Future Humanities: Translating World Literatures
On Monday, September 24th, 2018, LAL is hosting a public conversation on the stakes, challenges, and rewards of editing and translating premodern texts from the world’s great literary traditions.
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Vice President Mariët Westermann moderates a panel of general editors from six groundbreaking publishing projects that specialize in facing-page translations. Topics of discussion include the parameters and methodologies for establishing parallel-text translation series in Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Latin, Old English, and Sanskrit and other Indian languages.
“Future Humanities: Translating World Literatures” is free and open to the public, and is organized in collaboration with NYU Press and the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute.
Watch a recording of the event here.
New York City, September 2018
All Souls College, Oxford: A Workshop on the Library of Arabic Literature
LAL’s “A Corpus, Not a Canon” event at All Souls offered the first opportunity to discuss this ambitious and important enterprise in the UK. It brought together scholars, translators, editors, and public respondents to explore issues of culture diplomacy, canon formation, comparative criteria of appreciation, and approaches to translation, among others. For recordings of the panel sessions, as well as the list of attendees, click here.
Oxford, May 2015
Kinokuniya hosts LAL
NYU Abu Dhabi Institute’s first public program in Dubai celebrates LAL at the Kinokuniya bookstore with a sizeable crowd and a new publication, Two Arabic Travel Books, hot off the press. General Editor Philip F. Kennedy moderates a conversation between Executive Editors James Montgomery and Shawkat Toorawa, Editor Joseph Lowry, and Managing Editor Chip Rossetti on: how LAL came about, how it selects its titles, what’s to come, the critical importance of such projects in making a deep and rich tradition accessible to all, and the challenges facing translators in the 21st century. More information here.
Dubai, December 2014
Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, Falcons, and Abbasid Hunting Poetry
This popular event takes off with a reading of a much-loved poem by Sheikh Zayed about hunting with a young falcon, delivered in its original Arabic by the noted Emirati poet Mohamed Al Hashimi and then in English translation by Executive Editor James Montgomery, who goes on to discuss why poetry is such an apt medium for expressing the unique bond between man and animal. Watch the video below for the full lecture, which also features recitations by Professor Michael Cooperson, Abdulla Al Hussam, Shahkbut Al Kaabi… and don’t miss the slideshow of LAL Board members interacting with live specimens on their tour of the falcon hospital in Abu Dhabi!
Abu Dhabi, December 2013
VIDEO: Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, Falcons, and Abbasid Hunting Poetry
Translating the Untranslatable: The Challenges of Translating and Publishing Classical Arabic Texts
The Editorial Board of the Library of Arabic Literature officially launches the series at the NYU Abu Dhabi building in New York, presenting an overview of forthcoming works and discussing some of the challenges they face, including: rendering ancient poetry in 21st-century English, encouraging collaborative translations, and dealing with so-called “untranslatable” texts.
New York City, May 2013
VIDEO: Translating the Untranslatable
Caliphs and their Consorts: Translating Anecdotes and Poetry in Ibn al-Saʿi’s Nisāʾ al-khulafāʾ (Women of the Caliphs)
The Editors of the Library of Arabic Literature discuss a 12th-century work on the wives and women of caliphs. Julia Bray places the work in its historical and literary context and Shawkat Toorawa moderates a panel discussion on the process of collaborative translation and on the challenges of rendering classical Arabic poetry and prose.
Abu Dhabi, December 2012
VIDEO: Caliphs and their Consorts – Translating Anecdotes and Poetry
Translating al-Shāfiʿi’s Risāla
In this lecture held in May, 2011, in Abu Dhabi, Joseph Lowry assesses the significance of Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shāfiʿi’s Risālah as a founding text of Islamic law. Lowry’s edition-translation of this text was published in 2013 under the title The Epistle on Legal Theory.
Abu Dhabi, May 2011
VIDEO: Translating al-Shafi`i’s Risala
Translating Classical Arabic Literature
Professor and Editorial Board Member Michael Cooperson introduces the Library of Arabic Literature to an audience in New York, detailing the intricacies of commissioning translations and publishing a library of classic works of Arabic literature and culture in English and Arabic parallel-text editions. More information here.
New York, December 2010