The Buried Lives of Tarjamah, from Premodernity to Modernity

Every remembrance of a word's “life story,” of course, is also a forgetting of other possible narratives. If such is true of the fortunes of tarjamah, it is no less true of the broader story told of conceptions of translation in Arabic. According to Elliott Colla and Rana Issa, tarjamah and its root verb tarjama (ترجم ) came to supplant other terms more widely used to denote interlingual translation well into the nineteenth century, in particular the verbal noun naql (“transport,” “transmission,” “transcription,” “copying”) and its root verb naqala (“to transport,” “to transmit”; also “to transcribe,” “to copy”). In Issa's reading, the modern Arabic translation of the Bible—mediated by the nineteenth-century Syro-Lebanese intellectuals Buṭrus al-Bustānī and Fāris (later Aḥmad Fāris) al-Shidyāq in collaboration with English and American missionaries—spurred the Arabic-speaking world to abandon naql, for centuries the favored term for “translation,” for tarjamah. The “new word” tarjamah, Issa writes, “recollected translation's connection to the biblical Targums as well as to the Abbassid [sic] movement of translation that was spearheaded by Christians and Jews for the benefit of Islamicate Arab thought” (19). As I read Issa, tarjamah interrupts the hegemonic self-sufficiency of Arabic and Islam with the now-foreignized, once-native languages and religions that preceded them and underscores the debts of Arab-Islamic thought to Christian and Jewish translators. Moreover, she suggests, displacing naql with tarjamah not only stages “the Bible as a competing foundational text that could, in adjacency to the Qur'an, become a legitimate source for Arabic concepts and semantics in the modern era” but also “foregrounds translation as a movement through time” (20).

Issa astutely underscores the foreignizing energies of tarjamah, as well as the term's capacity to unsettle the selfsameness of Arabic and a Qurʾanic monopoly on its grammar by summoning its linguistic and scriptural antecedents and neighbors from shadow into light. Yet both the verb tarjama, in the sense of “to translate,” and the noun turjumān, denoting the translator-interpreter, appear in sayings attributed to the Prophet Muḥammad dating to 632 CE, and the noun tarjamah appears as early as 791 CE in al-Khalīl ibn Aḥmad al-Farāhīdī's كتاب العين (Kitāb al-ʿAyn; The Source), considered the first Arabic dictionary (see “Tarjama”; “Turjumān”; “Tarjamah”).Footnote ³ Turning to the nineteenth century, one finds Muslim intellectuals like the Egyptian Rifāʿah Rāfiʿ al-Ṭahṭāwī vexing Issa's intimation that Christian thinkers like al-Bustānī and al-Shidyāq (although al-Shidyāq later converted to Islam) deliberately supplanted naql with tarjamah. Writing in 1834, al-Ṭahṭāwī more than once invokes tarjamah; of his 1827 rendering of Joseph Agoub's La lyre brisée (1825; The Broken Lyre) from French into Arabic, for example, he declares, اعتنيت بترجمتها (“I took care with its translation [bi-tarjamatihā]”; Takhlīṣ 62), and in the introduction to his 1850s translation (serialized in 1867) of François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon's Les aventures de Télémaque, fils d'Ulysse (1699; The Adventures of Telemachus, Son of Ulysses), he declares his purported

Conversely, as Rebecca C. Johnson notes, naql was “the word most commonly used for both transmission and translation” in the nineteenth-century Syro-Lebanese archive, accenting “the mobility of texts and language across time as well as space” (30); it was crucial to al-Bustānī's argument for the transmission of knowledge from antiquity to modernity and to al-Shidyāq's translation of the Gospels, which reinterpreted them as contradictory transmissions rather than authentic revelations (47). To assume, then, that naql largely eclipsed tarjamah in premodernity or that tarjamah largely eclipsed naql in modernity is to overstate the break of the nineteenth century, or, perhaps, to misrecognize the corpse in the corpus.

