Review, Impostures of al-Hariri, translated by Michael Cooperson PDF

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288 Book Reviews Al-Ḥarīrī, translated by Michael Cooperson, Impostures: Fifty Rogue’s Tales Translated Fifty Ways. Library of Arabic Literature. New York: New York University Press, 2020. 542 pages. Cloth $29.95. Michael Cooperson’s rendering of the title of al-Ḥarīrī’s maqāmāt as Impostures, contr...

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288

Book Reviews

Al-Ḥarīrī, translated by Michael Cooperson, Impostures: Fifty Rogue’s Tales

Translated Fifty Ways. Library of Arabic Literature. New York: New York University Press, 2020. 542 pages. Cloth $29.95.

Michael Cooperson’s rendering of the title of al-Ḥarīrī’s maqāmāt as Impostures, contra the convention of presenting them as “assemblies” or “séances,” is meant to simultaneously evoke the work’s performative context (done inposture, with the declaimer standing before his audience) and the centrality throughout of rakish feats of disguise and dissembling. A third, unstated effect of the title change is to signal from the outset that readers are in for an extraordinary experience. Indeed, a significant irony arises when, in his concluding imposture—rendered by Michael Cooperson into the diction of the medieval Christian mystic Margery Kempe—the silver-tongued protagonist Abū Zayd al-Sārūjī turns to asceticism in a move heralded by the claim that “now he worketh wondyrs!” (innahu al-ān dhū ’l-karāmāt) (474). For what has all of the foregoing been if not a parade of wonder after wonder? This applies as much to Cooperson’s new translation as it does to the original text: Cooperson has executed a work of capacious breadth and skill, and has artfully rendered much of the spirit of the original by jubilantly abandoning a lexical translation in favor of what he refers to as an “Englishing.” In the process of “Englishing” each imposture, Cooperson appears to take to heart the admonition that “the proper word is better than a less proper but standard one,” though this advice is applied at the level of language rather than lexemes.1 As promised, the translation delivers the 50 different impostures “50 different ways,” with each way being another variety of English—from Singlish (Singaporean English) and Indian English to the distinct voices of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf— hand-selected based on the strength of the correspondences between the overarching themes in a given episode and the subjects or social contexts typical to the idiom. Before summarizing the volume’s contents, I should point out a pitfall that this work poses for the reviewer. It is extremely difficult to review a book that proposes to do fifty different things succinctly yet comprehensively. I dare not say it is impossible, for, as Cooperson reminds us, the hackneyed notion of untranslatability should be replaced by the prospect of infinite translatability. So too might this book elicit myriad strategies of review. For my part, after discussing its structure, I will offer my impressions of the volume 1 Gregory Rabassa, If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents, A Memoir (New York: New Directions Books, 2005), 9.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/1570064x-12341432

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by spotlighting a handful of the impostures, as well as the implications of Cooperson’s specific choices of language. The maqāmāt have been translated into Western languages many times over, although each time with a very different approach to the nature of the text. Impostures opens with a foreword by Abdelfattah Kilito, translated by Shawkat Toorawa. In his remarks, Kilito meditates in part on how one ought to interact with the text, saying that though one can read the episodes in an episodic fashion, doing so removes them from their anthological context, in which “each […] is in its proper place,” and a unity is hewn from each imposture’s rhythm of encounter and separation between the narrator, al-Ḥārith ibn Ḥammām, and the aforementioned Abū Zayd (xiii). In his own introduction, Cooperson agrees that the collection is marked by internal consonance, as well as a formal standardization that was not present in the works of al-Ḥarīrī’s predecessor and stated muse, Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī. Most of al-Ḥarīrī’s pieces feature exactly two poems and all adhere doggedly to stylized prose comprised of short rhyming phrases (saj‘), unless quoting from the Qurʾān. Cooperson’s and Kilito’s emphasis on the collection’s wholeness captures one of the many contrasts between modern attempts at engaging the maqāmāt and their premodern receptions, of which Cooperson gives a tour in his introduction and methodological note on the translation. The Western vogue has often been to treat texts such as the maqāmāt as disjointed and therefore mineable for those parts that non-Arabophone readers find most palatable, such as their “picaresque,” plotted stories, rather than those that feature rhetorical exercises and riddles (xx). The penchant for excerpting from the maqāmāt or leaving certain portions untranslated has been aided and abetted, according to Cooperson, by the modern myth of the inability to convey through translation those flourishes that rely most heavily on the mechanics of Arabic, and that therefore most wowed early audiences. Premodern translators like the Impostures’ Hebrew renderer, Yehuda al-Ḥarīzī, had no such compunctions, nor does Cooperson himself. Though we are encouraged to read the Impostures cover-to-cover as cohesive and even—as Kilito might have it—as a narrative progression, the idioms into which Cooperson has translated each imposture do not have a consecutive logic. There is no sense in which regionally, chronologically, or culturally groupable Englishes are given a shared enclave; one meets them as one might meet random strangers on a cosmopolitan city street. The table of contents also does not state which English has been assigned to each episode, though sometimes this is more intuitive from the title than others (“Iran go Brágh,” e.g.). All of this produces an equipoise that lends itself to one of translation’s main objectives,

