Paper short abstract:

How are the Arabic poetics of love, separation and devotion translated in a multilingual context, and what forms do these translations take? This paper will examine these questions in the context of 19th century Indian commentaries and translations of canonical Arabic poems.

Paper long abstract:

Canonical Arabic poems such as Kaʿb b. Zuhayr's Suʿād has departed (7th century) and al-Būṣīrī's Burda (13th century) continued to enjoy popularity in 19th century North India, and were significant in the articulation of cultural and linguistic identities among Muslim elites as well as being incorporated into popular devotional practice. Both poems draw on familiar idioms of Arabic love and separation to articulate devotion to the Prophet, and enjoyed a quasi-scriptual status. Unsurprisingly, manuscript copies of both poems abound, and printing technologies in the 19th century allowed for their further circulation beyond small scholarly networks.

Different 19th century reproductions of the poems follow distinct strategies to convey meaning to the audience, whether that strategy be single language commentary, interlineal glosses, or freer versified translations in Persian and Urdu such as those printed in several editions in Lucknow from the 1870s onwards. This paper will examine these strategies as modes of translation, whereby multilingualism is either obscured or textualised, and it will ask what we can conclude about the relationship between different cultural productions of the same texts and their audiences. Furthermore, the paper will consider the mechanics of translation, and how the idioms of Arabic love and devotion are rendered beyond the poems themselves. When we step outside the Arabic language, how are we to understand its poetics? After all, who is Suʿād, and why do we care that she has departed?