That corpse is tarjamah-as-life. For tarjamah itself is in a state of naql, and naql, for all its presumed nativity to Arabic, encodes a notion of translation hardly as simple or straightforward as it seems. Every so-called copy or reproduction, naql tells us, is both a transfer and a transport, hence also a displacement. Thus, tarjamah appears “copied” across the span of centuries, from the seventh to the twenty-first. Yet tarjamah now is nonidentical to tarjamah past; its past and present meanings are not equivalent. Somewhere along the way, tarjamah-as-life died on the tongue and the pen, despite its presence in modern dictionaries, and tarjamah-as-interpretation—or hermeneutic translation—tout court survived, its other lives buried within. Indeed, glossing the verb ترجم (tarjama) in his groundbreaking modern Arabic dictionary of 1867, محيط المحيط (Muḥīṭ al-Muḥīṭ; The Ocean That Encircles the Encircling Ocean), al-Bustānī foregrounds its principal modern signification, “to translate”:

Only later in the passage above does al-Bustānī note that the related verbal noun ترجمة (tarjamah) signifies not only an interlingual and intralingual translation or interpretation but also a biographical account. Al-Bustānī was a key exponent of the long-nineteenth-century Arab intellectual نهضة (nahḍah; “revival”), in which translation played a crucial role—and an intellectual force, alongside others of his generation, in the transformations that marked modern Arabic lexicography.Footnote ⁴ His maneuver bears out Colla's and Issa's contentions that nineteenth-century Arabic discourse relegated the premodern Arabic use of tarjamah to denote “biography” to the margins, crowning interlingual and intralingual “translation” the term's dominant modern meaning (Colla 140–42; Issa 19–20). Yet al-Bustānī's nod to the biographical sense of tarjamah sounds not only its death rattle but also the long last gasp of its life. His dictionary exhumes tarjamah-as-life, buried between the lines of premodern lexicons that barely register that usage, and slows its expiration, reviving past in present. Biographical tarājim would appear into the twentieth century, penned by such public intellectuals as the Syro-Lebanese Jurjī Zaydān (1902–03) and the Egyptian Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal (1921–22, 1929), and as late as 1956 the Egyptian literary scholar Shawqī Ḍayf would invoke الترجمة الشخصية (al-tarjamah al-shakhṣiyyah) to denote “autobiography” in Arabic, tracking its movements from the ninth century to the twentieth.Footnote ⁵ Modern revivals of tarjamah, however, are riddled with breaks from premodern form, reflecting the pressure of modern European conceptions of “life,” time, and biographical representation—and negotiating the value of cultures east and west in the shadow of imperialism. Writing of Haykal's tarājim of European figures, for example, Maya I. Kesrouany argues that his translating “I” infiltrates the third-person transmission (naql) of “exemplary” European lives, impersonating those lives to voice its own literary-political aims (see 156–67, esp. 160–63).

In the liminal modernity of the long-nineteenth-century Arab nahḍah, then, whose positional vertigo of othered selfhood it uncannily voices, tarjamah in its biographical sense survives beyond its death certificate in the dictionaries as well as in significant works, albeit in a translated form nonidentical with tarjamah past. As it turns out, tarjamah-as-life is arguably more marginal in the premodern lexical record, although more abundant in the archive. For while the use of tarjamah to denote “biography,” Dale F. Eickelman notes, is widely attested in Arabic works from at least the eleventh century onward (see Gutas et al.), this is “neither the earliest nor the most common” sense of tarjamah, as Tarek Shamma observes (4).Footnote ⁶ On tarjamah as biography, in fact, premodern lexicons seem largely silent, foregrounding instead the senses of “interpretation” and “translation”—and the figure of the translator-interpreter, the turjumān. Witness, for instance, the fourteenth-century dictionary المصباح المنير (al-Miṣbāḥ al-Munīr; The Illuminating Lantern) by the Egyptian lexicographer Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī al-Muqrī al-Fayyūmī (d. ca. 1368), who defines the verb tarjama as follows:

Curiously, al-Fayyūmī says nothing of the verbal noun tarjamah as “biography” (nor, for that matter, as “interpretation” or “translation”); rather, he foregrounds the verb tarjama and defines it in one sense alone, that of interlingual interpretation or translation: speech “in a language other than the language of the speaker.” Another noun, however, does shadow the verb tarjama: the figure of the turjumān (pronounced in various ways, also tarjumān or tarjamān). In defining that term grammatically, as the doer of the action denoted by the verb tarjama, al-Fayyūmī implies, perhaps, a more restrictive sense of turjumān than that advanced by some of his predecessors and successors. Where others gloss the turjumān as an “interpreter” of discourse more generally (in one's own language as well as in others), al-Fayyūmī insists on the turjumān as an arbiter of foreignness. The turjumān renders the speech of another person in a language foreign to the original speaker.

