[Music]
This is KZSU Stanford.
You're not going to find this instrumental arrangement on Amazon or iTunes or Spotify.
Only on YouTube and in titled opinions.
It's by a young guitarist named Gopriela Cuave, though.
I'm guessing she's Spanish.
I don't know anything about her except that she is simply superb.
She has taken another brick in the wall by pink Floyd and given it a whole new life, a new tonality and articulation.
It now comes at us from the subtle, nuanced adult sensibility of the Spanish soul, rather than from the squalid vowels of the English classroom.
I'm going to let it play a while, a little gift to you from entitled opinions.
Where love is always required.
[Music]
I'm going to fade it out now, but I'll tell you what.
We'll play the whole piece at the end of our show today.
At which point it should acquire an extra resonance for us as an example of creative translation, which is one of the topics we'll be discussing in the next hour.
Let me introduce today's show with a short lyric by the German poet Stefan Georgie called the word.
All its charm clings stubbornly to the German original. I know if two attempted translations into English, both of which sound somewhat contrived due to the fact that you really have to reproduce the rhymed,
couple its structure of the original. And that's not easy in this case.
I've called from both of them and come up with a modified translation of my own, which goes as follows.
Wonders and dreams from distant lands I brought back with me to my homeland, but I had to wait until she found names for them within her own domain.
Then I could hold them in my hand and now they blossom in this fair land.
Once I returned from happy sail, I had a prize so rich and frail. She sought for long, but then I was told nothing like this to my depths in fold.
At once it vanished from my hand, the treasure never graced my land. And so I renounced and sadly see where the word breaks off, no thing may be.
Heidegger has a ponderous commentary on this little poem which I'm going to steer clear of since I would rather hear my guests take on it.
Not as take on the poem as such, but some of the questions it raises about the relation between names and things, about the labor of translation, and about the challenges of transplantation.
From one language to another, one cultural tradition to another, one historical era to another.
Like Stefan Georg, in my guest, also has been to distant lands and has returned with wonders he has searched the proper names for in his own native language.
In particular, he has traveled into the realm of 11th century Islamic thought and literature, and has just finished a book that represents the fruits of a long effort of transplantation.
Among other things, he has brought back with him two wondrous Arabic words, "Mana and Haikika."
And now, thanks to his book, they blossom in this land as Georg is poem has it.
The book is called Language Between Gods and the Poets. It comes out later this year with the University of California Press.
The author is my colleague Alexander Key, an assistant professor of Arabic and comparative literature here at Stanford who joins me in the studio today.
Professor Key specializes in the intellectual history of the Arabic and Persian-speaking worlds from the 7th century onwards.
He is interested in Islamic theology, logic, and poetics as well as medieval Islamic ideas about language, mind, and reality, and the nexus between God and poetry.
All things that we are going to be discussing during the next hour here on entitled opinions, Alexander, welcome to the program.
Thanks. It's great to be here.
So you received a PhD in Arabic and Islamic studies from Harvard's Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization in May 2012.
So let me ask you first about your discipline in general. I'm assuming that much of what takes place in Islamic studies here in North America involves a tremendously
a labor of translation, or let's even call it transplantation, not only the translation of texts from one language into the other, but the translation of ideas,
and mentalities from one cultural context. Do I get that right?
Yes, and I think the ultimate two alterations to that idea, the first of which would be of course that as a professor of comparative literature, I'm no longer in what was my discipline when I was a graduate student.
I mean I spent seven years doing my PhD in Arabic and Islamic studies, and now I'm at pushing six years as a professor of comparative literature.
I think that move is reflected in the book and that's a move that's still happening and it's a move where I hope to stay on both sides forever.
So your book is not addressed specifically to people in the kind of department that you were part of at Harvard?
Both, both.
And I've tried very hard to do both audiences, whether I've succeeded will be a matter for the readers and the reviewers, but that's my goal.
And so the idea of translation is even more pressing when you're in comparative literature, right?
Yes, absolutely. I mean there's a...
I think the way I would characterize the discipline that I trained in is not so much that it's a discipline focused on translation, but that it's a discipline focused on philology, both in the most basic sense of a discipline that loves words and cares about words and cares about what words mean, but also in the more traditional sense of this is a discipline that is very much engaged in trying to make sense of text,
trying to make sense of language, when with its institutional history in your opinion and in North America, it's a discipline that's historically been trying to make sense of text and languages that are understood as foreign.
I think that that process has proved so hard for us as a discipline over the years, trying to just try to make sense of what's happening and trying to explain it to ourselves as philologists who work on these languages, that we almost haven't finished that task, and we haven't got to the stage necessarily where we're in a position to really think seriously about translation.
