Sky-Birds & Dead Trees On Two Images in Edmond Jabès

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasser Elhariry
Keyword(s):  
French Language ◽  
Arabic Poetry ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Dead Trees ◽  
Translational Mode ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Archive ◽  
Edmond Jabes ◽  
Classical Arabic ◽  
Late Works

Chapter 2 concerns two recurrent images from Edmond Jabès’s late works, Un étranger avec, sous le bras, un livre de petit format (1989) and Le livre de l’hospitalité (1991). While Jabès is well known within French literary circles, analyses of his early Cairene work— and to an even lesser extent the formative roles of orality and aurality from his pre- Parisian period—are few and thin. I first contextualize the figure of the Egyptian poet in relation to the history of Jabès scholarship, and then build on Tengour’s translational poetics of the classical Arabic literary archive in order to unravel a different, sublimated translational mode that links many of Jabès’s later books. In his late and final works, which he composed while living in Paris, Jabès’s poetic imaginary reprises word for word the tropes of early Arabic verse. When read together and in relation to the same archival corpus, Tengour and Jabès represent contrasting translational and intertextual modes for comparative poetic and translingual compositions in French. Through his aphasic refuge in French monolingualism following his exile from Cairo, and his late re/discovery of classical Arabic poetry in Paris, Jabès’s sublimated recourse to early Arabic verse retraces and performs the history of the old literary forms beneath a French language surface.

Collaborative Composition of Classical Arabic Poetry

Arabica ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 65 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 163-206
Author(s):  
Erez Naaman
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Arabic Poetry ◽  
History Of ◽  
Composition Process ◽  
Classical Arabic

Abstract Evidence of collaborative composition of poetry goes back to the earliest documented phases in the history of Arabic literature. Already during pre-Islamic times, poets like Imruʾ al-Qays used to challenge others to complete their impromptu verse and create poetry collaboratively with them. This practice—commonly called iǧāza or tamlīṭ and essentially different from the better known poetic dueling of the naqāʾiḍ (flytings)—has shown remarkable stability and adherence to its form and dynamics in the pre-modern Arabophone world. In this article, I will discuss evidence of collaborative poetry from pre-Islamic times to the early seventh/thirteenth century, in order to present a picture of the typical situations in which it was practiced, its functions, its composition process, and formal aspects. Although usually not producing poetic masterpieces, this practice has the merit of revealing much about the processes of composing classical Arabic poetry in general. In this respect, its study and critical assessment are highly important, given the fact that medieval Arabic literary criticism does not always reflect praxis or focus on the actual practicalities of composing poetry. This practice and the contextualized way in which it was preserved allow us to see vividly the inextricable link between poetic form and the conditions in which poetry was created. It likewise sheds light on the intricate ways in which poets resisted, influenced, and manipulated others by poetic means. Based on the obvious fact that collaborative composition is imbued with the spirit of play, I offer at the end of the article criticism of Johan Huizinga’s famous play concept and his (much less famous) views of early Arabic culture and poetry in light of the evidence I studied.

Sufis in Mecca

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasser Elhariry
Keyword(s):  
Textual Analysis ◽  
French Language ◽  
Francophone Studies ◽  
Current State ◽  
Sacred And Profane ◽  
Lyric Voice ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
French Poetry ◽  
Classical Arabic

This chapter directly picks up where Stétié ends, with a textual analysis of a poetic cycle of chapbooks by Meddeb. I argue that a renouveau in the Francophone lyric is made possible through his translations of classical Arabic and Sufi poetry. In his chapbooks, Meddeb attempts to refashion himself, after his two successful and widely acclaimed first novels Talismano (1979) and Phantasia (1986), as a mystical, wandering Sufi poet. With Tombeau d’Ibn Arabi (1987), Les 99 stations de Yale (1995), and Aya dans les villes (1999) in particular, Meddeb manically focuses on an adaptational, modern rewriting in French verse of the history of Sufi saints, poets and poetry. Meddeb simultaneously draws on the formal and structural poetics of the pre-Islamic odes (as we will have seen with Tengour and Jabès), but he recasts them in light of the life of the Sufi saints and mystics rather than the pagan poets. Meddeb’s major innovation lies not only in the poetic combination of sacred and profane poetic registers, but also in an original combination of French and Arabic poetic registers with the world of modern American poetics. A central literary case whom I revisit in the conclusion to Pacifist Invasions, a critical re-evaluation of Meddeb reveals him to be indispensable for the successful poetic reconstruction of Francophone studies. I demonstrate how, much like the Sufi poet, and in keeping with ‘Ā’ishah al-Bā‘ūniyyah’s Principles of Sufism, Meddeb’s new Francophone lyric self-inflects as consciousness in search of what lies beyond its knowledge of its current state: situated in relation to itself, its paradoxical internal genealogy, its contemplative meditational mode. The poetic import of Meddeb’s lyric consists of the masterful blending of the figure of the Sufi poet and the Arabic tongue with contemporaneous intonations in French poetry. Meddeb’s writing transverses concurrent and widely divergent poetic trends, and connects them to one another in an original French-language arabesque. Beneath the surface of his first poetic experiments, Meddeb had couched a hidden, propagative poetics of the trace, barely perceptible, held together by thematic and generic modulations, a double lyric voice, and the infralinguistic.

