Preface
A note on spelling and transliteration
A note on Translations
Acknowledgements
A Polemical Introduction
- Beginnings and Endings
- Translation and the Crisis of Cultural Conflict in the Abbasid Era
- Translation of Literary Criticism: Aristotle's Poetics in Arabic
- A Discussion about Translation in the Abbasid Period
- Translation of Literature: Kalila wa Dimna
- Translation of Science: Hunain ibn Ishaq
- Did the Abbasids Have a Theory of Translation?
- The Abbasids and Poetry Translation
- Impact of Translation on Arabic
Conclusion
Bibliography—Arabic
Bibliography—English
Index
Biography
Adnan Abdulla (Ph.D., Indiana University, Bloomington) is currently Chair of the Dept. of Foreign Languages and Professor of English and Translation at the University of Sharjah, UAE. He has published widely in the fields of comparative literature and literary translation. His published books include: Catharsis in Literature (1985) and A Comparative Study of Longinus and Al-Jurjani: Interrelationship between Medieval Arabic Literary Criticism and Graeco-Roman Poetics (2004). He has also published articles in Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Babel and Translation and Literature. In addition, he is the translator of more than ten books from Arabic into English and vice versa. His translations include The Attractions of Mystical Sessions (with William Elliott, 1980) and an Arabic poetic translation of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (with Talal Abdulrahman, 2006).
Abdulla’s approach to translation as a form of cultural interaction comparable to subversive activity is fresh and intriguing. Central to such activity is tension between curiosity to know the intellectual products the "other" has put out, and the risks taken in exposure to different cultures.
Shakir Mustafa, Northeastern University, USA
