The Printer, the Translator, the Scribe, and the Slave Girl: Acculturating the Mukhtar al-Hikam, ca. 1200–ca. 1700

Early Modern Cosmopolitanisms Lecture

—A. E. B. Coldiron, Florida State University

One of the first books printed in early modern England, The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers (1477), was a translation of a French version of the Mukhtar al-Hikam, an Arabic doxography by 11th-century sage Mubasshir ibn-Fâtik. This talk pursues the work’s paths from a 12th-century Arabic manuscript into Spanish, French, Occitan, and English versions (with back-translations into Latin). During key phases of acculturation and remediation, several kinds of authority were challenged and remade in different contexts, with sometimes surprising results. For instance, we’ll see Socrates both turbaned and tonsured; we’ll meet a slave-girl who defeats some misogynist sages; and we’ll hear a printer who tussles with his patron over the authority to translate.

Anne Coldiron is currently Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s “Year-Long Colloquium on Early Modern Translation” and is Professor of English, affiliated faculty in French, and Director of the History of Text Technologies Program at Florida State University. Her Printers without Borders: Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance (Cambridge UP, forthcoming) follows a book on gender and early modern poetic translation (2009) and revises some of the transnational challenges in her Canon, Period, and the Poetry of Charles of Orleans: Found in Translation (2000). Her articles on Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney, Donne, Milton, Chaucer, as well as Villon, Du Bellay, and Verlaine, appear in, for example, Renaissance Studies, Comparative Literature, Yale Journal of Criticism, JEGP, Criticism, and Translation Studies. She is currently editing The Tudor Translations of Christine de Pizan for the MHRA (UK).

This lecture is presented as part of Early Modern Cosmopolitanisms, a lecture series hosted by the Transnational Subjects and Early Modern Empire Working Group and sponsored by the UCLA Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies.

No registration is required.

Questions?
Contact Jeanette LaVere at jlavere@humnet.ucla.edu or 310-206-8552

Image: MS Ahmed III 3206, fol. 48a, with gracious permission of the Topkapı-saray Museum, Istanbul