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 end, we settled on “slave” alone. The Ghādir heading thus reads:
Ghādir
“Inconstance”
Slave of the Caliph al-Hādī
As for the English rendering of the names of characters and transmitters in the text, we occasionally shorten long genealogies to make them less unwieldy for English readers. Names of well-known figures that appear in the text in a form unfamiliar to modern readers (which is usually an indication of how familiar Ibn al-Sāʿī himself was with them) are identified in the glossary.
Other decisions we made about the translation include the following:
• With a few exceptions (typically in the case of well-known figures or long genealogies), we render names the way they appear in the Arabic on first occurrence and thereafter shorten them to a standard form, e.g. Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī, al-Ṭabarī, or Thābit ibn Sinān.
• We only translate a professional designation—e.g. “the trustee ʿAbd al-Wahhāb ibn ʿAlī”—when we are confident that it was the profession of the individual in question, rather than the equivalent of a modern surname.
• We follow the spelling conventions of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, Three.
• We render Saljūq names in Arabicized forms.
• In the longer isnāds—the succession or “chain” of transmitters of an anecdote or other item of information—we frequently use long dashes to separate the sources that intervene between Ibn al-Sāʿī’s own informant and the original source of the information, so as to make it easier for the reader to follow the transmission.
• We routinely substitute pronouns for proper names to make the meaning clearer. Occasionally we do the opposite, expanding a pronoun, to make attribution clearer to the reader; thus in §8.8.3, where the Arabic has simply “He said that,” we render it “Here our source, Abū l-ʿAynāʾ, notes …”
• Because we use “Isfahan” for the city, we use “al-Iṣfahānī” for the name (even though we have retained the predominating “Iṣbahān” and “al-Iṣbahānī” in the Arabic, as explained in the “Note on the Edition” above).
• We have striven to make the poetry rhyme when the context or verse itself required it and used devices such as half-rhyme or assonance when the meaning of the verse or anecdote depended on it. When forcing a poem to rhyme in English would have meant altering the original meaning, we have not done so.
• Translations from the Qurʾan are our own.
Note also:
• Though many anecdotes in Consorts of the Caliphs appear in other extant works, we do not provide cross-references (these are available in Jawād’s edition).
• We italicize the poetry to make it stand out from the rest of the text.
• The maps of Baghdad in some cases do not so much reflect precise locations as they do the topographical relationships between different locations.
• The first three glossaries—of characters; of authorities (authors and transmitters); and of places—contain all the names that occur in Consorts of the Caliphs. We also provide a fourth glossary, of realia.
In 2010, when we first told colleagues how LAL would work—numerous stages and levels of close editorial scrutiny, the assigning of in-house project editors to each and every volume, master classes in editing and translating, and collaborative, workshopped translations—most, if not all, were skeptical. We hope that this volume, which was produced according to these principles and norms, will help alleviate any doubts about the possibility, viability, and desirability of such an enterprise, and that it will come to be seen as one model for how things can be done and—such is our hope—done well.
Shawkat M. Toorawa,