We're still trying to work out what's going on, and so in the book I'm trying both to lay out for the first time an account of some critically important figures, because we're still engaged in the philological discipline of making sense of texts whilst at the same time making those ideas available to an audience that doesn't know Arabic.
Not only available, but I presume also relevant and pertinent to discourses that might not be specifically rooted in this historical period or in this cultural context.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think there's always a strong argument to be made for including context to orient the reader, but there's a, I think, a very, also a very strong sense in its sense that drives my research across the board that these ideas are not significant or explainable in terms of the fact that they were produced by people who are not
a people who are living in Iran and Iraq, speaking Arabic, living in certain political situations, wearing certain clothes.
These are ideas that were written as universal claims on the truth of how human beings interact with poetry, how human beings interact with the divine, how human beings develop logic.
And I don't think they wrote them thinking they were going to stick that they should stick in their context, so I think that makes it incumbent upon us to recognize those universal claims and get on board with them.
And from what I've read it in your book, you do take those universal claims seriously. I mean, you don't, you're not becoming, you know, the promoter or champion of them as they intended them to be, but nevertheless, I found it very refreshing that you are, you are not enslaved to the dogma of our studies of the humanities these days, which is that of historicism.
And it's always historicized, always historicized that kind of injunction that you get in Frederick James and other places. You say historic, historicization has its role, but it's not the whole story, especially when you're dealing with these 11th century thinkers and philologists that you're dealing with.
Yeah, absolutely. I'm actually reading a fun book about literary criticism at the moment by Joseph North, who's a assistant professor of English at Yale. And he's telling exactly that story about Jameson and Raymond Williams and the push to historicism.
And he's trying, I mean, I'm only halfway through the book, but he's trying to make this claim that there's an aesthetic universalism that is important for education and politically and socially salient.
And he's of course just talking about English literature and English poetry and English criticism, but I think I kind of take that on board and I'm saying that, yeah, there's an ethically and politically salient value in taking ideas out of 11th century Arabic and making them work today.
And the other thing that I would say there is that when you mention the humanities, one of the other things that's happening in this 11th century period in Arabic and Persian is a great deal of science and a great deal of math and a great deal of engineering.
And I think it's fair to say when you look at our colleagues here at Stanford today in science and math and engineering, things have progressed.
I'm not going to use those ideas necessarily. But when you look at our colleagues who work on metaphor in the linguistics department or who work on how languages constructed in the philosophy department, I don't think there's any sense that there are any further ahead.
Like different, equally interesting and equally valuable, but I don't think you can trace anywhere is one can arguably trace a teleology across science and engineering. I don't think you can trace that teleology when it comes to what is a metaphor, how does poetry work.
And that universalism is a commitment that some of the thinkers you deal with definitely had and it also, I think, has correlates at least in ancient Western philosophy. I don't know.
We know how important Aristotle was for some of these people or their translations, Plato and Aristotle into Arabic.
And we can talk about that further on, but maybe you can tell our readers a little bit generally with the framework of your book is and who are the thinkers and theories that you're dealing with there.
So it's a book about four people and four disciplines or genres of scholarship, some of which are still around today and some of which are not.
The first is lexicography, which is, there are no departments of lexicography anymore, but the process of how would you define lexicography?
I would say is the process of dictionary writing on the very most basic level, the process of producing large books that map of vocabulary of an entire literary scientific scholarly world, scholarly world and ordinary language world.
Like that mapping process and then the iterative repetition of the dictionaries is one of the most fundamental characteristics of what one might call classical Arabic civilization.
Big dictionaries get started, start getting produced very, very early.
Probably the earliest book we have is a dictionary from the mid-700s before the first grammar and then it's just bum, bum, bum, bum, big dictionary after big dictionary after big dictionary.
And these are dictionaries that make claims on everything. It's epistemology, ontology, religion, literature.
When they give the meaning of a word, they give explanations, they give examples.
The Arabic was in my head square, they give like witnesses.
Testemology, testemology.
Testemonials from poetry, from the Quran, from Persian source, from all over the place.
They map cultural transfer, so they map the Persian words that come into Arabic.
The Greek words that come into Arabic, the Aramaic words that come into Arabic.
Again, the lexical process is like a central scholarly performance.
There's this famous anecdote about Avicenna, the Greek philosopher who's translated into Latin, that he was so, somebody, a lexicalographer accused him at court.
I'm not really knowing Arabic.
Yeah, you do all this Greek philosophy, you don't really know Arabic.
And he was so stung, and he took it so seriously that he went away and he wrote a dictionary.
And he came back, a dictionary of rare Arabic words, and he was a native Persian speaker.
