Ludovico Marracci's Alcorani textus universus is rightly regarded as a landmark in the history of Qur’ān translations into Western European languages. Published in two volumes in Padua in 1698, the Latin translation is accompanied by the entire Arabic text and extensive commentaries in Latin. Marracci's translation, praised for its accuracy and philological merits, far surpassed previously published Latin translations and set a standard for excellence that has endured for centuries. Until recently, little was known about the process by which Marracci (1612–1700), a priest of the Clerics Regular of the Mother of God of Lucca, completed his translation, and in particular, what source materials, Qur’ānic and otherwise, he drew upon.
Recently Roberto Tottoli located in an Italian archive 10,000 pages of manuscripts owned by Marracci relating to his translation. Thanks to these documents it is now possible to examine the processes of translation and revision and to begin to reconstruct the sources that Marracci used. Tottoli, along with Reinhold F. Glei, has launched this undertaking by selecting the eighteenth sura (roughly a chapter) of the Qur’ān for analysis based on these newly identified materials. This sura is not only located at the physical heart of the Qur’ān but also is exceptionally rich in the Christian, Jewish and pagan Greek sources upon which it draws to make its arguments, as Marracci's manuscripts make clear. It also contains many terms that appear either once, or only a handful of times, in the Qur’ān, and so is an excellent place to examine the translator's lexical choices. The length of this sura (barely twenty pages in Latin translation) also make it appropriate for a shorter study of this type.
Glei and Tottoli take up questions of divisions of the text in Marracci's translation, his lexical choices, and the ways in which Marracci was reading the Arabic as he endeavoured to render its meaning into Latin.
The division of suras into āyāt (shorter units of text which the authors call ‘verses’, a handy if not quite literal description) can directly affect the meaning of a Qur’ānic passage. The problem of Marracci's choices of āyāt division is a complex and persisting one, since he is often at odds with the widely accepted divisions appearing in the famous 1924 Cairo edition of the Qur’ān. In fact, Marracci produced a division and numbering of the āyāt not attested by any Islamic tradition, something that has stumped scholars until now. The authors propose the intriguing hypothesis that Marracci turned not only to meaning-sense but also to end rhyme in the āyāt numbering of his earlier translations, raising the question of the role of auditory experience in this and other early translations of the Qur’ān. Perhaps even more important the authors say that Marracci's later versions were influenced by versions of the Qur’ān available to Muslim exegetical writers. But which versions? Glei and Tottoli demonstrate that in 1671 Marracci sought to borrow manuscript copies of the Qur’ān from the Vatican Library. On one occasion he addressed the pope directly in order to obtain a manuscript that the authors identify as a sixteenth-century Ottoman copy still in the Vatican. Marracci also rejected the widely distributed but seriously flawed 1543 Basel edition of the Robert of Ketton (c. 1010–60 ce) translation, as revised by Theodor Bibliander (1505–64). We also learn that Marracci complained that the Arabic appearing in the published version of his translation was not the text from which he had worked, a caution to scholars working with any typeset Arabic texts of the Qur’ān that appeared in the West during this period (for example, Michel Nau's Religio christiana contra alcoranum).
Not surprisingly, Marracci's translations did not depend exclusively on a single manuscript of the Qur’ān. His first complete Latin version relied heavily on the text found among Marracci's papers of Ibn Abī Zamanīn, a commentator of the tenth century ce and on the Tafsīr Al-Jalālayn, a classical Sunni commentary dating from the fifteenth century. Although Ibn Abī Zamanīn is not one of the most renowned Qur’ānic commentators, Glei and Tottoli argue that Marracci's use of this commentary invites an investigation of the relationship between Marracci's ‘verse division’ and the use of other Arabic language sources as well. Among others that the authors identify as sources that Marracci might have used are commentaries by Abdalla ibn 'Umar al-Bayḍāwi (d. 1260 or 1286 ce), Abu al-Qasim Mahmud ibn Umar al-Zamakhsharī (1075–1144 ce), and Muḥammad al-Thalabī al-Nīsābūrī (fl. c. eleventh century). The authors’ choice of the phrase ‘Islamic literature’ in this connection suggests just how wide a net might have to be cast to locate additional sources.
Marracci emerges from this account as a conscientious scholar, still capable of minor lapses, but judicious in his choice of sources, broad in his erudition and persistent in this undertaking, which must have occupied the better part of three decades. Yet much remains unknown about Marracci's living informants in the Arabic language, if indeed there were any, or about his knowledge of Islamic theology and religious practise.
A reading of his consecutive Latin translations along with the detailed commentaries provided by Glei and Tottoli reveals subtleties in the evolution of Marracci's lexical choices: for example, at āyā 8 he first uses the phrase prodigium maximum (‘a very great prodigy’) to convey the adverbial meaning of the accusative masculine singular indefinite adjective ‘ajaban (which occurs only three times in the Qur’ān) but later opts for more accurate mirabile. Such clear answers are, however, not always forthcoming: Marrracci tries two very different translations for the difficult word mawbiq at āyā 52: first una e Vallibus inferni, in qua omnes pereunt (which echoes Tafsīr Al-Jalālayn) and later torrentem exitii, drawing on the meaning of the trilateral root of mawbiq, wāw bā qāf, or ‘destruction’.
