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Conference Announcement Theme: Translation and the Languages of Islam Subtitle: Indo-Persian tarjuma in a Comparative Perspective Type: 4th Perso-Indica Conference Institution: Perso-Indica Project Centre for South Asian Studies, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) Location: Paris (France) Date: 8.–9.12.2016 __________________________________________________ On the occasion of the 4th international conference of the Perso-Indica project (http://www.perso-indica.net/), we would like to consider our main object of research—the Persian translations and original works bearing on Indic cultures — in a wider perspective than has generally been the case. We aim to do so by comparing the Indo-Persian movement of translation that took place in the subcontinent from the 13th century onwards with other processes of translations operating primarily from and to non-Muslim languages (e.g. Greek, Syriac, Pehlevi, Sanskrit into Arabic, etc.; Arabic into Latin; Greek into Ottoman Turkish, etc.) and, secondarily, between different languages of Muslim societies (e. g. Arabic into Persian, Turkish, Malay, Sub-Saharan languages, etc.; Persian into Urdu, Turkish, Malay etc.). We therefore invite contributions bearing on such movements of translation in different regions of the Muslim world between the 7th and 19th centuries, and highlighting the ways in which each specific translation process articulated the relation between source, “bridge” and target languages. Within this broad frame of comparison, we more specifically invite each contributor to provide elements of reflection on at least one of the following questions: - Translated: What was the literary form (prose, poetry) of the original text and to what literary genre or tradition did it (or was it considered to) belong? Which field(s) of knowledge did it cover? How popular was it in the society and time in which it was written? - Translator(s): Who is translating? An individual: if so, is translation part of his everyday job, is he a professional cultural broker such as the well-known Ottoman dragomans? Is, on the contrary, translation an accident in his professional trajectory geared towards other activities, be they intellectual or not? Is the translator part of a group specialized in translation: does he, for instance, belong to a “bureau” of translation or to a family/lineage renowned for its multilingualism and its abilities as cultural go-between? Is the translator a collective and, if so, what do we know of the dynamics and tensions at work in the process of translation? More generally, what are the networks (social, intellectual, economic, religious, political) in which the translator participates? In paying particular attention to the identity (both individual and collective) of the agents of translation, the idea is here to sketch a contrasted socio-intellectual history of the translators active in the pre-colonial Muslim world. - Patron(s) of translation: Is the translation a personal initiative undertaken for personal reasons? Is the translation the result of a commission by an individual or an institution? If so, what do we know of the relation between the translator and his patron prior and after the translation? How was the translator selected and on what criteria? What, if any, were the material conditions (salary, linguistic training, library, etc.) provided by the patron for the realization of the translation? How much involved was the patron in the composition of the translation (e.g. checking its progress, editing passages, etc.) and on which aspects (if any) of the process did he intervene? - Purpose(s) of translation: If every translation is as such a scholarly effort and may be said to partake in the long run in a general epistemic endeavor, the projects and processes of knowledge building in which many of them were framed need careful examination in order to uncover the function(s) assigned to the texts once they were translated and, by the same token, to understand the idiosyncrasies of each translation. In other words: why was a particular text selected for translation in a particular time and place and what was/were the (political, religious, social, scientific) role(s) assigned to the translated text by the translator and/or his patron? While the purposes of translations in the Muslim world were of course multiple, particular attention will be paid here to the ones that were commissioned as part of state- or empire-building and to those that were conceived in a missionary perspective of conversion/in a spirit of proselytism and even of conversion. - Process and tool(s) of translation: Unveiling the purpose(s) of translation is crucial in order to understand its process and the multiple transformations it entailed at the levels of literary form and genre, language and signification. Bringing the why into light will certainly help us better explain and circumscribe the how and ultimately allow us to lay out a number of correspondences between the purpose assigned to a translation and the methods used for its realization or the