A half century after Ḥamīdī, Yehudah ben Shlomo al-Ḥarīzī (d. 622/1225), a Jewish scholar living in Aleppo, took up the challenge of putting al-Ḥarīrī into Hebrew. 38 Writing after the fact, he describes the original Arabic Impostures as terrifying to all who heard them. No wonder, then, that those who first attempted to put them into Hebrew “captured rightly but one in fifty parts.” But the problem, it turns out, was not that it cannot be done. Rather, it was that the ones trying did not know Hebrew well enough: “The burning bush beckons—but they hear not; ears have they—but they hear not.” The citation of Exodus 3:1–5 makes the point that all the words a Hebrew translator needs are in the Bible; it is merely a matter of taking the trouble to look for them.
Al-Ḥarīzī clearly knew the Bible well enough: his translation, called Maḥberot Ithiʾel (“The Compositions of Ithiʾel”) is a masterpiece of ingenuity. Although the only surviving copy begins partway through the first and ends partway through the twenty-seventh Imposture, a later reference indicates that he translated all fifty. The same later reference explains why: to show that the “Holy Tongue” could do anything that Arabic could do. 39 This being his aim, the timid lexical approach was not an option. For the poetry, he produces poetry, and for the rhymed prose, rhymed prose. Moreover, he naturalizes the allusions, even to the point of Biblicizing the names. Abū Zayd, for example, becomes Ḥever, after “a charmer” mentioned in Psalms 58:6, with the tribal name ha-Qeni, after the Qenites, a tribe of wanderers who appear in Genesis 4:12 and Numbers 24:21–22. 40 Al-Ḥarīzī even manages to imitate most of the special effects, including, for example, the palindromes in Imposture 16. 41 In only a few cases does his ingenuity fail. Imposture 6 contains a passage in which half the words are entirely dotted and the other half undotted, in alternation. After breaking the fourth wall to explain the constraint, al-Ḥarīzī admits defeat: “We could not reproduce this particular feature in the Holy Tongue.” Instead he offers “a rendering of the sense.” 42
Both Ḥamīdī and al-Ḥarīzī display a healthy appreciation for al-Ḥarīrī’s “bright, noisy linguistic fireworks.” Strikingly, though, neither suggests that the Impostures are untranslatable. In his work on Arabic and Persian poetics, Alexander Key has proposed that untranslatability, as a presumed property of certain foreign texts, is a modern idea. For their part, pre-modern readers believed that content (maʿnā) was always transferable between languages. 43 Applied to Ḥamīdī and al-Ḥarīzī, at least, Key’s argument rings true. Of course, the assumption that anything could be translated did not make everything translatable: as we have seen, Ḥamīdī chose to imitate rather than translate, and al-Ḥarīzī had to let at least one of al-Ḥarīrī’s word games go unreplicated. Even so, the idea of intrinsic untranslatability—which is arguably the product of early-modern European notions about the spirit of peoples being embodied in their languages—does not apply, at least when it comes to human language.
It was only when al-Ḥarīrī arrived in Europe that he became untranslatable. But this verdict was not issued immediately. As recent work by Jan Loop has shown, early-modern European scholars hoped to find in the Impostures “an ideal text with which to practice and teach the Arabic language.” This they needed in order to pursue their broader aim, which was “to unlock the mysteries in the Hebrew texts of the Old Testament” and ultimately “to solve all theological questions.” 44 It was against this background that Jacobus Golius (d. 1667) produced a Latin rendering of Imposture 1 in 1656. 45 His work was “re-publiſhed with much larger notes, by that great Maſter of Arabic, Albert Schultens, at Franequer, 4to, 1731 [. . . to] which he added five more, purſuing the same method that he took in the firſt, of explaining difficult paſſages from the Scholiaſst, &c.” 46 The reference here is to the Dutch Orientalist Albert Schultens (d. 1750), whose edition and Latin translation of the first six Impostures formed the basis of the first English translation, that of Leonard Chappelow.
Chappelow’s rendition, published in 1767, offers a fascinating glimpse of a moment when the “ingenious conversations of Learned Men among the Arabians” could still be treated with reverence by English readers. Chappelow, who was a clergyman as well as the professor of Arabic at Cambridge, reads al-Ḥarīrī as “a prudent, diſcreet Satyriſt” who, had he been introduced to Christianity, “would have lived and died a Chriſtian in the beſt and trueſt senſe.” In keeping with his assumption that the Impostures should be scoured for lessons “inſtrumental in promoting the comfort and happineſs of life,” his translation of the first six Impostures operates on the principle of expansion. That is, every word is given as many of its senses as possible, and all are included in the same sentence, producing English that is a great deal longer than the Arabic it is supposed to be rendering. 47
In the writings of the splendidly named French Orientalist Jean Michel de Venture de Paradis (d. 1799) we find a reading of the Impostures that is much closer to our own. We also find an early expression of the belief that they cannot be translated. An Imposture (Mecamé), says Venture de Paradis, is the story of an amusing adventure told in elevated style. Because Impostures owe so much of their beauty to puns, rhymes, rare words, and far-fetched figures of speech, “it is very difficult, and often impossible, to render them in another language.” 48 His own timidly literal French translations make no attempt 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