Periodic Reporting for period 3 - AnonymClassic (The Arabic Anonymous in a World Classic)
Reporting period: 2021-01-01 to 2022-06-30
AnonymClassic is the first-ever comprehensive study of Kalīla and Dimna, a book of wisdom in fable form and a text of premodern world literature. Its spread is comparable to that of the Bible, except that it passed from Hinduism and Buddhism via Islam to Christianity. Its Arabic version, produced in the 8th century, when this was the lingua franca of the Near East, became the source of all further translations up to the 19th century.
The work’s multilingual history involving over forty languages has never been systematically studied. The absence of available research has led world literature to ignore it. Meanwhile, scholars of Arabic have avoided the work because of its widely diverging manuscripts, so that the actual shape of the key version in Arabic still needs investigation. AnonymClassic tests a number of “high-risk” propositions, including three key hypotheses: 1) The anonymous Arabic copyists of Kalīla and Dimna are de facto coauthors, 2) their agency is comparable to that of the named medieval translators, and 3) the fluctuation of the Arabic versions is related to the work’s shifting status between high and popular literature.
AnonymClassic’s methodology relies on a crosslingual narratological analysis of the Arabic versions and all medieval translations (supported by a synoptic digital edition), which takes precisely the interventions at each stage of transmission (redaction, translation) as its subject. Considering the work’s paths of dissemination from India to Europe, AnonymClassic will challenge the prevalent Western theoretical lens on world literature conceived “from above” with the view “from below,” based on the attested cross-cultural network constituted by its versions. AnonymClassic will introduce a new paradigm of an Eastern-Western literary continuum with Arabic as a cultural bridge. Against the current background of Europe’s diversifying society, AnonymClassic purposes to integrate premodern Near Eastern literature and culture into our understanding of global culture.
The work’s multilingual history involving over forty languages has never been systematically studied. The absence of available research has led world literature to ignore it. Meanwhile, scholars of Arabic have avoided the work because of its widely diverging manuscripts, so that the actual shape of the key version in Arabic still needs investigation. AnonymClassic tests a number of “high-risk” propositions, including three key hypotheses: 1) The anonymous Arabic copyists of Kalīla and Dimna are de facto coauthors, 2) their agency is comparable to that of the named medieval translators, and 3) the fluctuation of the Arabic versions is related to the work’s shifting status between high and popular literature.
AnonymClassic’s methodology relies on a crosslingual narratological analysis of the Arabic versions and all medieval translations (supported by a synoptic digital edition), which takes precisely the interventions at each stage of transmission (redaction, translation) as its subject. Considering the work’s paths of dissemination from India to Europe, AnonymClassic will challenge the prevalent Western theoretical lens on world literature conceived “from above” with the view “from below,” based on the attested cross-cultural network constituted by its versions. AnonymClassic will introduce a new paradigm of an Eastern-Western literary continuum with Arabic as a cultural bridge. Against the current background of Europe’s diversifying society, AnonymClassic purposes to integrate premodern Near Eastern literature and culture into our understanding of global culture.
By its mid-term, the AnonymClassic project has achieved the milestones committed to at the outset. Hitherto, this involved the A) building of the AnonymClassic team covering a wide range of specialists on Arabic, Syriac, Persian, experts on computer data science, and Arabic manuscript transcription; B) Another important milestone was the successful implementation of DH infrastructure; and C) the creation of the project ‘showcase’, i. e., the website connected to further Social Media activities; D) diagnosing 20,000 MSS pages, fully transcribing more than 2,500; E) collective publications and collective appearances in workshop, panels and other public events.
During the first half of the project, the PI, and her project team have presented the AnonymClassic project and their research at about 100 national and international occasions; in addition, the project invited numerous presentations by researchers from other institutions to Freie Universität Berlin. For details, please see the online project Timeline archive and AnonymClassic Events at: https://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/en/e/kalila-wa-dimna/index.html.
During the first half of the project, the PI, and her project team have presented the AnonymClassic project and their research at about 100 national and international occasions; in addition, the project invited numerous presentations by researchers from other institutions to Freie Universität Berlin. For details, please see the online project Timeline archive and AnonymClassic Events at: https://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/en/e/kalila-wa-dimna/index.html.
The challenges faced in the analysis of AnonymClassic’s text corpus may best be grasped by looking at the figures: We are dealing with a massively diverging textual tradition, preserved in over 200 manuscripts in 9 different languages, diagnosed via over 10 key modules of selected chapters (prefaces and parables), covering a time span of circa 11 centuries, and scattered across roughly 50 manuscript libraries and archives in the world. Scope and variety cannot be tackled by the traditional stemmatic method of text edition, but require a combined philological and digital approach in which both dimensions are closely interwoven. This is necessary to capture this text “on the move,” a phenomenon uncommon in classical Arabic literature and only known from medieval European works (though with a lower degree of rewriting).
Not only the sheer volume of data, but also a high degree of variation within the texts themselves, required us to implement a highly structured procedure, and a similar workflow with digital tools and support, to make the process of analyzing the multiple manuscripts possible. The circa 140 Arabic manuscripts are being investigated first, since they are not only those most numerous and least studied, but also because from the Arabic version all later versions derived directly or indirectly. One major objective of the project is to create an open-access comprehensive Digital Corpus of the Kalīla and Dimna manuscripts, including both facsimile images of the originals and their transcriptions, and to provide the tools for their digital analysis. Within the project, a Digital Synoptic Edition is in the process of being built.
Not only the sheer volume of data, but also a high degree of variation within the texts themselves, required us to implement a highly structured procedure, and a similar workflow with digital tools and support, to make the process of analyzing the multiple manuscripts possible. The circa 140 Arabic manuscripts are being investigated first, since they are not only those most numerous and least studied, but also because from the Arabic version all later versions derived directly or indirectly. One major objective of the project is to create an open-access comprehensive Digital Corpus of the Kalīla and Dimna manuscripts, including both facsimile images of the originals and their transcriptions, and to provide the tools for their digital analysis. Within the project, a Digital Synoptic Edition is in the process of being built.