense translation as much as it does between the veritable incarnations of these two approaches in the forms of Ibn Tibbon and al-Ḥarīzī. Although it ultimately largely comes down in support of the Tibbonid approach to translation, its careful mediation of the two positions is reflective of the way in which the two translations were received –with enthusiasm each by one of two distinct sets of literary partisans.

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The debates in which the preface intervenes are twofold, both largely subsumed under the broad heading of “Maimonidean controversies”. For historical background, begin with a slightly older but still-valuable work by Daniel Jeremy Silver: Maimonidean Criticism and the Maimonidean



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Controversy (Leiden: Brill, 1965). In alluding just briefly to the notion of the prestige and value of Arabic for Andalusi Jews and Andalusi Jewish exiles, I am relying shamelessly upon my own work for my forthcoming book. Surely going from writing without footnotes to citing oneself is some kind of faux pas, but for the moment, until the book appears, I’ll ask you to trust that it is so.

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The assumptions that underpin this argument and even the ability to ask the kinds of questions that would ultimately lead to this study are contingent upon María Rosa Menocal’s The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987). It (and especially this bibliographic essay in place of a list of works cited) is also, obviously, dependent both formally and ideologically upon her “Writing Without Footnotes: The Role of the Medievalist in Contemporary Intellectual Life” (The Occasional Papers of the Bernardo Lecture Series 10, Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Binghamton, 2001); and, in daring to describe a medieval phenomenon as Borgesian, to From Borges to Bocaccio: Writing in Dante’s Cult of Truth (Raleigh: Duke UP, 1991).

For the broader theoretical discussion with which I conclude the article, I have chosen to read the texts through the lens of Jacques Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other (trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford: UP, 1998); it is perhaps especially useful because it examines the linguistic and national identities of a Jew between the Arab world and France. I also considered Derrida’s Des Tours de Babel, which appears in its English translation in A Derrida Reader Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia UP, 1991). Although I read it in the process of preparing this essay but did not draw upon it directly, another study that, in effect, posits a monolingual translation and languages that can only speak themselves about themselves and into themselves and is therefore worth mentioning is Zrinka Stahulijak’s “Medieval Fixers: Politics of Interpreting in Western Historiography” in Rethinking Medieval Translation, eds. Emma Campbell and Robert Mills. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012. 147–63.

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The references to Don Quijote (ed., Martín de Ríqer. Barcelona: Planeta, 1992) that frame this tale began as a way to help make my wondrously strange material relatable to my colleagues in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, but at their urging I took it farther, drawing in not only my own initial discussion of fictionally-lost fictitious manuscripts but also using Alonso Quijano’s book-sorry, depraved death as one more example in the more canonical works of the ties between death, theological and literary life after death, and lost books written in Arabic characters.

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And finally, the phrase “life given twice” was María’s own. I’ve cited my source; I’ll let you find the reference yourself should you ever need it. Vale.

Versions of this work were presented in a variety of forms and forums during the summer and fall of 2013. I am particularly grateful to David Nirenberg and James Robinson for their feedback during the symposium “The Cultural Worlds of a Medieval Translator” at the University of Chicago; to Ross Brann for his ever-thoughtful reading and discussion of the forthcoming book chapter upon which this essay is loosely based; to my NYU colleagues, to whom I presented this work at the faculty research workshop of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, among them especially Gabriela Basterra, Georgina Dopico-Black and James Fernández, for their provocative questions and their enthusiasm for broad-minded Hispanism; and to the participants in the Mediterranean Seminar workshop on translation held at UC-Berkeley, particularly Sharon Kinoshita, Zrinka Stahuljak, and David Wacks for their feedback and conversation. This study is, naturally, dedicated to María Rosa Menocal's memory; would that it did not have to be.


In a Better and Older Language: The Redemptive Potential of Arabic and Its Translated Fictions

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