Feb 26 Brennan Corrigan

 I found Huda Fakhreddine's talk to be one of the most enjoyable we have had so far. She made an important point about how Arabic literature is "at the mercy of translators" unlike the canonized works, or the canonized languages. She was also very good at helping us hear the poetic sound of the Arabic text.

I don't think I agree with her idea about lineation; that it can be used when other methods of poetic organization (rhyme, meter) are not available. To me, lineation just highlights the fact that those things are not present. Here, though, the lineation probably also serves her target audience of Arabic speakers who prefer to read in English rather than "Classical" Arabic. The lineation matches up to the search text, making the two easier to compare.

I asked her a question about the accessibility of the Mu'allaqāt to modern readers; whether the language had changed to such a degree that it would be difficult for a speaker of Modern Standard Arabic to engage with them. She said she had never heard of the idea of a Modern Standard before she came to America. I still wonder what she meant by this, because linguists hold Arabic as one of the best examples of diglossia; a Standard variety and several nonstandard varieties employed contrastively in different social situations. I would like to know more about this from the Arabic faculty here. Still, she answered my question in a way that I understood, saying that a native speaker would need a dictionary to engage with it.

I read Harker, on foreignization in Japanese. He says of Venuti,

"His description of the foreignizing text (experimentation, polyvalencies or plurivocalities, discontinuities, the play of the signifier) betrays his preference for the ‘writerly’ text and his instinctive suspicion of anything too accessible and mainstream."

"...residual elitist tendencies in Venuti’s advocacy of the foreignizing translation. Venuti’s relentlessly fluent prose – fluent, at least, in an academic context – suggests that his embrace of formal experimenta- tion is more symbolic than disruptive, a necessary gesture in a politicized theoretical environment."

We saw how pervasive this in Chad Post's talk, where he discussed how translations don't sell well because translation presses are interested only in the "important" and "High Modernist" works. If I remember correctly, Dr. Elliot commented that Ken Liu might be the first science fiction author the BU Translation Series has ever hosted. I really like "fluent, at least, in an academic context". There are multiple Englishes, and maybe we need to deal with the Greco-Latinate log in our own eye before picking out all the specks in other translators.

I wrote the above before finding THIS:

“So let the masses have their Masscult, let the few who care about good writing, painting, music, architec- ture, philosophy, etc., have their High culture, and don’t fuzz up the distinction with Midcult.”

(in Rubin 1992:xv).

I can't believe anyone actually published that. Well, I can, but that just makes it worse.

I also read Dimitrova. She says an important feature of dialects is "they tend to exist almost exclusively in oral form. Any written forms of them are very restricted in use and often tend to be created anew every time there is occasion for their use". This is becoming less and less true. In my undergrad years, I studied this exact phenomenon in Swiss German. The local dialect is being used on Twitter and other social media sites, both by individuals for casual tweets, and by organizations that want to signal Swiss identity. (So, similar reasons why authors use dialect, according to Dimitrova.) Mahmoud Qudah (2016) has shown that speakers of Jordanian Arabic will use their local dialect when texting or tweeting close associates, then switch to MSA for formal communication or when a wider audience is desired.

At least in the Swiss German example, the dialect is written phonologically. Eventually, I have to imagine someone from one of these communities will base dialog in a novel off of conventions that evolved organically online. At that point, the author's choice will not be between (1) not representing dialect or (2) inventing a way to represent dialect, but (1) representing dialect the community way (2) representing it in an invented way (3) not representing it. In the future, I wonder if English text-speak will be able to receive translation from foreign dialect.