And he came back and presented it and destroyed the guy at court and the guy of fear.
So are all these dictionaries of Arabic words, or are there also Persian dictionaries?
It's basically Arabic Arabic dictionaries.
The Persian dictionaries start later, and then as Persian increasingly in what's now Iran and to the East,
Persian takes over as the elite scholarly language, and it's very important in India and for our Asia.
And then Persian dictionaries build up.
Okay, so we have lexicography for one of them, one of the four.
And then number two is theology.
And this is theology in a sense that we might compare it to sort of scholastic theology in Latin Europe,
from the 12th, 11th, 12th, 14, 1500s.
This is a discipline in Arabic, in Islamic scholarship.
The name of this discipline is funnily enough, Elinil Kalam, which is the science of speech.
Which tells us that this is a discipline that cares very much about the credally legitimate ways to describe the divine,
the credally legitimate ways to engage with the divine, like what words can you use for God.
And it's underpinning is deeply rationalistic.
It's deeply committed to logic and reason and dialectical development of arguments.
So you get a vast number of debates about one of the names of God, one of the qualities of God.
When God is merciful, is that the same as human mercy?
Can we say that God has knowledge? Is that knowledge separate from his essence?
Or is it part of his essence? How does it map onto human knowledge?
And it's a tremendous amount of complexity here.
And what are the criteria that are invoked to separate legitimate from non-legitimate names for God's or waves of speaking of him?
I would say overwhelming is a sense of rationality. It's a reason.
And of course there are limits to this reason because it's theology.
So one of the rational claims is that one of the rational maximuses, of course, that God communicated directly to this community in the Quran.
So that's a... we start reasoning from the position that that's true.
But also if we come up against a moment that seems logically untenable to us,
so for example, there's famous passages in the Quran, God settles on the throne.
If you work that through, God has to have what an actual throne and a butt to sit on the throne.
And it doesn't work. How can that logically be compatible with the fact that he's also the creator of the entire world and history?
And then, so do you take it as metaphor or do you not? And they're a long argument about this.
So you mentioned reason and rationality. Is there an Arabic or Persian? Is there a concept or word as there is in the Western tradition where the word reason, whether it's logos or...
Yeah, is there such a word or concept?
Ah, it's equally fetishized.
It is without question. It's constantly fetishized, constantly involved.
As rational.
That you give reasons for why things must be the way they are.
And of course then it's criticized by people who might subscribe to frameworks of knowledge that have more of a role for inspiration, for direct inspiration.
Or frameworks of knowledge that are what we might call...
A mystical intuitive.
Yeah, mystical and intuitive and also from the other side, the kind of things that, you know, North American Protestantism and Christianity, we tend to call quote-unquote fundamentalist.
Like, absolute commitments to textual literacy.
They also criticize people for being and his thing, commitments to historical fact also criticize the rationalists.
So does knowledge of God from the human point of view require always the discursive process that we can only go through it by the rational way rather than this intuitive kind of connection with the essence of God?
I think these are two very strong currents. The current that is dominant in the scholarly discipline of quote-unquote Islamic theology, and Mel Calam, is entirely the rational side.
At the same time in the society, and often in books that some of the same people write, you know, the disciplines, and certainly by lots of other scholars around them at the same time, the mystical intuition is very strong.
The theology chapter is all about the work of a theologian called Ibn Forak.
Most of the first chapter about lexicography is about a theologian exegete, literatore, called Ragib.
They share a great deal. They're not in the same schools of theology, and Ragib is ultimately committed to the intuitive root to knowledge.
But he's on board with rationality, he's on board with all the discursive projects, but he deliberately preserves intuition as a final source.
Ibn Forak, the theologian who I write about doubles down on rationality.
To the extent that there's a story, a much belabed and balli-hoot story, the Ibn Forak was poisoned on the way back from visiting a politician.
Mahmud of Kazna, because he had like over-rationalized.
In fact, I want to ask you how to my own curiosity, because I know medieval scholastic theology and all the most of the major players in that realm.
But in Christianity you have this phenomenon of faith, and it's a very delicate relationship between faith and reason.
What, how much of Christian truth is actually accessible to the rational inquiry of logic and philosophy?
And how much of faith is inscrutable and will never really be understood through reason alone?
Is there such a thing in the Quran that would say that your reason will only take you so far, but that there are truths,
divine truths that are open only to faith and not to reason?
I think that this is a debate that these scholars would have been deeply familiar.
This is the debate they were living.
Ibn Forak is, I think, committed to bringing a reason dialectical discursive process to absolutely everything about God.
There's a moment where he almost seems to talk about. He almost, I don't think he does disparage belief, but he almost seems to, like it's not his core epistemological standpoint.
