Hearing and saying what was said.

• Author: Frank, Richard M.
• Position: Problems in translating Arabic to European language

RICHARD M. FRANK THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA

Presidential Address, delivered at the 206th meeting of the American Oriental Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March 19, 1996

Several of the brethren were at me lately to say something, concerning language, the one concerning certain features of the work of the Arab grammarians and the other about translating, but I was, when they asked, occupied with quite other and for me more accustomed things and was basically disinclined to take up either of the general issues proposed. But even saying nay may go agley and end in schemes unlaid. So I will here talk about language - after a fashion, anyway - and about hearing and understanding and making sense of what one hears (or reads) and so too, or maybe primarily, about translating - I hope in a way that, even if it doesn't seem to make clear and unequivocal sense, may help us to think about some of the most fundamental features of a problem that many of us here have - or maybe ought to have, though not all of us in the same way. That depends on how you hear "have" - but that's a tale for you to tell.

So, my topic, in principle, concerns the problems - one problem, anyhow - of translation, specifically of translation from Arabic into a European language. Assuming the appropriate skill in the craft of composing reasonably wrought sentences in one's own language, that one writes clearly and uses words carefully, doesn't speak ambivalently by accident, the source of our problems and perplexities resides in the very nature of language itself. What I have to say, though very general in most respects, reflects the peculiar perspective of my own continuing struggles ([Greek Text Omitted] in several senses) in trying to deal with the classical tradition of Muslim systematic theology commonly dubbed kalam; and it is in terms of this, as an exemplary, even if in some respects peculiar, case, that I shall focus my remarks. Some of you, particularly those who deal chiefly with other forms of discourse, will find there are important issues and aspects of the general problem that I fail to mention, but time is limited, and my experience as well.

It will be useful, by way of introduction, to say something about how I came to where I am on the question. A long time ago when the world was young, following a general interest originally fostered at St. Johns College, Annapolis, I was, on and off, working at Muslim philosophical texts. Having its roots in Hellenistic thought, the Muslim philosophical tradition termed falsafa historically intersects the intellectual tradition of the Christian West. For scholars and historians whose interest is chiefly or entirely focused on Aristotelian and neo-Platonic philosophy in antiquity and the middle ages, the falasifa (those who cultivated falsafa) appear as participants in an ongoing philosophical dialogue in which certain basic questions and issues continued from antiquity, and continue yet, to be posed and discussed, often in much the same terms. The texts are in different languages - Greek, Arabic, Latin - but, in the historical continuities of the discourse, one finds, despite a number of differences and disagreements on important theoretical issues and several fundamental divergences, a more or less similar way of talking and similar or analogous meanings voiced about a core of basic themes. Within this restricted perspective, translations and analyses of the Arabic texts are presented, and for the most part quite appropriately, in the much same language as are those of the Greek or the medieval Latin texts. This, however, is to read the Arabic texts (some of them, at any rate, or certain parts of them) - to hear them and understand their meaning - within a historically and theoretically appropriate context, but one which is nonetheless abstracted from their native Muslim context.

My own engagement with the Muslim philosophical texts was focused almost entirely on their relation to the Greek tradition. At some point, however, I got off for a time onto a siding where I read several kalam works, the meaning of which I didn't get; I couldn't see where they were coming from or exactly whereto headed. One evening then, I expressed my difficulties and perplexities concerning kalam to a colleague (now deceased) from another university who said in response that in his view this stuff wasn't really meant to make sense. His reply was non-sense. That was plain to see. No major element of a major culture - of any culture, for that matter - is, on its own terms and in its own context, vacant of serious meaning, even if it may not appear so immediately to the learned observer who views it from a distance and at an oblique angle. And so I was set off down a path I am yet on: trying to make sense of the texts, to uncover their sense and to present it. Uncovering and presenting are here two different activities; you have first to get hold of what it is you would present, and for this reason we shall have first to say something about language and getting hold of another speaker's meanings. And we might note here that, in ordinary usage, the Arabic word kalam is originally a noun for speaking, and commonly means speech or talk or discussion and sometimes dispute; and the name for the master of kalam theology, mutakallim, is, in origin and ordinary usage, "one who speaks" - and in grammar designates the first person of the verb, the one to whose speaking the hearer listens.

At the time I began, studies concerning kalam - most of them, anyhow - were of little help, as they plainly did not get to the core sense and intention of the texts. The main source of the difficulty was simply that classical kalam does not conform to the general ways of the usual philosophical and theological thought most of us were brought up on, our household thinkers from Plato to Kant, to Hegel and Nietzsche and so forth. The approach to it, when not simply philological, was mostly out of ancient and medieval philosophy and in several notable cases with a heavy dose of neo-scholasticism. The notion that kalam ought somehow to conform to the pattern was fostered by the active presence of elements of the late hellenistic tradition in Islam and by the presence in kalam of a few key words that were also at home in the peripatetic tradition. People who read kalam texts in Arabic heard "familiar" words and expressions - such as jawhar and arad and wujad - words that, on the one side, were used in Arabic translations already in the ninth century to represent Greek words and expressions (most often indirectly via Syriac) and then later, in Latin translations of Arabic philosophical works, were rendered in most cases by the same Latin words which were employed in translating the same philosophical works directly from Greek, so that the Greek, the Arabic, and the Latin words were taken to be equivalent, as in one sense many, if not most of them, are/were in that particular context. But the lexical "equivalence" of words translated across cultural and historical gaps often obscures semantic distance and intentional difference, especially where they occur in contexts alien to that represented in the translation tradition. This would seem fairly obvious. But some scholars and historians heard them - or treated many of them anyhow - as essentially synonymous, and this had some rather serious consequences where kalam was concerned. So, kalam didn't make proper sense and was declared - and considered by many - to be mere "dialectic": a simply disputational exercise in defense of one or another doctrinal orthodoxy, not a serious theoretical reflection on basic questions of metaphysics and theology. The assumption (not always explicit) that the mutakallimun were not only intellectually, but also religiously, a rather plebeian lot, was simply not questioned. Moving in a quite...