to render those features he acknowledged as indispensable to the appeal of the original. But at least he found them appealing; some of his successors would not.
In 1822 the great French Orientalist Silvestre de Sacy published what was to become the standard critical edition of al-Ḥarīrī’s Impostures. In his preface he addresses the question of why he did not translate the text into Latin or French. What matters about the Impostures (Séances), he says, is their form, not their content. Many episodes consist of “riddles, anagrams, and puns . . . that even the most gifted translator could not put into another language.” 49 Nor indeed should any translator want to: though the word games can be amusing, they can also be tiresome and pointless. 50 Clearly, we have come a long way from Chappelow and his belief that the Impostures are full of good advice for living a better life.
For de Sacy, the Impostures are most useful as a means to learn the fine points of Arabic. Even so, he admits that there is something irresistible about them. And he offers a perceptive diagnosis of why translations into European languages have failed to do them justice. Translators, he says, feel obligated to retain the allusions they find in the original. But then they must do one of two things, neither of which works. If they leave the allusions unexplained, the reader will have trouble understanding what is going on. But if the allusions are explained, they will draw more attention to themselves than they do in the original, spoiling the effect of al-Ḥarīrī’s style. 51
This insight was not wasted on the German Romantic poet Friedrich Rückert (d. 1866), the next great translator of the Impostures, and the first after al-Ḥarīzī to venture beyond plodding literalism. In the preface to his Verwandlungen des Abu Seid von Seruj, which appeared in 1826, Rückert admits that a translator who approaches the Impostures as a specifically Oriental text would indeed have to explain all the cultural references, since al-Ḥarīrī, unlike Homer or Shakespeare, is culturally alien to German readers. But Rückert refuses to produce an academic treatise. Instead, he says, he decided to focus on the poetic elements: the “incessant word- and sound-play, the rhymed prose, the over-the-top images, and the hairsplitting, overwrought expressions.” The result, he says, is not a translation but a recasting (Nachbilding) of the Impostures. 52
True to his word, Rückert strives to replace al-Ḥarīrī’s special effects with equally elaborate tricks in German. To translate the palindromes, for example, he uses Doppelreim, a form where the ultimate and the penultimate stressed syllables in each line rhyme with their respective counterparts in successive lines. 53 Yet even Rückert could not come up with an equivalent for everything. Like al-Ḥarīzī before him, he throws up his hands at the dotted and undotted epistle. The German text faithfully reports that the challenge is to avoid certain letters, but not which ones or why; and, as far as I can tell, the German epistle obeys no constraint. 54 In other cases, the difficulty proved so insuperable that entire episodes had to be dropped. And Imposture 20 he appears to have omitted simply because of its sexual content. As a result of these avoidances and omissions, his translation contains only forty-three Impostures.
With Rückert’s German on his desk, Theodore Preston, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, produced the first English translation to acknowledge the formal properties of the Impostures. His 1850 rendering uses “a species of composition which occupies a middle place between prose and verse,” not rhyming, but “arranged as far as possible in evenly balanced periods.” But the more complex special effects—the puns, palindromes, and so forth—presented “almost insuperable obstacles,” leading him to omit three-fifths of the text. 55 And the copious notes betray his failure to heed Rückert’s warning that any translation that treats the Impostures as a text to be parsed for information about something else (the manners and customs of the Orient, for example) will produce an academic treatise rather than a work of art.
After Preston there was one more nineteenth-century attempt to put the Impostures into English. The initiative was that of Thomas Chenery, a Barbados-born polyglot who resigned from a position at Oxford to assume editorship of The Times of London. 56 Following de Sacy’s advice, he decided to treat the Impostures as a teaching text. 57 In 1866, he published a translation of the first twenty-six episodes, stating flatly that he had made “no attempt to imitate the plays on words, or the rhyme of the original” but rather composed “a literal prose rendering, intended primarily to help the student in Arabic.” 58 After Chenery’s untimely death in 1884, his work was carried on by the German-born Orientalist Francis Joseph Steingass, whose rendition of the remaining episodes appeared in 1898. In a preface, F. F. Arbuthnot tells us that Steingass “completed his portion of the work under great physical difficulties. . . . For some part of the time he was actually blind.” 59 Like his predecessor’s, Steingass’s rendering is strictly lexical. And, like Preston, both Chenery and Steingass append page after page of annotation, as if still laboring under the conviction that if the Impostures could not be translated they could at least be explained.
Whatever the merits of the lexical approach, it must be admitted that it has contributed nothing to making the Impostures part of Anglophone literary culture. Outside the narrow confines of medieval literary scholarship, I have never seen a reference in English to any of these translations, nor any other evidence that nonspecialists have heard of al-Ḥarīrī or, for that matter, of al-Hamadhānī (whose Impostures were translated, also lexically, by Prendergast in 1915), or of anything called a maqāmah.
In Russian, the situation is quite different: the Impostures exists as a full-fledged literary text. This is the result of work by Anna Arkadievna Iskoz-Dolinina (d. 2017) and Valentin Michaelovich Borisov (d. 1985), whose partial translation appeared in 1978, followed by a complete translation, with Valeria Kirpichenko (d. 2015), in 1987. 60 Like al-Ḥarīzī and Rückert, the translators render poetry as poetry and rhymed prose as rhymed prose. The latter, they say, can work in Russian, since Russian prose, like Arabic, can be made rhythmic by repeated sounds and parallel grammatical forms. Arguing, however, that too close an imitation of the Arabic form would result in unreadability, they unpack al-Ḥarīrī’s dense conceits and let his clauses go on longer than they do in Arabic before ending them with a rhyme word. 61 The result is a distinctively patterned yet still readable text—one that became a Russian bestseller and won, along with Dolinina’s translation of al-Hamadhānī, a major Saudi translation award in 2012. 62
As far as I know, the only other languages in which complete translations exist are Ottoman and modern Turkish, French, and Chinese. 63 The Ottoman translations include four complete and three partial renderings. Of these, the only one I have been able to look at is the partial translation published by Hâşim Veli in 1908 or 1909. It is intricately patterned, full of lightly rhythmical sentences and Arabic-style prose rhyme (Kaplan, “Roma Sefâreti Imami Hâşim Velî’nin Makâmât-i Harîrî Tercümesi,” 219–21). There is also a modern Turkish translation by