But then, I mean, I think the distinction I would draw here, and this is very, very broad brushstroke, and I'm sure many of my colleagues will be able to produce counter-examples and rightly so,
more complicated than these big generalizations.
If you were to make one generalization that would hold up, it would be that the pluralism of ideas is such that you can always find a counter-examples.
There's a tremendous pluralism and diversity of ideas and theories.
But I think if I would say generalize, I would say that there's less of a cultural and intellectual reliance on mystery and insupporting.
And inscrutability and failure to understand that I think you could argue is in some way fundamental to have one fundamental trend in the European tradition.
And I think this is much less strong. I think that people who are committed to mystical intuition, a great figure, as early, Ibn Arabi, great figures committed to mystical intuition,
and the rest of the world, they may restrict that mystical intuition via elitism.
And only a certain chosen view can get there. They may, in some cases, restrict it to even prophets, just prophets.
Or they may open it up, and this is a very much a political argument.
But there's always the sense that you can get it. Like it's gettable, it's there. Like you can get the truth.
It's not always hidden behind the fog.
So the rationalist argument in your second chapter does the whole world emerge as a eminently rational place where everything has a proper reason for being?
And that God's intentions are quite not only, I wouldn't say transparent, but at least they're benign in the sense that if you compare it to the God's opinion,
to the God of the Hebrew scriptures, there's a lot of places where you just don't know what God is doing, no?
It has reasons that reason ignores. That's a French phrase, I think, from Pascal about God has reasons that reason doesn't know nothing about, no?
Yeah. Yeah.
It sounds like you've got to be a very eminently rational universe.
Yeah, I mean, in this, in this thinker that you're talking about.
There's a theological dispute, first of all, between about, it's basically about theodicy and God's justice.
And there's a very strong, there are basically two sides on this dispute.
There's a side that says God is inherently just and therefore we can interpret his actions according to that justice and we can be confident in that justice.
And that's the argument that pushes you towards statements like if God is telling us to do something that is self-evidently damaging or if God is saying something about himself that is self-evidently false, we can reason it out and it's a metaphor.
And there's another opposing school of thought that holds the opposite from again, even then from a very rational perspective.
If you take, if you assume that God created absolutely everything, including human minds and all history, and you believe that God is in, I guess they have an occasional list account of action.
So you believe that God is in control every single action you make, even though you think you're doing it and you'll be judged according to it, God is still in control of everything.
So if you buy into that belief structure, it's then a very rational choice to say, if he says he settles on the throne, he settles on the throne and I'm not going to ask too many questions like seeing that he created me and my mind, it will be madness to try and put my epistemology on top of his, just logically.
And the other thing I would say, because when we start talking about history and ethics and whether the world is working as it should and how we consider order and how we consider order is created by God, which again, I think is very much there in Christianity and Judaism, it's like political religions, Islam is no less political.
It's a genres of scholarship, I mean, I think if you want to hear what these people thought about politics and society and ethics, you don't go to their theology, you go to their history or to their literary compilations or to their work on education.
And the one word I would take from that vast body of literary narratives and history is irony, like deep, deep sense and critical understanding of irony with regards to everything about history and ethics and social stuff.
Terrific.
So let's just move on to the third and fourth and then we can open it up so what's that your third chapter?
So the third chapter is the Greeks, like the Greeks come in here.
The third chapter is about Ibn Sina, the logician, the most important, I think it's fair to say, philosopher of the millennium, I'm sorry.
No one in the West is an
epistemic, because he gets translated so much pre-humanism.
And what the world, what scholarly world looks like for
what the world looks like for the world is a world in which, I mean Aristotle is a thousand years old by this point, but also the fundamental source of Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition and all the commentaries and simplicius and all these commentaries that are all translated into Arabic.
This is a fundamental source of truth about the world and in all fields.
Avisonus projects is basically a complete rethinking of the Aristotelian project, a translation of it for the first time into Arabic, a full conceptual translation into Arabic, not just using Calcs of Greek words that people have been doing beforehand, and a rethinking of all its gaps.
So it takes the organ on and re does it very successfully.
Part of that, of course, is logic.
Like logic is the fundamental tool by which the organ on is constructed according to the Aristotelian tradition, it's fundamental to Ibn Sina's project.
What I'm interested in this chapter is really not so much the Aristotelian project itself, because scholarship is just on a tremendous job on that, but the role that Ibn Sina sees for language in it.
If Ibn Sina is translating an Aristotelian tradition that has one could say from our current perspective, maybe not really nailed the question of language-minded reality.
Like the famous passages at the beginning of Dainte Pertatione, the question of whether the categories is about names or about things.