scholarly journals Convergence and Divergence between the Arabic ʿUdhrî (Chaste) Love and Platonic Love: A Comparative Study

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 44
Author(s):  
Ahmed Thnaybat ◽  
Hussein Zeidanin
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Arabic Poetry ◽  
Platonic Love ◽  
History Of ◽  
Convergence And Divergence ◽  
And Behaviors ◽  
Classical Arabic ◽  
Literary Phenomenon

The study explores the Udhrî ghazal as a classical literary phenomenon in the Arabic poetry; and it seeks to correlate it with Plato’s theories of love in The Symposium. The issues the study raises are: history of the Udhrî love, factors leading to its emergence, impact of Islam on the Udhrî poets, and stages of the Udhrî narrative based on classical Arabic poetry and prose. The study controverts the claims associating the Udhrî ghazal with Islam due to the profound discrepancies between Islamic teachings and the practices and behaviors of the Udhrî poets. It as well reviews the theories of love Plato introduces in the Symposium for the purpose of estimating their manifestations in classical Arabic prose and impact on the Udhrî ghazal. The beginnings of Udhrî love go back to the pre-Islamic era during which poets, such as Antara Al-Absi, frequently combined the motif of chaste love with other related topics in their poems. Yet, the Udhrî ghazal flourishes in the Umayyad age during which poets tackled Udhrî love as an autonomous motif and subgenre. The study further questions the various possible factors, i.e. political, religious, environmental and social, modernists believe have led to the evolution of the Udhrî ghazal in the Islamic age and the Umayyad age.   

Translating Translating Tengour

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasser Elhariry
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
First Century ◽  
French Language ◽  
Translation Theory ◽  
English Translations ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Classical Arabic ◽  
Literary Arabic

Chapter 1 begins with a study of the most evidently literal, translational rewriting of a classical Arabic literary corpus. It analyses in depth Habib Tengour’s chapbook Césure (2006). I read Tengour’s literal translations of images and metaphors culled from the archive of the classical Arabic odes, alongside his American translator Pierre Joris’s rendering of his translations of translations. The juxtaposition of the old Arabic texts, the history of their English translations, and Tengour’s original French language poems, which are then cut through with Joris’s American translational idiom, produces a four- sided linguistic refraction that unravels how Tengour unwrites the Arabic, so as to rewrite it forward into a falsely, seemingly monolingual French. I situate the poetics of translation and intertextuality in relation to Tengour and Joris’s respective, trans-Atlantic editorial and publishing worlds. I pay particular attention to how they capture and maintain the ‘pseudo-opacity’ of an original translingual, translational poetics, which they premise on the multicultural plurilingualism of the Maghreb. In so doing, we revisit translation theory from Joris’s perspective as an active contemporary American translator, theoretician, essayist, poetician and poet, with a particular focus accorded to a consideration of the formative, vagrant structure and thematics of the classical Arabic odes. Together, Tengour and Joris point to a twentieth- and twenty-first-century tradition of trans-Atlantic Franco-American translations, which undercuts the place afforded to the French language. I conclude with the assertion that Tengour and Joris render the French language an effaceable, hopelessly transparent mode of translation between two series of opacities: classical, high literary Arabic on the one hand, American English on the other.

