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.