Colla is thus right to suggest that premodern Arabic intimately links the act of interpretation or translation that the verb tarjama denotes to the human actor who performs it: the turjumān (141). Indeed, under the headwords tarjama and rajama (رجم ) in the thirteenth-century dictionary لسان العرب (Lisān al-ʿArab; The Arab Tongue), compiled by the North African scholar Ibn Manẓūr (d. 1311), the noun turjumān—defined first as الْمُفَسِّرُ للِّسان (“interpreter of the tongue,” that is, language; 1: 426) or simply as الْمُفَسِّرُ (“interpreter,” “exegete”; 3: 1603)—frames the verb. One discovers the action through the actor; one reaches the meanings of tarjama—and offstage, tarjamah, the act of interpreting or translating and the reading produced—through the turjumān, by learning that the latter is الَّذِي يُتَرْجِمُ الكَلام، أَيْ يَنْقُلُهُ مِنْ لُغَةٍ إِلَی لُغَةٍ أُخْرَی (“one who translates [yutarjimu] discourse, that is, transports it [yanquluhu] from one language into another language”; 1: 426), or by traveling a circuit from the turjumān to the action, where قَدْ تَرْجَمَ كَلامَهُ إِذا فَسَّرَهُ بِلِسانٍ آخَرَ (“one has translated one's words if one has interpreted or explained these in another tongue”; 3: 1603), and back: ومِنْهُ التَّرْجَمانُ (“thence al-tarjamān [the interpreter or translator]”; 3: 1603). And in القاموس المحيط (al-Qāmūs al-Muḥīṭ; The Encircling Ocean), the fourteenth-century lexicon compiled by the Persian scholar Majd al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Yaʿqūb al-Fayrūzābādī (also Fīrūzābādī; d. 1415) on which al-Bustānī based his modern Muḥīṭ al-Muḥīṭ, the turjumān eclipses the verb tarjama, in that (unlike in Lisān al-ʿArab) turjumān is now the headword and tarjama is embedded in its definition, with tarjamah again offstage (83). In sum, to borrow the words of W. B. Yeats, on the lexical stage on which tarjamah flickers as something of an absent presence, we cannot “know the dancer from the dance” (245). If tarjamah as “biography”—as a “life” told—makes no direct appearance in many premodern lexicons,Footnote ⁷ the “life” of the turjumān assuredly does.

As Colla astutely notes, foreignness too is encoded in the premodern DNA of tarjamah, the term that would become the primary equivalent of “translation” in modern Arabic. “[W]hether in English [or in] Arabic,” he remarks, “the vocabulary of translation/tarjama is borrowed from other languages[.] In that borrowing, to maintain an image of the word in its original, is in a sense to decline to perform the act of translation most narrowly defined” (142). Indeed, the long controversy over the root of the verb tarjama from which tarjamah derives, as well as of the noun turjumān to which it is related, testifies to the disjointed lineage of tarjamah in Arabic. Ibn Manẓūr indexes turjumān under both the quadriliteral root tarjama [t-r-j-m] and the triliteral root rajama [r-j-m], flirting with foreignization in the first instance and domestication in the second (1: 426, 3: 1603). Al-Fayyūmi, in turn, wonders whether the tāʾ [t] that helms the verb tarjama is supplemental or integral to the verb and concludes the latter (35–36)—a conclusion al-Fayrūzābādī upholds (83). Remarking on al-Fayyūmi's perspective, Colla suggests that “[m]odern scholars of Semitic languages agree, telling us that tarjama is borrowed from the Aramaic (or Syriac) targm, meaning ‘to interpret’” (142). As for al-Bustānī, he classes the verb tarjama under tāʾ, after al-Fayrūzābādī, but teeters (as Ibn Manẓūr implicitly does) on the brink between its potential foreignness—noting its possibly “Chaldean” provenance—and its potential Arabness, citing the alternative root rajama (161–62). Indeed, as Hannah Scott Deuchar has noted, al-Bustānī's Muḥīṭ distinguishes between tarjamah (“the interpretation or ‘tafsīr’ of a foreign term, and the provision of its equivalent in Arabic”) and taʿrīb (“Arabization”) by defining the latter as “the preservation of a foreign word more or less in its original form, but made to submit to Arabic grammatical and morphological rules” (190). She cites the example of the Greek philosophia turned Arabic falsafah (190–91), which the Syro-Lebanese intellectual Jurjī Zaydān adduced in a lively 1908 public critical debate on tarjamah, taʿrīb, and how best to “render foreign concepts in Arabic” (190), whose exchanges were published in three of Cairo's foremost journals: الهلال (al-Hilāl; The Crescent Moon, which Zaydān edited and published), المقتطف (al-Muqtaṭaf; The Digest), and المنار (al-Manār; The Lighthouse). Reading Colla's suggestion that the term tarjamah “maintain[s] an image of the word in its original” with Scott Deuchar's discussion, I propose that the term tarjamah—as an “Arabization” that retains the phonemes of the Aramaic targum even as it gives them new Arabic shape—offers us a vision of translation that holds foreignness in view.