type of translation produced as a result. Closely connected to the question of process is the issue of the linguistic and philological instruments and resources available in the society in which the translator was active: what were the dictionaries, glossaries, grammars, etc. at hand when the translator started his work? Did he know of their existence? If so, did he use some of them and how? - Audience, reception and circulation of translation: How was the translation received by its targeted audience, especially by its patron in the case of commissioned works? How widely did it circulate in contemporary Muslim societies and beyond, and through which specific networks? Did it become a “source” for later translations in other languages, especially in other languages of Islam and in European languages? Studying the afterlife of such translations in both the Muslim world and Europe is crucial to put in perspective and in dialogue the Orientalist traditions they respectively built. In this respect, a particular important question is the appropriation by Western scholarship of translations composed in an Islamicate context: how were these translations understood by European intellectuals and colonial administrators and what was the role (and visibility) of such translations in the latter’s knowledge-building on the society to which the “Ur-text” belonged or on the language in which it was originally written? Program Thursday, 8 December 2016 9:30-10:00: Corinne Lefèvre (CNRS) & Fabrizio Speziale (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3): Introduction 1) Longue durée and comparative perspectives 10:00-10:30 Cristina d’Ancona (Università di Pisa): In horizonte aeternitatis et temporis: Greek, Arabic, Latin 10:30-11:00 Shankar Nair (University of Virginia): Translation in the Time of Prophecy: Greek and Sanskrit Knowledge in the Islamic Prophetic Context 11:00-11:30 Discussion 11:30-11:45 Coffee break 11:45-12:15 Maria Mavroudi (UC Berkeley): Byzantine translations from Arabic into Greek 12:15-12:45 Blake Smith (Northern University-EHESS): From Dara to Deussen: Anquetil Duperron's Oupnekhat between Mughal and European Orientalisms 12:45-13:15 Discussion 13:15-14:45 Lunch 2) Translation and religious encounters 14:45-15:15 Muzaffar Alam (University of Chicago): ‘Umar Mihrabi’s Hujjat al-Hind 15:15-15:45 Ines G. Županov (CNRS): From Abgar to Akbar: Jesuit Translation and Accommodation of the Life of Jesus 15:45-16:15 Discussion 16:15-16:30 Coffee break 16:30-17:00 Carl Ernst (University of North Carolina): Disentangling the Different Persian Translations of The Pool of Nectar (Amrtakunda) 17:00-17:30 Alberto Fabio-Ambrosio (CETOBAC/LSRS Luxembourg School of Religion & Society): The Ottoman Pool of Water of Life 17:30-18:00 Discussion Friday, 9 December 2016 3) Genre and translation 9:30-10:00 Natalie Rothman (University of Toronto): Making Ottoman Historicity Legible: Dragomans, Istanbulite Diplomacy, and Ottoman-Italian Translations in the Seventeenth Century 10:00-10:30 Audrey Truschke (Rutgers University): Translating Indian History: Mughal Genre Expectations of the Sanskrit Epics 10:30-11:00 Discussion 11:00-11:30 Coffee break 11:30-12:00 Pegah Shahbaz (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3): Persian Sight of the Indian Insight: Pañcatantra Tradition through Translation and Retranslation 12:00-12:30 Anna Martin & Maximilian Mehner (Philipps-Universität Marburg): Vīraratnaśekharaśikhā: Sahib Rām’s adaptation of Kāšifī’s Aḫlāq-i Muḥsinī 12:30-13:00 Discussion 13:00-14:30 Lunch 4) Multilingualism, orality and vernacular cultures 14:30-15:00 Walter N. Hakala (University at Buffalo, SUNY): Revisiting “How Newness Enters the World”: The Semantic Strategies of Inclusion, Identification, and Displacement in Hindvī Vocabularies 15:00-15:30 Dror Weil (Princeton University): Persian’s Eastern Frontier: The Translation of Persian Texts in Late Imperial China, 17th-18th centuries 15:30-16:00 Rajeev Kinra (Northwestern University): Cosmopolitan Maintenance in a Vernacular World: Sources, Methods, and Multilingualism in Farhang-i Jahangiri (1608) 16:00-16:45 Discussion 16:45-17:00 Coffee break 17:00-17:30 Tal Tamari (CNRS): The Culture of Translation in West Africa: Arabic and Regional Languages, From the Written to the Oral and Back Again 17:30-18:00 Marc Toutant (CETOBAC): Translating Persian into Turkic at the Court of the Khivan Khans 18:00-18:30 Discussion 18:30 Concluding remarks by Eva Orthmann (Universität Bonn) and general discussion Venue: CEIAS (Centre for South Asian Studies, EHESS-CNRS) 190 avenue de France 75013 Paris Scientific coordination: Corinne Lefèvre (CNRS, co.lefe...@gmail.com) Fabrizio Speziale (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, spezia...@yahoo.com) Contact: Corinne Lefèvre & Fabrizio Speziale Email: co.lefe...@gmail.com Web: http://www.perso-indica.net/events-news/28 __________________________________________________ InterPhil List Administration: https://interphil.polylog.org InterPhil List Archive: https://www.mail-archive.com/interphil@list.polylog.org/ __________________________________________________