Like this has been a problem for a long time, and Ibn Sina is translating that Greek project into an Arabic scholarly world where languages, as we know from the dictionaries, example, like absolutely fundamental to epistemology and ontology.
So what he does with language here is logic is super interesting.
And I think that what you can take away from it is that he uses an Arabic theory of meaning that word "matonar" that came up at the beginning.
He uses an Arabic theory of how language-minded reality interacts to solve the Dainte Pertatione and categories.
So it's not an Aristotelian understanding of language that he's using to make sense of Aristotle.
It's its own theory that not have a sentence personally, but it's part of the Arabic Persian tradition that he's working in logic.
I think that's true only for the question of how do language-minded reality interacts.
That's a big question.
Yeah.
Though you could argue it's not the fundamental question of the organ on.
So is that any means?
Right.
But is this chapter or third chapter of your it's a place where you discuss my non-muscle?
No, it's everywhere.
It's everywhere, okay.
Because it might help in order to tell our listeners what exactly these two key words that your book is really committed to transplanting, if not translating for us.
But these two words, man and Haikika, maybe you could say something about that and then we pick it up where Avi Sena is translating Aristotle into these terms.
Yeah.
The argument I make, or rather the fact that I present, the text that I've read and the way they use language, the use they made, the usage is they make of these particular words.
First of all, these are words that pop up everywhere, like across all genres of scholarship, in critical and important places.
And the word manna is a word that refers to the stuff that we have in our heads.
You could say ideas.
You call it the stuff of cognition.
Yeah.
The stuff of cognition.
I call it mental content.
Yeah.
The stuff of cognition.
And this is something that people working with this vocabulary.
People using this vocabulary assume that the stuff of cognition is stable in our heads.
It's shared between people.
So this is how people can talk to each other because there's a shared stable set of mental content.
It's ontologically salient.
So it has a very real existence in the human mind and a real existence in divinity.
And could it be meaning also?
So it very much cool.
This is a number one question that people ask.
And my answer is yes but no.
And the but no is so damaging that it means it's best just to say no up front.
Because I mean this is where the translation strategy that I lay out before I get into these four people,
which rests on a lot of the stuff that Thomas Kuhn did about core conceptual vocabulary and how translation happens.
How translation happens in science.
What he notices and explains the fact that there are certain words that are so fundamental to the way everything else happens around them.
That if you don't share that exact, if you don't share that same genealogy in history,
translation becomes incredibly difficult.
And any meaning is one of those words in English.
Like we use it a lot.
It means lots of different things.
Yeah, I understand the but now I understand the but a little bit better because meaning can also mean that it's linguists is not necessarily stuff of cognition.
It's not necessarily located inside the mind.
Yeah.
And it has an effort, it's an ethical.
There's an effect to meaning, there's like an ethical like this my life has meaning.
But an Arabic you would never say.
So this mental content of man now, does it coming from, is it pre-existent in the mind or is it coming from the world?
Is it coming from words?
Is it implanted by God or how is it that we all share it?
That's the question.
I mean, I think all those all those are true.
Like there is like the chair has a manner of chairness that goes into our minds and enables us to talk and think about chairs.
It also has a manner of blackness like it's color that goes into our minds and we're able to talk about it.
The fact that we have these, the stuff of cognition is reflected in the extra mental world enables us to do science and what we would now call physics.
Like how do things move?
Like why does the ball roll?
Well, it has a manner of rolling that's in it that is also in our head.
So we're kind of fundamentally connected to the extra mental world and are able to read and analyze.
So does it rely on a theory of correspondence?
I think that for the extra mental world it does.
The interesting thing about the way different capillary is used in talking about the extra mental world is that the clear dividing world is the
line that we're so comfortable with between mine, between mental and extra mental.
The reason we have this world that word "extramental" to make that distinction is just not really a problem.
It's not really a problem.
And it eventually, as you move sort of past,
Avicenna and the integration of our strategic and logic into people like Hasalian, the central is the vocabulary changes a little bit.
There's a much clearer sense that there are times when we do need to make a division between mental and extra mental.
But for somebody like Ippen Foreak, I mean I think the answer lies to a certain extent in what you just said about is it managed by the divine, by God.
If Ippen Foreak, because he has an occasionalist theology in which God is controlling everything,
There's no problem with having a single label, manna for both the idea in your head and the quality of the extra mental thing and the divine attribute of God.
These are all in the same category.
But this then brings up the other key word of Hakikka, which has to play a role in adequate or connecting accurately.
Yes, the mental and the extra mental content is that the divine content.
Like, Hakikka is when you get it right.
Because as you can imagine, in a world where you're using a single category to talk about,
oh, and of course words have manna.