Heliotropic Exit

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasser Elhariry
Keyword(s):  
French Language ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Critical Inquiry ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Speaking In Tongues ◽  
History Of ◽  
Classical Arabic ◽  
Language Question ◽  
Visual Sign

Ryoko Sekiguchi’s Héliotropes is deeply informed by Giorgio Agamben and Daniel Heller-Roazen’s work on the ‘end of the poem’ and on ‘speaking in tongues,’ and so Sekiguchi perfectly unites classical Arabic literature, modernist poetics, and contemporary philosophical and critical inquiry into prosody. As the youngest of the five authors studied in Pacifist Invasions, she draws on recent innovations in critical poetic theory, and the complex linguistic, prosodic and thematic arrangements of the muwashshaḥa and the history of its scholarship. Her poetry provides a spectacular, particularly poignant exemplar for where we may begin with the language question, now that we have ended. Her solution to the inescapable problems facing French poetics represents an extreme departure: to exit altogether the Francophone literary idiom, and back toward its beginning as prise de conscience or ‘awakening,’ mediated by a Franco-Arabic tradition of unprecedented poetic innovation. Her Franco-Arabic composition deforms and unfurls a language undone. As with Saussure and Stétié’s aporetic notion of a ‘pacifist invasion’ of language, with Sekiguchi this linguistic transformation takes less the form of Francophonie’s initial surrealism- tinged linguistic destruction than a rediscovery and resurrection within and through a French language surface of classical Arabic literature and mystical Islam and Sufism. In this light, the poetics of the muwashshaḥa marks an exceptional site of transference between languages in passage, a liminal moment of transit where languages are placed at one another’s thresholds, freely interwoven into one another, becoming other languages, becoming something other than language as such, that is, characterized by a basic correspondence between visual sign and uttered sense.

Pacifist Invasions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasser Elhariry
Keyword(s):  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Francophone Literature ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Francophone Studies ◽  
Poetry And Poetics ◽  
Original Language ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
Edmond Jabes ◽  
Classical Arabic

Pacifist Invasions: Arabic, Translation, and the Postfrancophone Lyric is about what happens to the contemporary French lyric in the translingual Arabic context. Drawing on lyric theory, comparative poetics, and linguistics, it demonstrates how Arabic literature and Islamic scripture pacifically invade French in poetry by Habib Tengour (Algeria), Edmond Jabès (Egypt), Salah Stétié (Lebanon), Abdelwahab Meddeb (Tunisia), and Ryoko Sekiguchi (Japan). Pacifist Invasions deploys comparative side-by-side close readings of classical Arabic literature, Islamic scripture, and the Arabic commentary traditions in the original language, against the landscape of contemporary Francophone literature, poetry, and poetics. Detailed close readings reveal three generic modes of translating Arabic poetics into French lyric. The book analyzes how poets writing in French pacifically invade the language by engaging in a translational and intertextual relationship with the history and world of Arabic literature. Pacifist Invasions reveals the central importance of translational and intertextual poetics after colonialism, as they pacifically invade and denature the monolingual fabric of French. It recasts the field of Francophone Studies to account for transversal and transhistorical transmissions of literary forms and languages in Arabic, and offers fresh insight into the question of writing in the colonizer’s language. The study shifts the focus to the context of Arabic and Islamic literary cultures, demonstrating how they pacifically invade French from within, rather than writing back from the margins of empire. Through close readings of poetry, translations, commentaries, chapbooks, art books, and essays, Pacifist Invasions proposes a rereading of Francophone literature in relation to the translations and transmissions of classical Arabic poetics, offering a translingual, comparative repositioning of the field of Francophone postcolonial studies along a fluid, translational Franco-Arabic axis.

ACCOUNTING REPRESENTATION AND THE SLAVE TRADE: THE GUIDE DU COMMERCE OF GAIGNAT DE L'AULNAIS

2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl S. McWatters ◽  
Yannick Lemarchand
Keyword(s):  
International Trade ◽  
Real World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
French Language ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Economic Context ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Bear Witness ◽  
Language Literature

The Guide du commerce occupies a distinctive place in the French-language literature on accounting. Passed over by most specialists in the history of maritime trade and the slave trade, the manual has never been the subject of a documented historical study. The apparent realism of the examples, the luxury of details and their precision, all bear witness to a deep concern to go beyond a simple apprenticeship in bookkeeping. Promoting itself essentially as “un guide du commerce,” the volume offers strategic examples for small local businesses, as well as for those engaged in international trade. Yet, the realism also demonstrated the expertise of the author in the eyes of potential purchasers. Inspired by the work of Bottin [2001], we investigate the extent to which the manual reflects real-world practices and provides a faithful glimpse into the socio-economic context of the period. Two additional questions are discussed briefly in our conclusion. First, can the work of Gaignat constitute a source document for the history of la traite négrière? The second entails our early deliberations about the place of this volume in the history of the slave trade itself.

