alliance Radical Reassessment of Arabic Arts, Language, and Literature (RRAALL), of which he and three other Library of Arabic Literature editors are members—Michael Cooperson, Devin Stewart, and myself, Shawkat Toorawa.62 Having successfully published a collaboratively authored book on Arabic autobiography in 2001,63 RRAALL was looking for a follow-up project. Lowry made the case that Consorts of the Caliphs captured our various and varied interests (the Abbasids, art and archaeology, ethnomusicology, gender, history, language, law, literature, the Saljūqs), that it was short, that it was divided into manageable parts, and that it was of inherent interest.64 By 2008, eight of us had translated consecutive portions and we had a complete if uneven working translation. In 2009, Lowry, Stewart, and I met in Philadelphia to even out the translation and subsequently dispatched it to Cooperson, who made many changes and suggestions. Then the project went quiet.
In 2009, when Philip Kennedy asked me what kinds of works I thought one might include in a “library of Arabic literature”—then still only an idea—I mentioned, among other works, Ibn al-Sāʿī’s little book. I even told him a “draft translation” was available. Later, when the Library of Arabic Literature (LAL) had become a reality, Kennedy (now the LAL’s General Editor), who hadn’t forgotten Ibn al-Sāʿī, mentioned the book to the board. In 2011, Julia Bray suggested that it was an ideal candidate for a collaborative LAL project and so, one morning in New York City, we resolved to take it on, with the blessings of RRAALL and of the LAL board. We realized—as we had been realizing and discovering with other LAL books that we had already edited—that the “draft translation,” in spite of the effort that had been put into it, was less a translation than it was an “Englished” version of the Arabic, in a prose that we have come to think of unflatteringly as “industry standard.”
PROCESS
Our first act was to appoint a project editor from our own LAL editorial board, as we do with all our projects. We chose Julia Bray, who went through the “draft translation” and wrote a report describing what needed to be done to bring it up to LAL standard—something we require for all potential LAL projects. At the same time, we showed it to the distinguished translator Richard Sieburth. With Bray’s and Sieburth’s positive but critical feedback, we decided that it was best to start from scratch. We divided the book into five parts and assigned each part to a team of two; the ten people involved were the eight LAL board members, the managing editor, and Richard Sieburth. After our first workshop we presented our preliminary thoughts and samples of our work at a public event in Abu Dhabi. For the next workshop, we invited Justin Stearns and Maurice Pomerantz (both of New York University Abu Dhabi) to join us and we shuffled around the teams. After these teams had done their translations and conferred among themselves and with one another, I then collated their material, made the various parts consistent based on the principles and choices that we had agreed upon, and e-mailed the material to everyone to read through and ponder.
We held a final workshop during our May 2014 editorial meeting in New York City, where we projected the translation onto a screen and went through it all together, comparing it to the manuscript. At the end of three half-day sessions, we had thrashed out many issues, which involved, among other things, reversing course on certain key decisions. Then, in a final daylong session, Julia Bray (the designated project editor) and I (the designated editor of the book) spent a most genial day going through it all again line by line, establishing new principles, establishing consistency where it was not yet present, and deciding on shape and format. Julia then returned to Oxford and I to Ithaca.
I then went through the entire translation again, implementing all of our decisions, and when I was satisfied I sent it back to Julia Bray to vet carefully. I also sent it to Joseph Lowry for his feedback. After I had incorporated Joe’s feedback and intervened stylistically again myself, we sent the translation to Marina Warner, who very graciously agreed to write a foreword. Julia then sent me further detailed comments and annotations, which I addressed and incorporated, and she proceeded to write her introduction.
At that point, I set about producing fuller notes to the translation. I also prepared preliminary glossaries. LAL policy is to have one unified glossary of names, places, and terms, but in this case we felt that separate glossaries of the authorities (authors and transmitters cited) and the characters featured in the anecdotes, of place names, and of realia would be far more useful to reader and scholar alike; we also decided that we would gloss every individual in the book. As I finished each constituent part, I sent it to Julia, who went over it very carefully. We would often catch a problem, or discover a reference that we wanted to insert, on our third or fourth exchange or read-through.
Once everything—front matter, Arabic edition and notes, English translation and notes, glossaries, indices—was ready, I sent it all off to Julia, in her capacity as project editor, so that she could vet it one last time and make any final crucial interventions. Once she gave the go-ahead, an executive editor—in this case James Montgomery, who made numerous valuable suggestions—did an executive review and then gave the green light to our managing editor, Chip Rossetti, to put the book into production.
The reason I have given such a detailed description of the process is that I want to highlight the fact that this is in every way a collaborative translation, and has been from the very beginning. It is true that in the final stages, Julia and I ended up making many decisions without the input of the rest of the group, but these were generally very small and/or stylistic decisions or else instances where we realized we had misinterpreted and therefore mistranslated something. Macro-level decisions were always taken as a group, after protracted discussion. As for the front and back matter, Julia and I collaborated extensively. And as I have described above, Joseph Lowry and James Montgomery had the opportunity to weigh in again.
PRINCIPLES
The first and easily most important question we faced was whether and how to translate names, designations, and titles. The second entry in the collection, for example, is devoted to “Ghādir jāriyat al-Imām al-Hādī.” “Ghādir” is a nickname or pet name meaning “treacherous” or “inconstant.” We could not initially agree whether to render the name in English or keep it in Arabic. Not to translate a nickname would be to shortchange the English reader; she could, it is true, learn from a footnote what a name means, but she might miss the fact that the name means what it means every time it is used. The group also agreed, however, that the “meaning” might constitute an undue distraction and sound odd besides. There are names that are meaningful but which one might not wish to translate; imagine a Spanish text featuring a woman named Concepción—one would likely not translate her name into the English “Conception.” We eventually decided to use Arabic names throughout. In the case of slaves, we provide a translation in quotation marks after the first occurrence (as it happens, typically in the heading), but use the Arabic name thereafter. In the case of the freeborn, however, we do not translate the name.
This decision extended to the titles of caliphs. The choice of a regnal title, whether made by the caliph himself or bestowed on him as heir apparent, was always significant and sometimes reflected a program; such is the case for al-Nāṣir li-Dīn Allāh (husband of Saljūqī Khātūn, no. 29 below), who aspired to be “The Champion of the Faith,” but even though Arabic readers will be very aware of the meanings of such titles, it is not the norm to translate them. As for the title Imām preceding a caliph’s name, that is one standard way of referring to a caliph, but it was clear to us that to use the title “Imam” in English would cause confusion, whereas to use “Caliph,” as we have, would be unambiguous. We also decided that the caliphal title “Amīr al-Muʾminīn,” literally “Commander of the Faithful” and routinely used as a form of address, could sound clumsy in some contexts in English; we opted instead for “Sire” or “My lord” in many, though not all, cases.
The word jāriyah in the phrase “Ghādir jāriyat al-Imām al-Hādī” is often translated “slave girl” or “singing-girl.” While some of us thought that the demeaning aspect of the word “girl” was a positive feature of the word in this case, appropriate for describing someone who was a slave, no matter how accomplished or respected, others of us thought it would be more powerful (if that is the right word) to use “female slave” or “slave”—and this view prevailed. In the