Like every word has a manna, at least that's what gets recorded in the dictionary.
The words get mapped onto the stuff of cognition.
So in a world where you're using a single category to talk about language, mind, extra mental reality, divine reality.
In that world, there's a lot of potential for stuff to go wrong and Hakikka, yeah, exactly, is a value that it's the moment when we get it right.
And so you have, and so you can access knowledge.
Hold on, Alexander, we get it right because we use the right words for it, or because we conceive it clearly and distinctly.
Both, yeah.
Both of it, both.
So for, for, for, rugged, in a lexicographer, Hakikka is what we might call the literal.
Like if you say chair, and you mean chair.
If you say chair, and you mean like afternoon rest, because you're tired, that would be metaphor.
So that's what it's getting it right in the, in the, in the lexical sense.
For the theologians, Hakikka is getting it right in a theologically accurate and rationalist sense.
For people who are committed to, to inspiration and divine intuition,
Hakikka is that truth that you access when you get the intuition.
For, even seen it, for Avisana, for a logician, Hakikka is when you accurately conceive of a term in a syllogistic logical equation that then enables the rest of the syllogistic, the syllogism to function properly.
Okay, so we have, we have mental content, mana. We have instrumental things to which there, there's a correspondence.
And you can get it right, or those two things are aligned.
What about the role of words or language or names?
Can, you can misname, obviously, or you can, because that's a vex problem in, in the history of the West.
The status of language, ontologically speaking. But I gather it from what I've read in your, that it was not a big, vexation for your scholars that language could, there's not a big problem in terms of the referentiality of words, either if they're referring to the mental content or to the external thing that we conceive in our minds.
Yeah, I mean, I think I would say that on the one hand, it's the fundamental problem.
Like naming is the fundamental problem, that the entire project of lexicography is designed to solve.
And it's an ongoing process of solving it that has to adjust to changing circumstances.
If people start using words in different ways, the whole vast lexical project has to adapt and contain that and manage it and discipline it.
And so on the one hand, like this question of naming is the fundamental process that's involved in theology and lexicography.
And in logic, like Avicenna puts a lot of work into saying, before you do build, you have to build a syllogism and you have to get the terms right at the beginning.
And so that's the bits that Avicenna that I'm most interested in reading, because that's what you see as that.
And that's where that poem that I brought up at the beginning.
Yeah, yeah.
This idea of where the word is missing, there is no thing that you can invoke so that they're interconnectedness in a strange way.
And what gives the words, there's theories of language and traditional ones in the West that it's all just custom.
And so on and so forth. There are other traditions in which we don't want to get into the kind of medieval nominalism versus realism, but the idea that there are words that actually hold the essence of the thing within their own verbality.
But yeah, I think, I mean, I think if you think of Plato's Crattellus as being the start of this discussion about about where language comes from, it touches on exactly that.
Is it conventional? Is it used? Is it just a bit of a wedding?
This is another big, deep, long argument within the Arabic and Islamic and Jewish and Christian traditions in Arabic.
It takes both sides. Lots of people take both sides.
It's obviously a very interesting moment that you could, that people could use to talk about what language is to talk about where it came from.
Going back to the poem, I think one of the main things I took away from this poem is this idea that there's no thing must be at the end, no thing may be.
In the end, it's a failure. It's this going and looking for a language and coming back with a rich and frail prize.
But they're never getting that prize home properly. Yeah, because there's no word for it in the native tongue.
Yeah, and this where the word breaks off, no thing may be, makes, I think, total sense in the European context.
And yeah, I think it makes for the people that I'm working on, it would have just made no sense at all.
Not least, because they have this third category, they have this category of the stuff of cognition, of Matt and a mental content that just prevents them from ever experiencing that problem.
This is where I mean, this is where I find Kun's theory of scientific change and its relationship to vocabulary is so important.
Because if you take, I mean, he's talking about things like gravity and gravity, the relationship with the discovery of gravity and the word gravity to the theory of relativity, Newton to Einstein, like two different vocabulary is how they depend on each other.
And I'm talking about the scientific problem of how language mind and reality interact as it's found in poetry or Arabic theory.
But to use Kun's way of describing it, Gorga in this poem is using a conceptual vocabulary in which you have ding for thing and for word.
And that vocabulary has a genealogy, I mean, woof, I mean, to say it's got a genealogy.
And it produces a certain kind of thinking, a certain kind of theory, not in a good or a bad way, but it's just that's a conceptual vocabulary.
And the Arabic conceptual vocabulary I'm reading in these texts has different terms.
You know, it has a word for the vocal form of a word, like the physical thing that comes out of your mouth or the physical mark of the...
...the only... ...phone name.
...kind of.
