Precis: The best-known work of fiction in pre-modern Arabic was not the 1001 Nights but a collection of stories called Impostures. The hero is a hard-drinking preacher who can produce any kind of speech, including puns, riddles, and palindromes, on demand. Because of its over-the-top wordplay, Impostures has long been called untranslatable. Yet it has been adapted successfully into Hebrew, German, and Russian. The latest attempt is in English, and puts each of the 50 stories into a different historical, literary, or global style, from thieves' cant to Multicultural London English. Does it work? You decide!
Short bio:
Michael Cooperson teaches Arabic at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published numerous studies of early Abbasid cultural history, including Classical Arabic Biography (2000) and Al-Ma'mun (2005). His translations from Arabic include The Life of Ibn Hanbal, by Ibn al-Jawzī (NYU Press 2017), which won the Sheikh Hamad Prize for Translation and International Understanding; and al-Hariri's Impostures (NYU Press, 2020), which won the 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award in the translation category. His other research interests include Maltese language and culture.
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