BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//ceres.rub.de//events// CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH X-WR-TIMEZONE:UTC BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Frühe Koranübersetzung in Europa und Asien II DTSTART:20110408T070000Z DTEND:20110408T150000Z DTSTAMP:20260415T091506Z UID:Koranuebersetzungen-2-de-50@ceres.rub.de CATEGORIES: DESCRIPTION:Flyer  Poster\nOn Friday\, 8th of April 2011\, there was a wo rkshop organized by Concetta Finiello and myself\, on “Early translati ons of the Qur’ān\, Part II”. The first part took place one year ag o\, on 19th of March 2010. Both parts had the purpose to review and to int ensify research on translations of the Qur’ān for the following reaso ns: An important requirement for the expansion of religions in an intell ectual sense (were are not concerned here with military or political ex pansion\, but with its sequels) is the production of translations of the holy texts into the languages of the newly acquired territories. To tra nslate these texts seems not only useful but rather inevitable even in c ase of an untranslatebility of the original text due to its uniqueness t hat is assumed not only regarding the aspect of revelation but also of language. We all know of the Koranic concept of Idjāz\, the unimitabilit y and untranslatebility of the Qur’ān. Nevertheless\, the Qur’ān h as actually been translated into foreign languages since the expansion o f Muslim empire. On the other hand\, also non-Muslim people often have a great interest in translations of the enemies’ scripture in order to take up the intellectual struggle against Islam.\nIn the workshops\, we w ere interested especially in translations into – so to speak – non-I slamic languages\, that means languages that belong to countries which a re not ore not entirely Islamic. To make it concrete\, we were concerned firstly with the three holy languages of Judaism and Christianity\, nam ely Hebrew\, Greek and Latin\; secondly with European vernacular languag es\; and thirdly with East or Southeast Asian languages. Our interest li es on the earliest attempts to translate the Qur’ān into these langua ges\, and subsequently in the later history of translation\, too.\nIn th e first part of the workshop\, after an overview to the problem of ‘un translatebility’ (idjāz al-qur’ān) given by Hartmut Bobzin\, the l anguages we were concerned with were Byzantine Greek\, medieval Latin\, 17th century German\, and (perhaps most surprisingly) modern\, i.e. 20th c entury Japanese (for details\, see IKGF Workshop I Report). In the secon d part of the workshop\, we concentrated on further vernacular European languages both Western and Eastern ones\, namely Aljamiado (i.e. Spanish written in the Arabic alphabet) and French in the West\, Polish and Rus sian in the East. Furthermore\, we discussed a different Latin translati on and\, to be not too christianocentristic\, translations into Hebrew. It was planned to have also a talk by our former fellow Svevo d’Onofri o on translations into Sanskrit\, but unfortunately it was not possible to find any existing copy of a Sanskrit Qur’ān neither in Europe nor in India. Perhaps some of us remember Svevo’s last talk here in our co nsortium when he showed that the famous Indian Om sign is a distortion o f the word Allah written in Arabic letters – just to make the relation ship evident.\nNotwithstanding this blind spot on our map\, we had a wide range of space as well as of time: From Southwestern to Northeastern Eur ope and to the Near East\, from the beginning of the 13th up to the 20t h centuries. And we had also a wide range of cultural transfer phenomena: One the one hand\, there are translations that resulted from direct en counters between Muslims and Christians or Jews\, respectively\, in a at least partly Islamic environment\; one the other hand\, the French and Slavonic translations were made in a completely different cultural conte xt far from the genuine Muslim countries.\nThe first paper was given by Dr . Ulisse Cecini from Erlangen\, who is with us as an Assitant Researches s ince the 1st of April now. Cecini was concerned with the Latin translation of the Qur’ān by Marc of Toledo\, finished about 1209 or 1210. His t ranslation was far less known and far less influential than the famous t ranslation by Robert of Ketton from 1143\, but Cecini convincingly showe d that Marc’s translation is much more oriented at the Arabic original that Robert’s was. By means of comparison of several surahs\, one cou ld easily recognize the differences. The purpose of that very close tran slation that sometimes is not easy to understand obviously was to presen t a scholarly instrument for a bilingual reading of the Qur’ān to lea rned Christians who were not familiar enough with Arabic to read it only in the original language. Consequently\, Marc’s translation was used by later missionaries like Riccoldo da Monte di Croce.