Translating (and) World Literature across the University

David Alvarez and Nina Stular collaborated on drafting a Slovenian translation of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s The Turkish Embassy Letters (1763). As this epistolary travel narrative is an influential account of intercultural exchange between Europe and the Ottoman Empire in the early eighteenth century, the translation was motivated by current ongoing debates about religious toleration and the place of Islam in Europe, as well as the relevance of a cosmopolitan ethics in our age of ascendant nationalism. Translating Montagu’s work into Slovenian is particularly apt, for her letters are largely about the territory where today’s 2.5 million speakers of Slovenian in Italy, Austria, Hungary, Croatia, and Slovenia reside, a space where the legacy of the early-modern border between East and West remains unresolved.

Nick Williams and Amity Reading’s project—“Naming the Divine in the Old English Andreas: Transfer and Adaptation of Epithets for Odin during Anglo-Saxon Christian Conversion”—is a linguistic investigation of the epithets for God in the Old English poem Andreas. Although the poem has a biblical source, it also preserves a linguistic and cultural record of the Christian conversion of the Germanic tribes inhabiting the British Isles, around 600 CE. In its unusual and numerous names for its main deity, Andreas seems to preserve a linguistic record of the complex process by which the pagan tribes slowly turned away from Odin and toward the Christian God—not by abandoning the one for the other, but rather by combining the two.

In their "Treatise on the Usefulness of Human Parts (Risāla fī Manāfiʿ al-Aʿḍāʾ al-Insāniyya): A Translation and Commentary," Nahyan Fancy and Salma Allam (with Malak Daher) collaborated to revise the edited version of a medical text composed by the greatest Islamic physician of the post-classical (post-1200) era, Ibn al-Nafīs (d. 1288), using the manuscript acquired from Cairo by Salma. They translated 11 out of the 16 chapters and made notes on both the choices made in translation, as well as on explaining the medical content.