A Melkite Arabic literary lingua franca from the second half of the first millennium

1994 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Blau
Keyword(s):  
Arabic Language ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Greek Orthodox ◽  
Lingua Franca ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Arabic Dialects ◽  
Modern Arabic ◽  
Classical Arabic ◽  
The Ideal

After the Islamic conquest, the Greek Orthodox, so-called Melkite ( = Royalist), church fairly early adopted Arabic as its literary language. Their intellectual centres in Syria/Palestine were Jerusalem, along with the monaster ies of Mar Sabas and Mar Chariton in Judea, Edessa and Damascus. A great many Arabic manuscripts stemming from the first millennium, some of them dated, copied at the monastery of Mar Chariton and especially at that of Mar Saba, have been discovered in the monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai, the only monastery that has not been pillaged and set on fire by the bedouin. These manuscripts are of great importance for the history of the Arabic language. Because Christians were less devoted to the ideal of the ‘arabiyya than their Muslim contemporaries, their writings contain a great many devi ations from classical Arabic, thus enabling us to reconstruct early Neo-Arabic, the predecessor of the modern Arabic dialects, and bridge a gap of over one thousand years in the history of the Arabic language.

scholarly journals Tempering an Enlightened Educator: Frédéric-César de La Harpe at the Russian Imperial Court (1783–1795)

Slovene ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 365-384
Author(s):  
Andrei Yu. Andreev ◽  
Danièle Tosato-Rigo
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Educational Process ◽  
French Language ◽  
Main Stage ◽  
Success Story ◽  
Imperial Court ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of

Among all the educators who cared for him from his early childhood, Alexander I gave a particular honor to only one, the Swiss teacher Frédéric-César de La Harpe (1754–1838), who, invited to teach the French language, was further his instructor in geography, history, arithmetic, and geometry, as well as the foundations of philosophy. This Swiss teacher has been regarded in historical studies as the fortunate “chosen one” by Catherine II, who summoned him to direct Alexander’s education and who rewarded him accordingly afterwards. The present article peers into the backstage of the long educational process (1783–1795) in which he was engaged, revealing the less idyllic facts. Based on unpublished documents in Russian and Swiss archives, this study presents a picture of the place of an educator on the main stage of his activity, the Russian Imperial court, and thus the interplay of the history of practice and of ideas and their representations. Did La Harpe himself choose to work as an educator? Did Catherine II really search and find the Swiss teacher for his abilities? Did his teaching indeed represent a concretization of Catherine’s thoughts on this matter? And finally, how did La Harpe himself estimate his situation at the court, which was transformed into a “success story” only after 1814? This article, offering some answers to these questions, adds to the analysis the different circumstances of La Harpe’s appearance and later life at the court; the difficulties he faced in spite of the support of Catherine II, which was, regrettably, withdrawn unexpectedly; and, finally, the permanent discrepancies between his pedagogical ideals and the everyday studies in which he engaged.

scholarly journals Priority values of the French axiological paradigm on the material of the most used French idioms

2021 ◽  
pp. 68-77
Author(s):  
L. V. Shapovalova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
National Character ◽  
French Language ◽  
A Value ◽  
National Values ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Value Hierarchy ◽  
Broad Understanding

The article examines and analyzes 10 of the 1,500 most commonly used French idioms from the site "Les expressions françaises décortiquées". Phraseological picture of the world plays an important role in cognition of the world around us, because it not only captures its phenomena in the language, but also adds to them connotations, which are manifested in the choice of words of a particular language register. The study of hierarchies of values, recorded in idioms, and ways of their representation allow us to build a value hierarchy in the French mentality and understand the main features of the French national character. We have a broad understanding of phraseology and consider idioms not only idioms, but also phraseological units, proverbs, sayings, winged expressions, speech stamps, because they all name a concept, are reproduced unchanged, and are stable phrases. The phraseological units, taken into the analysis, are allocated on frequency of addresses that allows to define a hierarchy of values in the French phraseological picture of the world. Each of the permanent statements, taken into the analysis, nominates one concept, and the frequency of appeals to them allows not only to understand their priority in the French mentality, but also to outline the features of the French national character. French national values are fixed in the selected phraseological units, and the relation to them is distinguished on the basis of connotations, the register of speech, the present euphemism, and metaphorization. It is interesting to trace the history of the considered phraseological units and lexical units in their structure, ways of entering the French language, numerous hypotheses that explain their meaning. These areas of research and identification of social strata, in which the idioms arose, show where the phenomena denominated by them were the most common, and the hierarchy of values recorded in them, in the French mentality.

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