Not really.
Laughs.
Like utterance or stuff that physically...
...physical instantiation of language.
And it has a word for the stuff of cognition, and that's it.
As it's a different conceptual vocabulary, it's not a try out of language mind and reality, it's a binary.
And that just produces a different conceptual vocabulary, it has its own genealogy, it feeds into these different genres like psychography, logic.
Feeds into some genres we're familiar with, logic, Aristotle, and some genres we're unfamiliar with, lexicography.
But it's just you have these two separate conceptual vocabulars. One represented by this poem.
One represented by the word.
I gather that there was a commitment to a certain kind of universalism, that these things that the scholars are dealing with, that they were true, regardless of, you know, circumstance, cultural context.
They're not just cultural constructs, and that they would expect that a thousand years from when they were writing, they would be as equally true then, and say where to then.
So, here's a question that may or may not be pertinent.
Why was the Quran never translated?
Because you're dealing here with Arabic and Persian speaking peoples.
From what I've read of in your book, there seemed to be no particular issue with the fact that you could not translate into Persian, you know, the same concepts that are, they're using in Arabic, and that the mental, the mind is going to survive.
You know, the transition from Arabic to Persian or vice versa and so forth. Why then is the Quran not translated into Persian until when was it?
Yeah, so the answer is the answer is reason. The answer is human rationality basically.
Like there is an labeling. Like it fits beautifully with the conversation.
So, the Quran is not translated because it is, that's a, it's a rationally incoherent position.
Like if God spoke Arabic, then it would be madness to translate it. It would be better to learn Arabic.
Like if God's going to actually communicate, these are his actual, like, this is actual words, unlike the Bible or the Torah, this is his actual word or the sentence structure.
It's God's syntax, it's God's grammar. So, if you're engaged in any kind of process of engaging with that, it's largely, it would be madness to try and translate it.
So that's the rationalist theological argument. But the real world, the Quran is translated instantly.
The Quran is trans, it's revealed, you know, in Arabic in the 600s, and it is translated into linear translations into Persian, like 50 years later, like immediately.
We have these manuscripts of the Quran with the Arabic, and then in the lines in between its Persian. This starts straight away.
And then it's everything. And then all the other languages of the world go into that into linear space.
Because, who's, I mean, who speaks Quranic Arabic? Very, very fast, very, very few people.
So, there's a project of an ex-sagatical project of explaining it in multiple languages, a project of teaching it, and just on the most practical level, it's translated from the get go.
Well, it's translated even by the fact that it's written, no?
Ah, so not really.
Because in onsol, as the Islamic theology has an ontological claim about the status of the defined text as exists with God.
So obviously not a single claim, they're multiple conflicting claims, where there are letters.
Like there are letters up there with God according to some stories.
There is biggest mountains. There are more letters up there than we have down here.
But the writingness, no, the writingness is divine.
And then there are arguments about, okay, so when you write it down, is it still divine?
Yeah, which is obviously an interesting question.
The other translation thing that, that springs to my mind apart from the Quran is, is poetry.
Poetry is incredibly important. It's like a cultural, as like a part of culture.
It's kind of fun and ironic that when Heidegger's writing about Gorga, this is a poem when poetry was very important in German, which is rare, I think, in certainly its rare in contemporary anglophone society that poetry would have this kind of high cultural social status.
In the 19th century with the romantics you knew would have yet.
Yeah, exactly. But not, so Arabic is, poetry is even more central than that all the time.
Oh yeah, it's still today. Yeah, totally, totally.
And Persia too, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's fundamental. It's a fundamental literary expression.
And the translation of it is theorized, and the idea that you can have the same text,
and the theory is understood as universal.
So, Jojani says famously that a metaphor is a metaphor, it's the same structure, whether it's in Arabic or Persian.
Mass pours a metaphor.
So it's not a big problem. Translation in poetry is unproblematic.
No, it's kind of fascinating.
And in fact, it's very different from our own presumption that what is lost in translation is the poetry.
I don't know, you quote, was it Robert Frost who says what's lost in the translation of a poem is the poetry.
Yeah, it's not the case with these guys.
Yeah, I mean, it's super interesting. I done some work on what bilingualism and multilingualism does to the way you can see the theory of literary criticism.
It seems very much that the classical Arabic attitude to translation comes from bilingual and multilingual worlds where people could just swap from one language to another.
It comes from logic where Avisenna very clearly says, just as Aristotle had before him and for Arby that logic is above all languages and works in all languages.
And so yeah, I mean, what's interesting from the perspective of the whole project is that it gives the literary criticism that comes out of this world, a universal salience.
We're talking about your fourth chapter now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what the fourth chapter is about what makes good poetry.