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namely, to incorporate a range of literary Englishes, including those not widely thought of as such. Inequalities among these Englishes (a fault of society, not of the translator) emerge in the commentarial apparatus that accompanies each imposture in the form of an incipit that introduces the choice of English and explains the rationale behind it, a glossary (some of the longest of which are for Multicultural London English, thieves’ cant, and Harlem Jive, while others like the vernacular of Herman Melville do not warrant a glossary at all), notes, and a works cited list. All of this is undoubtedly helpful to the reader, allowing, say, the person proficient in UCLA English to launch into reading Scottish English. Still, the disparities in glossing suggest a presumed primary audience of educated readers trained in “standard English,” who can readily decipher Melville regardless of their membership in one of the myriad cultures—and concomitant intellectual legacies—reflected in the work’s other Englishes. For those literary Englishes that are less mainstream, Cooperson unapologetically relies on their producers’ knowledge in all its forms, including YouTube videos, Wikipedia articles, and Urban Dictionary entries, rather than privileging “academic” sources, which would in turn privilege a much narrower linguistic range. Often, the notes sections are most useful where they give granular insight into Cooperson’s decision-making; Imposture 25 (“De Froid Trempé”), which utilizes the stylings of Susanna Moodie on Northern Canada, embeds large chunks of her own little-known prose in the notes, and thus provides a window onto the intricacies of the pastiche (229-230). Pastiche, for Cooperson, entails constraints some might regard as supererogatory. When writing in a specific author’s voice, he typically takes this beyond the atmospheric, restricting himself to the lexicon used in the individual’s oeuvre. Occasionally, this produces odd results: in the notes on his Shakespearean rendering of Imposture 13 (“The Cozening Quean of Babylon”), Cooperson is compelled to point out a stretch in the form of using “mosque” (masjid), noting that though Shakespeare did not employ the term, “it is attested in the seventeenth century” (116). This draws attention to the exoticism, from the Bard’s perspective, of a mundane institution in the source culture. In the Englishing of Imposture 12 (“Arabia Absurda”), a near-opposite tack is taken when Cooperson emulates the prose of the English traveler Charles Doughty, whose writings on Arabia calque a whole host of Arabic words, like “mejlis” and “hijâb,” which interestingly are used in the translation but not in the original (“hijâb” stands in for protective amulets, ‘uwadh, while “mejlis” accommodates a first-person collective) (103). In this case, providing such a pronouncedly Orientalist translation appears at cross-purposes with many of the translator’s other choices, which resituate the text in new milieus to the