\nThe second paper was a real highlight: Professor López-Morillas from Bloomington/Indian a (USA) is the leading worldwide expert in Aljamiado\, especially Spanis h translation of the Qur’ān keeping Arabic letters. So we were very h appy that she had come to Bochum to present us the results of her long t ime research on that topic. The first translation of the Qur’ān into a European vernacular at all was the translation into Spanish made by th e Alfaqui of Segovia\, ‘Isa ibn Djabir\, on behalf of a famous Christi an theologian\, Juan de Segovia\, who made a interlinear Latin translati on from the Spanish. Unfortunately\, this trilingual Qur’ān is lost. Professor López gave an overview over the surviving 26 manuscripts cont aining Spanish Qur’āns\, most of them bilingual in Arabic and Aljamia do (in Castile or Aragonese dialect). Of particularly interest was her p resentation of “The Mystery of Ms. Toledo 235”\, the only complete S panish translation. It is in Latin characters and transcripted from a bi lingual manuscript in Aljamiado\, finished as late as 1606. Professor L ópez’ edition of that text with a detailed study of its paleographica l and linguistic features is under press and will come out in the next f ew weeks.\nThe third paper given by Dr. Aleida Paudice\, former Assistant Researcher at Halle-Wittenberg\, dealt with Hebrew translations and tr ansliterations of the Qur’ān. She gave a report of her so-far studies in that topic\, concentrating mainly on manuscripts with Arabic Qur’ān s in Hebrew characters\, obviously written for and used by people who understood spoken Arabic but could only read Hebrew script – just the opposite to the aforementioned Mudéjars and Moriscos whose spoken langu age was Spanish\, but who could read only Arabic letters. There were\, a s far as we know\, no medieval translations of the Qur’ān into Hebrew . The first one was made by Jakob Levi b. Israel in 1636 Venice\, not di rectly from the Arabic\, but from the Italian translation of Andrea Arri vabene 1547. The first direct translation is from Hermann Reckendorf\, L eipzig 1857.\nIn the afternoon\, we had two further papers by Bochum schol ars\, one by Dr. Annette Gerstenberg from the Romanistic Department\, th e other one by Prof. Mirja Lecke from the Department of Slavic languange s. Dr. Gerstenberg talked about French translations\, the first being th at of André Du Ryer1647\, followed by that of Claude-Étienne Savary 17 83 and Albert Kasimirski 1840. It was highly interesting to see how Dr. Gerstenberg showed by means of a synopsis of several Qur’ānic passage s and the three French translations that the method and purpose of the translations changed over the centuries: While Du Ryer made a Christian izising translation for polemical purposes (to demonstrate the absurditi es of the Qur’ān)\, Savary’s intention was to create a literary wor k of art congenial to the Qur’ān\; finally\, Kasimirski’s translation is philological one to serve interests of historical scholarship. So t he trias may be called in terms of absolutism\, enlightenment\, and his toricism.\nThe last\, but not the least presentation was by Prof. Lecke on the first Polish and Russian translations\, respectively. They are not comparable at all\, because of their completely different origin\, purpo se and linguistic features. The first Polish translation called “The Lithuanian Tefsir” was made about 1600 by Muslims for a Muslim minority living in Poland (including parts of the Balticum at that time). It is preserved in some bilingual Arabic-Polish manuscripts written entirely in Arabic letters\, a kind of Polish Aljamiado\, so to speak. Since the Muslim community was later completely Polonized\, that means also Catho lizised\, these translations had no future impact and have of course nev er been printed. In the Russian empire\, on the other hand\, there are m any peoples of Muslim faith until today who have their own languages and translations. The first Russian translation by Petr Posnikov is a Chris tian orthodox one and was made for polemical and missionary purposes. It was published 1716 in St. Petersburg and is a somewhere grotesquely dis torted translation from the French of Du Ryer. The second Surah\, for ex ample (al-baqara\, revealed at Medina)\, which in Du Ryer is titled “L a vache\, à Medina”\, in Posnikov sounds like that: “From Lavache t o Medina”.\nIn sum\, the workshop gave fascinating insights not only int o different kinds of philological aspects of the translations\, but also into religious transfer phenomena that are crucial for Research Field 2 . The idea came up to wide and deapen these insights by holding a third part of this workshop on translations in languages not yet concerned\, namely East and Southeast Asian languages like Chinese and Indonesian\, or at least to include these languages in the forthcoming publication. And perhaps we’ll discover a Sanskrit Qur’ān\, too. URL:https://khk.ceres.rub.de/de/veranstaltungen/Koranuebersetzungen-2-de/ END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR