A Rat and Its Redactors: Silent Co-Authorship in Kalīla wa-Dimna

The article investigates Kalīla wa-Dimna as a multilingual text which underwent massive change over centuries, especially in its Arabic phase, which is the present focus. Out of three types of sources for the work, indirect transmission, medieval translations, and complete manuscripts, the last group is analysed in greater detail, based on a sample of seven manuscripts. As a text sample, the short chapter of the Cat and the Rat is chosen. The interpretative method is comparative narratology, and regarding the editing procedure, a synoptic digital edition has been opted for, which juxtaposes versions for comparison, as opposed to a stemmatic reconstruction of any putative “original.” On this basis, the text’s changes in the seven manuscripts are classified and interpreted. The alterations can be identified to a large extent as selective and targeted, and they lead to a fluctuation of the text. In those three of the seven manuscripts, in which the rewriting is most extensive, distinct trends can be observed, insofar as the protagonists and the plot are given specific and varying foci. These can be regarded as the outcome of a silent redaction process that approximates co-authorship, and which was performed by copyists who remained mostly anonymous. These results, being partial and preliminary, require further study to confirm the scope and consistency of such textual interference. The study is part of the ongoing research project “The Arabic Anonymous in a World Classic” (acronym: AnonymClassic), funded by the European Research Council and located at Freie Universität Berlin

An Unruly Classic: Kalīla and Dimna and Its Syriac, Arabic, and Early Persian Versions

In this collective volume, members of the AnonymClassic project will discuss, from different perspectives, a core aspect of their work with Kalīla and Dimna: the study of variation. The aim is to shed light on Kalīla and Dimna’s variance—or textual instability, in the framework of Bernard Cerquiglini—and typologies of textual mobility/mouvance across linguistic traditions and historical periods. How can these dynamics best be described, analyzed, and classified? What were the reasons for the remarkable mobility of this book; who were the agents that intervened; and how

An Interim Report on the Editorial and Analytical Work of the AnonymClassic Project

In this collective article, members of the AnonymClassic project discuss various aspects of their work on the textual tradition Kalīla and Dimna. Beatrice Gruendler provides a general introduction to the questions being considered. This is followed by a number of short essays in specific areas, organized into three categories: codicology, literary history and theory, and the digital infrastructure of the project. Jan J. van Ginkel summarizes the challenges involved in editing the Syriac versions of Kalīla and Dimna; Rima Redwan explains the AnonymClassic team’s approach vis-à-vis the transcription and textual segmentation of Arabic manuscripts; Khouloud Khalfallah follows this with an overview of the types of data that are recorded for each codex that is integrated into the project; Beatrice Gruendler, in a second contribution, shares some preliminary results from the analysis of interrelationships among manuscripts; and Rima Redwan, also in a second contribution, discusses the sets of illustrations, or »image cycles«, that are found in many copies of Kalīla wa-Dimna. Moving into the realm of literary history and theory, Isabel Toral poses a range of questions relating to the status of Kalīla and Dimna, as (arguably) anonymous in authorship and as a fundamentally translated book; Johannes Stephan explores the references to Kalīla wa-Dimna found in various medieval Arabic scholarly works; and Matthew L. Keegan confronts the problem of the genre(s) to which Kalīla wa-Dimna might be assigned and the exceptional »promiscuity« of the text. The last section of the article, on digital infrastructure, contains two contributions: Theodore S. Beers describes a web application that the team has created to facilitate the consultation of published versions of Kalīla and Dimna, and, finally, Mahmoud Kozae and Marwa M. Ahmed offer a more comprehensive discussion of the digital tools and methods – specialized and in some cases developed »in-house« – on which the AnonymClassic project relies

Le savant et son époque à travers sa correspondance Seeger A. Bonebakker (1923-2005) et quelques notes sur Ḫalīl b. Aybak al-Ṣafadī (696-764/1297-1363)

This article proposes a survey of two great scholars’ in Arabic literature correspondences: a European of the 20th century, Seeger Adrianus Bonebakker, who is of special interest for us because he bequeathed all of his great library, personal notes and correspondence to Università Ca’ Foscari, and a subject of study of the former, Ḫalīl b. Aybak al-Ṣafadī, great littérateur and scholar of the first century of the Mamluk period. Letters sent and received are preserved in both cases and are primary sources on their network, but also on their personal life, personality and methodology

City of Poets, Poets of the City

About this article (quote by volume editors/introduction): "As Beatrice Gruendler shows in her contribution on poetry in Baghdād, ʿAbbāsid courtly culture also rendered a model for the households of the elite and middle class in the city, who strove to imitate the caliphal court by forming their own poetry sessions and literary salons. Hence, poetry (and literature) became ubiquitous and was cultivated in mosques, courtyards, streets and book markets, making Baghdād, that also served as inspiration for a new type of “urban” verse, a place of publication and reception of poetry.

Originalidad en la imitación: dos mu‘āraḍas de Ibn Darrāŷ al-Qasṭallī

The essay explores the range and function of the emulation (mu‘āraḍa) in al-Andalus, taking as examples two odes of Ibn Darrāj al-Qasṭallī (d. 421/1030), dedicated to his first patron al-Ḥājib al-Manrṣūr and his last patron al-Mundhir b. Yaḥyā of Saragossa. The first is modeled on an ode of Abū Nuwās and a declared poetic contest, the second a silent overwriting of al-Mutanabbī’s ode on the battle of al-Ḥadath, summoning it as “the vocabulary of a second higher power” to invert a celebration of military victory into one of a wedding feast. The ode acted as an ideological strategy to defend the patron’s peaceful diplomacy with Saragossa’s two Christian neighbors in order to form a coalition against a third Christian party, and it responded to criticism by some Muslim contemporaries. Both emulations show the considerable freedom Ibn Darrāj took in developing the themes of his subtexts.Este artículo analiza las variedades y la función de la imitación literaria (mu‘āraḍa) en al-Andalus a partir de dos poemas que Ibn Darrāj al-Qasṭallī (m. 421/1030) dedicó a sus mecenas al-Ḥājib al-Manrṣūr y al-Mundhir b. Yaḥyā. El primero de ellos imita un poema de Abū Nuwās, en competición poética explícita con el mismo. El segundo es una imitación no reconocida como tal del poema de al-Mutanabbī sobre la batalla de al-Ḥadath, que se invoca como “vocabulario de un segundo poder más elevado” para convertir la celebración de una victoria militar en la de una boda. al-Qasṭallī utilizó este segundo poema como estrategia ideológica para defender la diplomacia pacífica que su mecenas mantenía con dos vecinos cristianos de Zaragoza con los que formaba una coalición contra una tercera facción cristiana. Con él respondía a la crítica de la que esta política era objeto entre ciertos musulmanes. Ambas imitaciones muestran la considerable libertad que Ibn Darrāj se tomó a la hora de desarrollar los temas presentes en sus sub-textos

The Interrelation of some Arabic Versions of Kalīla wa-Dimna

A massive challenge of the project has been to ascertain how the drastically different manuscripts of Kalīla wa-Dimna extant from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century hang together, and what can be uncovered about the silent agents of that textual change. These questions are approached from two angles. The first angle consists in assessing how the manuscripts relate to each other. Here a majority of the manuscripts have turned out to form continua, meaning that short near-verbatim passages of text recur through the manuscripts of one group (or continuum), alternating with passages of rewriting. This has made it possible, for instance, to assign approximate dates to manuscripts that are not explicitly dated, by locating their textual structure and content between other dated versions. Conversely, the passages that “continue” across the manuscripts of one such group can be contrasted in a second step with changing passages that were added, rewritten, or cut in individual manuscripts of a continuum. Such individual intervention constitutes the second angle of approach, namely, manuscript redaction. At times, redaction can be shown to be substantial. A continuum thus establishes a trajectory against which the departure of single versions can be measured. With regard to rewriting, a “trigger” seems to be the reading of the text ungoverned by any sort of scholarly transmission, aided by the indeterminacy of the Arabic script, and compounded by the fact that copyists’ (re)interpretations were not bound by the givens of classical Arabic grammar. Reinterpretations of the consonantal frame (rasm) led in certain cases to the addition of new passages, when copyist-redactors’ creative rereading evinced ideas substantially different from what was contained in any Vorlage, and they needed to embed the new or altered passages into that context. Nonetheless, such intervention is still incremental. 3 Another phenomenon that we analyze is the combination of several Vorlagen by one copyist- redactor. By comparing these “cross-copied” versions with the manuscripts from which they take their parts, a spectrum of compilation techniques can be observed, from large blocks combined from different Vorlagen to an iterative and serial combination of very small pieces at every step of the action. Manuscripts exhibit this phenomenon from an early date (around the fourteenth century). But other manuscripts then reuse these cross-copied Vorlagen and recombine them with others—a practice which may be described as “cross-copying in the second degree.” This compositional intervention proves that the copyist-redactors 1) were aware of the textual proliferation; 2) felt entitled to contribute to it; and 3) pursued goals of their own, be it comprehensiveness or a focus on the plot. Most of them did not sign their names in the colophons. Beyond the manuscripts’ relationships within a continuum, verbatim copies occur, though they are small in number. These aid in solving textual puzzles in their Vorlagen. It is remarkable that cross-copied versions of Kalīla wa-Dimna received a disproportionally large number of verbatim copies, as if those “optimized” texts were especially popular

Understanding Near Eastern literatures : a spectrum of interdisciplinary approaches

Verena Klemm and Beatrice Gruendler (eds.)Beitr. teilw. engl., teilw. dt