Professor Alan Williams, University of Manchester
From Oceanography to Fillet-O-Fish®. The Spectrum of Translation of the Poetry of Rumi
Date: September 1, 2016
Time: 15.45 – 16.45
Venue: F21, 7 George Square, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH8 9JZ (http://www.ed.ac.uk/maps/maps?building=7-george-sq)
Abstract:
Rumi (1207-1273) was a prolific mystical poet whose oeuvre is oceanic in dimension. His work, which ranges from thousands of ecstatic lyric ghazals to a multi volume didactic mystical tafsir of the Qur’an, inspired many other Muslim poets and spread the religious teaching of Sufi Islam across the Persianate world, to South and South-East Asia as far as China and Indonesia. In the last few decades, however, his poetry has acquired a remarkable and unprecedented popularity in the West, particularly through ‘transversions’ and ‘Englishings’ mainly by American ‘poet-translators’ and self-styled spiritual teachers.
In this lecture I consider the methodological issues that arise from this situation, reflecting on the challenges, dilemmas, perils and opportunities faced by academic and ‘free-lance’ translators in the market economy of translation.
Bio-note:
Alan is British Academy Wolfson Research Professor (2013-2016) and Leverhulme Major Research Fellow (2016-2019) working on a project ‘The Realisation of Rumi’s Masnavi’ to produce a parallel text metrical translation of Rumi’s six-volume masterpiece. He has published books in Ancient, Classical and Modern Iranian Studies, including Spiritual Verses (Penguin Classics, 2006) and The Zoroastrian Myth of Migration… Brill, 2009). He has also written many articles and chapters on historical, sociological and anthropological themes in religion and literature, as well as on translation studies.