Among the curiosities that are brought to light by this painstaking examination of Marracci's working materials is a marginal note to the story of Dhul-Qarnayn or the ‘Two Horned One’ (whom Marracci, along with many Islamic scholars, identifies as Alexander the Great). In it the translator, grappling with a particularly obscure passage, explains that people meeting the conqueror were not able to understand him because they were not standing close enough. Since elsewhere in the sura we read that Dhul-Qarnayn could readily communicate with the people whom he met, this would seem to be an example of the great lengths that Marracci was prepared to go to prevent one Qur’ānic passage from seeming to contradict another. Yet given Marracci's desire to show where the Qur’ān errs, such care is hard to explain.
The authors understand Marracci's ultimate Latin version as being ‘laid over the original text like a transparent foil that allows [us] to see what is behind’ (p. 136). Marracci himself calls the language into which he translated the Qur’ān as Arabismus latine personatus. He produced this Latin after engaging in what the authors identify as successive and cumulative phases of the translation process. In the decoding phase, meaning is acquired through semantical and syntactical analysis. The recording phase verbalises this meaning in the scholarly neo-Latin of Marracci's day, which Glei elsewhere has called a ‘meta-language’. The final, ‘transcoding’ phase produces a ‘source-language oriented, “documentary” translation that provides the reader with the full-scale linguistic code of the source text’ (p. 136), a process that has, in Glei and Totolli's opinion, been carried out to virtual perfection by Marracci.
Yet while we acknowledge the plausibility of such a claim, we must keep in mind that a devout Muslim's understanding of the text of the Qur’ān goes far beyond semantics or the mastery of a linguistic code to embrace the transcendent experience of reading and believing the message of the Qur’ān. Such an understanding was of course not claimed by Marracci (whose attacks on Islam in his Qur’ānic commentaries are well known), but cannot be dismissed as irrelevant. The importance of this spiritual engagement with the text of the Qur’ān is all the more significant since the Qur’ān is regarded by believers as the immutable and definitive word of God. While the focused textual study that Glei and Tottoli have written does not claim to address these subjective and internally experienced aspects of engagement with the Qur’ān, their impact on the way meaning is constructed for the devout reader, must inform studies of translations of this particular text. What the authors here have done is lay bare the process of translation by an exceptionally conscientious and skilled member of a competing faith tradition, and in doing so they have shed light on the limits within which Marracci worked when translating a text whose essential premises he rejected. Glei and Tottoli thereby clear a path for the direction of future research on translations by Christians of the Qur’ān.
Glei and Tottoli claim that Marracci ultimately used the Arabicised Latin that had emerged from his repeated engagements with the Qur’ān rather than his native Italian because the former was a ‘perfect tool’ for the task that he had set himself. Given the years that Marracci had spent refining this variety of Latin, there is some truth in this assertion, but the scale of the project that he undertook and the cost of the production of the book which resulted from it would have encouraged any translator to seek a wide audience, which Latin (even Arabicised Latin) could reach more readily than Italian. The broader political, confessional and economic context of Marracci's project lie outside the scope of this study, but these factors shaped his final product and its ultimate impact.
This volume includes a complete transcription of two of Marracci's renderings of the text in Latin (one is a compilation of two earlier versions and the other the text of the published version with variations from a later revision incorporated), along with handsome colour plates that illustrate, inter alia, Marracci's skill in transcribing the Arabic and his employment of the aesthetics of late Renaissance manuscript production into copies of his working translations. There is also a schematic synopsis of translations, which includes Marracci's earlier rendition, his printed version, a transliteration of the Arabic, a word-for-word translation and the English translation of the eighteenth-century orientalist George Sale, which was based at least partly on Marracci's work. Taken together, they form an invaluable tool for anyone studying other Latin translations of this sura.
This well produced volume contains only one notable editorial lapse: in several places in this co-authored work the reader encounters ‘I’, but it is unclear which author is speaking. Parts of the text most likely were based on papers originally given by the individual authors, but the change in voice in the co-authored work should have been easy for the authors or editors to catch. While not a long book, this volume is filled with technical terms and names, and so would have benefitted from an index.
Glei and Tottoli have made an important contribution to the growing literature on Latin translations of the Qur’ān by first identifying questions related to a specific text that merit investigation and then demonstrating how the findings of such investigations can be reported in a lucid and concise fashion. Their introduction of an ‘epi-linguistic’ theory to account for the evolution of Marracci's translations is worth serious consideration and should be applied to other translations when similar documentary evidence of their evolution survives.
Ludovico Marracci at work inaugurates a new series of Harrassowitz's Corpus Islamo-Christianum, Series Arabica-Latina, and as such is a very good beginning. Our understanding of the way in which Christian scholars of Arabic in the early modern period accessed, sifted and understood their sources is still at a very early stage, and the locating of their translations of the Qur’ān, published and unpublished, within the ‘translation cultures’ of the day will contribute, not only to manuscript studies, but also to the study of the intellectual history of the early modern period, and to the historiography of Christian-Muslim relations.
