The use of ethno-specific varieties of speech and writing raises the vexed question of cultural appropriation, a question to which I have given a good deal of thought. I take seriously the argument that privileged users of Standard English have no business imitating, and profiting from the use of, the speech varieties associated with less privileged communities, especially since members of those communities have suffered everything from ridicule to persecution for speaking as they do. But I also take seriously the arguments of linguists and writers, many of them members of the same communities, who point out that ethno-specific forms of speech are fully developed forms of language and therefore no less deserving of serious study than, say, classical Arabic or Standard English. When local varieties of English reach the point, as many have, of being used to compose literary texts, they have for all intents and purposes become full-fledged languages. For better or worse, one of the properties of a language is that it can be learned by non-native speakers. And indeed, every variety I have imitated here has its linguistic anthropologists, textbook authors, and video uploaders eager to pass on the secrets of their talk.
In using these varieties to translate Arabic, I am taking the enthusiasts at their word that their forms of expression are worth sharing. Using a nonstandard variety of English is not the same as mocking its users, speaking for them, or pretending to convey their experience—all habits of privilege that are indeed obnoxious. Rather, it is a matter of treating all varieties as equally worthy of being called upon to represent the staggering diversity and inventiveness of English. Given the nature of the original, moreover, using different idioms did not entail trying to create facsimiles of ordinary talk. Rather, it meant coming up with something as verbally excessive as the Impostures. To do this, I relied primarily on speech and writing by verbally excessive speakers and authors, and on the second place on dictionaries, glossaries, and linguistic studies. In as many cases as possible, I asked a native speaker, a well-informed writer or linguist, or—in the case of historical varieties—an expert reader to review my draft. In one case, that of Naijá (Imposture 45), the review was so extensive that it amounted to a largely new text, which should be read as a collaboration between myself and the Nigerian novelist and editor Richard Ali.
In an essay on the translation of classical Chinese poetry into English, Paul W. Kroll warns against “the idea that it is permissible, even necessary in some cases, to rewrite the original text to accommodate either the deficiencies or the particular strengths of the target language.” This “self-protective approach,” he says, fosters “the tendency to discover simply oneself and one’s own ideas in a text.” When a translator gives in to the urge to “rewrite the text in order to please himself,” the result is a monument to “self-display and the anticipated desires of an intellectually incurious audience” rather than “an honest carrying-over of the original author’s words and thoughts.” Kroll does not deny that an “imitation” (John Dryden’s term) can find a place “in the broad market of literature,” but it should be understood as “a new performance inspired by, but not reliably reflective of, the original text.” 76
Before I met al-Ḥarīrī, I would have agreed with everything Kroll is saying here. Having now learned something about the Impostures and its reception in various languages, I cannot imagine carrying it over honestly without self-display. Nor can I imagine a translation of al-Ḥarīrī that is “reliably reflective of the original text” without being a performance of some kind. In this case, the point of the performance is to create a text that is impossible to read as anything but a celebration of language. If the result does not quite seem to deserve the name of translation, I will happily accept two other names. One is new: transculturation. The other is old: Englishing. 77
While deeply engaged in the Englishing of al-Ḥarīrī, I happened to make the acquaintance of Abdessalam Benabdelali, an accomplished translator and theorist of translation. When I told him about this project, he said simply, “The Impostures cannot be translated.” Before we parted, he kindly gave me a copy of his bilingual volume Ḍiyāfat al-gharīb/L’hospitalité de l’étranger (“Stranger’s Welcome”). Looking at it later, I came across a passage that may explain what he meant:
The untranslatable is the space where the differences between languages and cultures come to the surface. This does not mean that certain things can never be rendered, but rather that we must never stop trying to render them. The untranslatable, therefore, is not something that cannot be translated, but rather something that can be translated infinitely many ways. 78
This I take to mean that all translations fail, but all the failures are necessary. In my work on the Impostures, I have found this a consoling thought. The second thing that has sustained me is not so much a thought as an image: al-Ḥarīrī, blackening page after page, tugging at his beard, and all too often finding himself at a loss for words, as he strove to match wits with the Wonder of the Age.
1.See Abdelfattah Kilito, L’Absent ou l’épreuve du soleil, translated from the Arabic by Francis Gouin (Casablanca: Toubkal, 2019), 98–101.
2.Or so he later claimed. Rowson (“Religion and Politics”) seems to believe him, while Hämeen-Anttila is more skeptical (Maqama, 24–27). For an illuminating study of the “vizier culture” that promoted literary rivalries of this kind, see England, Medieval Empires.
3.Hämeen-Anttila has pointed out that al-Hamadhānī “was not seen primarily as a maqama writer by his contemporaries” and suggests that his reputation as the master of the genre may have arisen because of al-Ḥarīrī’s later efforts to outdo him (Hämeen-Anttila, Maqama, 117–25).
4.Etymologically, maqāmah indicates any occasion when one stands, and by extension a speech made before an audience. As used by al-Ḥarīrī and al-Hamadhānī, its obvious sense is that of a verbal performance delivered to strangers while standing in a mosque, market, or street, as opposed to one delivered while seated in comfort among friends, as would be the case in a majlis. Even so, the term’s wide application as a designation for literary works has generated much discussion. My position is that of Katia Zakharia, who argues that no single definition is adequate to the variety of documented uses (Zakharia, Abū Zayd, 93–101). I would add that even if the connection between “standing” and a particular kind of speech was at some point clear, it was evidently lost over time—just as, for example, no one today is quite sure what the word “tragedy” originally meant. In practice, a maqāmah is simply the genre, or any single example of it, known by that name. Throughout this book, I will use the capitalized word (Imposture, Impostures) to refer to the genre or to individual maqāmāt. I will use Impostures in italics only when referring to al-Ḥarīrī’s text.
5.Al-Hamadhānī’s Impostures were collected, copied, and published at different times, but apparently never by the author himself, making it impossible to know whether we have them all or whether all the ones attributed to him are genuine. See Pomerantz and Orfali, “Three Maqāmāt.” Whether he was the first to write Impostures is a question much debated in the secondary literature. For an incisive summary see Malti-Douglas, “Maqāmāt,” 247–51, and Hämeen-Anttila,