Periodic Reporting for period 4 - AnonymClassic (The Arabic Anonymous in a World Classic)
Reporting period: 2022-07-01 to 2023-12-31
ANONYMCLASSIC is the first-ever comprehensive study of »Kalīla and Dimna«, a book of wisdom in fable form and a text of premodern global literature. Originating in India, the transmission then spread via Syriac, Hebrew, Latin, Old Castilian, and Greek to the Medieval Christian world and beyond. The Arabic version was first established in the 8th century, when Arabic was the lingua franca of science and learning around the Mediterranean, to then become the source of all further translations up to the 19th century. The absence of available research had led world literature to almost entirely ignore it. This has now begun to be remedied.
The work’s multilingual history involving over forty languages had never been systematically studied. ANONYMCLASSIC’s methodology relies on a crosslingual narratological analysis of the Arabic versions and all medieval translations, supported by a synoptic digital edition. The edition is available online and provides facsimiles, Arabic transcriptions, English translations, and manuscript descriptions. Especially the feature of the near-verbatim English translations opens up the edition to a far broader audience than scholars familiar with Arabic.
During the six years of research, ANONYMCLASSIC successfully tested its ‘high-risk’ key hypotheses: 1) The anonymous Arabic copyists of »Kalīla and Dimna« are de facto co-authors, 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, its mobile place within Arabic genres, and its decided adaptability to different purposes and audiences.
As an additional turn, ist own frame narrative, the preface of »Buryuza’s Voyage« (long version), takes precisely the transmission and its interventions at each stage (translation-redaction) as its subject: this polyphonous ‘book’ knows exactly what it is doing, and sketches its own psychogram while doing so.
By highlighting the work’s paths of dissemination from India via the Near East to Europe and beyond, ANONYMCLASSIC challenges the prevalent Western theoretical lens on global literature conceived ‘from above’ with the view ‘from below’ based on the attested cross-cultural network constituted by its versions. ANONYMCLASSIC and its successor project ARABIC LITERATURE COSMOPOLITAN introduce a new paradigm of an Eastern-Western literary continuum, with Arabic operating as a cultural and conceptual bridge.
Against the current background of Europe’s diversifying society, we purpose to integrate premodern Near Eastern literature and culture into our understanding and living of global culture.
The work’s multilingual history involving over forty languages had never been systematically studied. ANONYMCLASSIC’s methodology relies on a crosslingual narratological analysis of the Arabic versions and all medieval translations, supported by a synoptic digital edition. The edition is available online and provides facsimiles, Arabic transcriptions, English translations, and manuscript descriptions. Especially the feature of the near-verbatim English translations opens up the edition to a far broader audience than scholars familiar with Arabic.
During the six years of research, ANONYMCLASSIC successfully tested its ‘high-risk’ key hypotheses: 1) The anonymous Arabic copyists of »Kalīla and Dimna« are de facto co-authors, 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, its mobile place within Arabic genres, and its decided adaptability to different purposes and audiences.
As an additional turn, ist own frame narrative, the preface of »Buryuza’s Voyage« (long version), takes precisely the transmission and its interventions at each stage (translation-redaction) as its subject: this polyphonous ‘book’ knows exactly what it is doing, and sketches its own psychogram while doing so.
By highlighting the work’s paths of dissemination from India via the Near East to Europe and beyond, ANONYMCLASSIC challenges the prevalent Western theoretical lens on global literature conceived ‘from above’ with the view ‘from below’ based on the attested cross-cultural network constituted by its versions. ANONYMCLASSIC and its successor project ARABIC LITERATURE COSMOPOLITAN introduce a new paradigm of an Eastern-Western literary continuum, with Arabic operating as a cultural and conceptual bridge.
Against the current background of Europe’s diversifying society, we purpose to integrate premodern Near Eastern literature and culture into our understanding and living of global culture.
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 project homepage; D) diagnosing 20,000 MSS pages, fully transcribing more than 2,500; E) collective publications and collective appearances in workshops, panels and other public events.
During the the project, the PI, and her project team have presented the ANONYMCLASSIC project and their research at about 270 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(opens in new window).
During the the project, the PI, and her project team have presented the ANONYMCLASSIC project and their research at about 270 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(opens in new window).
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 nearly 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 identified 179 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 has been built and optimized.
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 identified 179 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 has been built and optimized.