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end of highlighting its universal literary qualities rather than objectifying its native particularities, as an Orientalist narration almost inevitably does. The numerous impostures that explicitly point to transcultural themes, topoi, and features of language are especially conducive to classroom use, and throughout my reading I delightedly imagined adding the Impostures to a stack of syllabi, from surveys of Arabic literature to seminars on translation theory or courses on trickster narratives from around the globe. I will highlight only two examples here. Imposture 16 (“Con Safos”), written in a mix of Spanglishes with the help of Leyla Rouhi, incorporates useful lessons on code-switching and the formality of certain literary registers (language games, poetry, etc.) as opposed to informal speech. It also occasions a conversation about the historical interactions between the Iberian Peninsula and its languages and the Maghrib, for which the original maqāma is named. All of this is packaged in an English with which many American students are acquainted. Moreover, the particular language game that is afoot—a contest of palindrome composition—operates identically across languages, making it one of the more accessible rhetorical exercises in the primary source as well. A similarly ripe venue for discussing the mutually-informing social histories behind al-Ḥarīrī’s magnum opus and Cooperson’s translation is to be found in Imposture 34 (“The Fraud of Slavery”), Englished in the parlance of Frederick Douglass. Cooperson selects Douglass as his muse for this portion because the episode “contains one of the most powerful denunciations of slavery I have ever seen in a pre-modern text.” (315) While this imposture elicits vigorous objection to the enslavement of particular individuals, and especially Muslims, the discourse of abolition so central to Douglass’ project is, of course, absent. Even with this caveat, the emotional force of the translation is striking. A poem voiced by the son of Abū Zayd feigning his own sale asks if he is to be vended “as if a thing and not a man?” (wa-an ushrā kamā yushrā al-matā‘) (319). Pedagogically, this episode could be used to introduce the topic of slavery in the Arabo-Muslim world and its comparisons and relationships with Atlantic world slavery, and to query the role of Classical Arabic belles-lettres more broadly as an institution for sustaining or critiquing the status quo. The role of emotionality in the volume brings me to one of Cooperson’s greatest achievements in the Impostures, namely, the reconstruction of multiple affective dimensions of engaging with the maqāmāt as reader, listener, and composer. In several cases where the original has incorporated chunks of poetry via sariqa (creative cribbing), Cooperson brings in poems that might be vaguely familiar to us rather than doing a direct translation. So too, in certain instances, oft-used phrases from the Qurʾān are represented as similarly

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aphoristic verses from the Bible that echo the moral at hand. Cooperson draws in the commentarial tradition as well, explicating one particularly opaque passage of the maqāmāt with a page of commentary radiating outward and around the text in the fashion of handwritten shurūḥ. An imposture in which Cooperson has rendered the riddles as cryptic crossword clues tantalizingly offers a blank puzzle at the end, begging audiences to scrawl all over the page in perplexity and amusement like so many have done in inscribing their marginalia in manuscripts of al-Ḥarīrī’s work. Imposture 47 features an attempt to replicate the sound of Arabic verse in translation, resulting in language that is melodic, playful, and asks to be read aloud. Imposture 32, a particularly long episode featuring a list of riddles whose solution relies on the homonymy of the keyword, was forged in the same context in which many maqāmāt are themselves set and performed: a dinner party, hosted by Phillip Mitsis, at which a constellation of collaborators partook in a pun-off. In Impostures, the Library of Arabic Literature has once again shepherded the production of an innovative and brilliant volume, and “shown their work” as well. The text is accompanied by an online-only meticulously produced critical edition of the Arabic original, also done by Michael Cooperson; the editorial board of the Library of Arabic Literature’s involvement in the work is patent in its front matter and glowing acknowledgments. Throughout the volume, especially in its incipits and notes, it also becomes clear that many others supported its development to varying extents, from Mitsis’ salon to efforts that merit editorial or co-authorial credit, as with Nigerian novelist Richard Ali’s reworking of the Naijá. For me, this raised the question of how best to balance the boldness of Cooperson’s work and the Library of Arabic Literature’s mission with the way in which the pieces of this volume are cited. How should I, when using Impostures, note such contributions? Cooperson is, in a sense, already concerned with this question from the volume’s opening. In his note on the translation, he addresses the problem of cultural appropriation, which is loosely defined for his purposes as “privileged users of Standard English […] imitating, and profiting from the use of, the speech varieties associated with less privileged communities,” and which is made particularly pernicious “since members of those communities have suffered everything from ridicule to persecution for speaking as they do” (xliii). Cooperson’s corrective is, therefore, to treat these Englishes with the utmost respect, to seek guidance where needed, and to name it where it was sought. His efforts are commendable, and I find the work largely reads in the spirit Cooperson intends. However, hoary structures in the humanities—from citational formats to book covers to our collective mythologies of the isolated genius—that are resistant

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to accommodating multiple authors of multiple parts of a project complicate Cooperson’s endeavor to give credit where it is due. To be sure, perhaps there was a better way of visibly giving contributors pride of place inside the work— under the headings to the impostures, set off in large font, or as subheadings to the table of contents. In so many ways, Impostures promises exciting new directions. I have high hopes that the Library of Arabic Literature and others will continue, on its heels, to admit more experimental translations of Arabic works and push the boundaries of what “texts” themselves can mean and do. I also hope that the way we value and distribute accolades for the labor behind this pioneering work continues to evolve in kind. Rachel Schine

Postdoctoral Associate in Arabic Literature and Culture, Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA [email protected]

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