The Foreignness of the Native, the Artifice of the Natural

Foreignness clings to the figure of the turjumān, particularly as it shape-shifts from its premodern to its early modern guises. As Colla and E. Natalie Rothman attest, between the thirteenth and the nineteenth centuries the turjumān or dragoman became an important diplomatic-commercial mediator between the Islamicate and European worlds and their languages (Colla 145; Rothman 4).Footnote ⁸ Thick traffic between Venice and the Ottoman Empire linked Venetian dragomanni—citizens of Venice, “urban elites of Venice's Adriatic and eastern Mediterranean colonies” (Rothman 25), and Catholics of “Genoese, Pisan, and Venetian” descent long established in Istanbul (26)—to Ottoman tarājim, who often hailed from “ethnic and religious minorities” (Colla 145): Armenians, Jews, Greeks, and European converts to Islam. Such translators “were feared,” Colla argues, because they represented “the terror of knowing that there is no such thing as neutral mediation” (145); “their role,” writes Rothman, “far exceeded rendering a speaker's message in another language” (4). The life of the turjumān that sidles up to tarjama and tarjamah—and the lexical and real-historical brush with foreignness of both the word turjumān and the personhood it names—frame modern tarjamah-as-translation, reminding us that its imagined positivist transparency (al-Bustānī's “simpler” language) is anything but.

In the figure of the turjumān, then, twine three cases that inflect the modern Arabic term tarjamah with accents arguably less marked in its supposed English equivalent, “translation”: a strongly hermeneutic understanding of translation as interpretation, exceeding the mere transfer of meaning from one language to another; a foreignness to both the “source” and “target” worlds whose languages and epistemes the turjumān mediates, captured in the lexical foreignness of the very term turjumān (and its quadriliteral “root,” t-r-j-m) to Arabic; and an emphasis on the personhood, at once intimate and detached, of the interpreter or translator. Indeed, we might say that the alter ego of tarjamah as biographical “life”—though encrypted in premodern lexicons and ultimately eclipsed in the later twentieth century—haunts tarjamah-as-translation as a conceptual ghost. As Dwight F. Reynolds and his coauthors suggest, we might view the biographical valence of tarjamah as an extension of the act of interpretation, implied by tarjamah writ large, to the “text” of a life:

As biography, the tarjamah passes for one mode of naql—replication—yet represents another: transport or displacement. Thus, Colla, citing Eickelman's gloss of the biographical face of tarjamah, notes that the life it captures is distanced: the premodern tarjamah eschews interiority, limning the personhood of a religious, political, or scholarly figure through a third-person account of that individual's moral character and deeds as interpreted by sources of equal moral integrity (141–42). I suggest that like the turjumān as living translator, the tarjamah as recounted “life” evokes Naoki Sakai's theorization of the translator as a “subject in transit” whose relationships to so-called source and target texts are ever shifting (11, 13): simultaneously hailed by the source text as a “you” and hailing the target text as an “I,” yet also a “bystander” to both, observing the interactions of source and target “languages”—although Sakai questions the notion of bordered “languages,” arguing that they emerge as such through translation (11–15, 52–59). At times that shifting subject, Sakai argues, occupies the first person, at others the second, at others the third—much as a turjumān of languages or lives might, the final tarjamah masking the changing terms of address.

Shifting though the subject of tarjamah-as-biography may be, however, shifty it was not: if the Romance languages imagine translation as treachery (witness the Italian adage “traddutore, traditore” [“translator, traitor”] or the French anxiety that translations might be “belles infidèles” [“unfaithful belles”]), the Arabic biographical tradition posited tarjamah as veridical discourse, a morally credible voice recounting the life of a respected authority.Footnote ⁹ Still, the conjectural face of tarjamah shadows positive knowledge with the specter of its negation, since, as Waïl S. Hassan, Colla, and Issa note, the hypothesized root to which some medieval Arabic lexicographers traced the verb tarjama, rajama (r-j-m), may also refer to the casting of stones against Satan, adulterers, and other traitorous souls.Footnote ¹⁰ That association survives even in al-Bustānī's definition of 1867:

Under the sign of rajama, whether foreign or native, tarjamah assumes a wayward life, not a “true” one. If tarjamah-as-biography recalls the Islamically inflected Arabic expression إقطع الشكّ باليقين (“Intercept doubt with certainty”), the Arabic etymology hypothesized for tarjamah-as-translation does precisely the opposite; it intercepts certainty with doubt.