I mean, I think that's really like we've recorded Matt and I in dictionaries.
We've negotiated it with God.
We've subjected it to the logical syllogism, but now we have to ask what makes it beautiful.
And that's poetry and that's literary criticism.
And you can only, I think, really understand the literary criticism of someone like Jojani if you've worked through the theology and the lexicography in the logic.
He's coming out of this world. That's the genealogy for his theory.
Now are we talking about religious poetry or also Amorous poetry?
We just know, yeah, it's sake. I mean, secular.
We're talking about poetry that it's rare to, I mean, it is religious poetry, you know, but poetry is more about description of either the world in the older in the sort of sixth, seventh, eighth centuries.
Poetry is very much as this, like, deeply, we might call it realist, but out that, you know, it's realist plus realist and simplest maybe.
And then as poetry develops, you can call it like a mannerist turn and it's more about psychology and meaning and destiny and love.
And of course, there's irony and violence and sex and beauty and it all gets mashed up.
And what Jojani is interested in isn't so much that he's not interested in what we might call, you know, the point of the poetry or the meaning or the subject matter or the content.
He's interested in like the mechanics of how the poetry works, like how does this metaphor work?
How does this similarly work? How does this, you know, particular syntactical construction in the line of poetry work and what's made this one better than that one?
And he develops a literary critical toolbox that he says is totally applicable in Arabic and Persian.
So it should be applicable today, right? Because the universal claim is highly formalist, you know, very much focused on the structures of the language and the syntax.
And it also of course applies just as well to the Quran as it does to poetry.
So you can, he develops a literary critical toolbox and he's not the first person to do this, that you can run it on, you can show how God's metaphors work.
And you can show how some pre-Islamic poetry talking about sex metaphors work.
And you can show how some poetry being written in your lifetime about political destiny works because you have a universal formalist account of affect.
Do you think we could take that and apply it fruitfully to our own English or European language poetry?
I mean, this is kind of what I'm trying to do now. I think that I don't see any theoretical or epistemological reason why a formalist account of poetry should not be universally applicable.
I can't really find like a conceptual reason why that will be the case.
So once you get on board with that universal claim and you identify the lack of a barrier to its universal applicability within the tightly formalist constraints that it sets itself, I were not discussing the meaning of destiny.
Destiny of course would be contextually dependent.
We're discussing the functioning of metaphor.
I don't see any reason why you can't run it. I've tried a couple of times, I tried doing it on Auden's Shield for Achilles.
It kind of works. It kind of told you some extra stuff. And in the end, even if this is like, running this kind of like, you can call it like a formal anachronism.
Running this kind of formal anachronism, taking a criticism, a literary criticism from a historical context and applying it out of that context.
It doesn't give you a complete account of Auden's Shield of Achilles, but it gives you a workable and useful account of a part of it.
And by doing that, it tells you more about what is this literary critical tool, because you can see it working or missing stuff or not missing stuff.
And it tells you more about Auden's poetry. Some stuff gets a little bit clearer and some aspects of it get slid off the table.
Does it work?
Well, that's great. This book is coming out soon, right? And you're hoping that it will speak both to those people who are more specialized in near-reastering studies as well as Islamic studies as compared as well as comparatives and scholars of literature, even philosophy, certain philosophy, no?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think for the field in which I was trained and that I want to stay in, like the Philip of the Philologist of Arabic, I've provided all the Arabic texts that I talk about in footnotes.
Right on the page, I fought to get footnotes included with the publisher, like, struggle, they were very good about it.
And for people who don't know Arabic, you can read the whole book without knowing a single word of Arabic. It's written for an audience that doesn't read the original texts.
And yeah, in terms of scholarship, I think, I mean, if you look at the academic departments that are working on the same subjects now, philosophy, linguistics, English departments, departments of rhetoric, obviously departments of comparative literature, obviously like Islamic studies, religion.
Right. Yeah.
Well, that's great. And we're looking forward to it, but as I said in the intro, this is a massive labor of transplantation where you didn't accept what the homeland says to the poet in Georges poem that we don't have an award for this.
So you went there and you found the words for these concepts and ideas that come from the 11th century tradition, to us from a distant land. So congratulations again, we'll look forward to all of us reading the language of between gods and the poets.
Right? Language between God and the poets.
Yeah, very good. Thanks again to Alexander Key, my guest who is a professor of Arabic and comparative literature here at Stanford system professor.
We've been talking this last hour about his new book, which I just mentioned, and I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. Thanks again for coming on.
Thank you.
All right, and we're going to go back to that song we began with the instrumental arrangement by Gabriela Kaveo.
Stay tuned for our next show. Bye bye.
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