THE ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS
Any literary work in which rhythm and metaphor play a key role poses a challenge to the translator, and ʿAlī’s words have been described as “easy yet impossible” to mimic (sahl mumtaniʿ). As such, they are arguably some of the most difficult Arabic texts to translate. The language is for the most part deceptively simple, with straightforward syntax and a commonly used lexicon (common, at least, for ʿAlī’s time). Individual words are often unproblematic to translate on their own, but when strung together, the deeper meaning of the sentence is not so easy to convey. The Arabic text is pithy, and maintaining a similar succinctness in translation is difficult. Furthermore, the texts are poetically dense, abounding in culturally specific idioms and historical allusions, whereas English has a wholly different set of associations. A translator has to navigate treacherous waters, for unlike a commentator, she must select just one rendering to convey a host of meanings, a rendering that best articulates the substance of the original yet makes sense to an audience whose cultural background is quite different. On the one hand, it is important to use an idiom that resonates with the English reader. On the other, it is also important to retain raw and graphic expressions, and to translate metaphors literally, rather than interpreting them away into hollow abstractions that dilute the cultural specificity of the original.
Keeping these larger issues in mind, I have striven for sentence to sentence translation, rather than word to word correspondence. Instead of pedantically trying to reproduce the lexical meaning of each word, I have found it is more important to convey the spirit of what is being said in the Arabic. The following list catalogs the choices I have made in the translation to achieve this purpose. Where appropriate, I have:
• added words to unpack the dense Arabic;
• modified syntax and morphology for an idiomatic English rendering;
• changed third person to second person in proverbs;
• replaced pronouns with names for clarity;
• converted passives to actives;
• dropped “He said, … I said …” phrases introducing individual lines of the question-and-answer pieces in chapter 5;
• translated a single Arabic word differently in different places;
• removed the phrase “another category” that occurs at the head of certain sets of proverbs in chapters 1 and 4, which indicate the groupings’ similar grammatical structure (they are retained in the Arabic);
• removed “narrated from ʿAlī” and similar phrases from the chapter titles; and
• presented in smaller and italic font: (a) the chains of transmitters in several chapters, and (b) al-Quḍāʿī’s explanation of rare words in chapter 6.
Three other points to note:
• Translations of Qurʾanic verses are my own; I have found it preferable to do so in order to maintain the consistency of the translation, as well as to highlight the meaning of the verse in the context of each piece.
• Specialized terminology is a challenge encountered equally by translators of literary and non-literary texts. As any good Saussurian knows, differences in language arise not just from differences in the signifier, but more deeply, from differences in the concepts signified. There is no perfect translation of these culturally specific words, but some renderings come closer to the import of the word in the original culture than others. To this end, I have translated certain technical religious terms differently from their conventional English rendering, to convey better what I believe is the traditional usage of the term in its Islamic context: For example, I translate “Islam” as “commitment to God’s will” (rather than “submission” to it); taqwā as “piety” or “being conscious of God” (rather than “fear of God”); zuhd as “rejection of worldliness” or “indifference to the world” (rather than “rejection of the world” or “asceticism”).
• For pronouns referring to the world (al-dunyā), I have sometimes used the neutral form “it,” and at other times, when the context is clearly playing to the metaphor of the world as temptress, the feminine “she”; the word al-dunyā is feminine in Arabic.