The late translation and publishing series Library of Arabic Literature did much to change the bleak landscape of Arabic literature in English translation.
For a long time, there was a wry truism among scholars of Arabic: namely, that most Anglophone readers — even well-educated ones who claimed to be well versed in “world literature” — knew of only two Arabic-language books written before the modern period: the Qur’an and the Thousand and One Nights. Adding insult to injury, neither of those two very different books has ever been considered adab, a term normally applied to a tradition of formal written belles lettres and composed by an identifiable single author. At least outside the academy, the vast archive of pre-modern Arabic poetry and prose has mostly been invisible to English-language readers.
The proximate reason for this state of affairs was that English translations of early Arabic were simply unavailable. Those few translations that were out in the world were often dated, clunky, or incomplete (in some instances, all three). In many cases, translations were done by scholars who knew their subject matter but seemed to be translating primarily for fellow experts. Imaginative English renderings, such as Michael Sells’ Desert Tracings, his 1989 translation of six early Arabic odes, were fairly rare. Until recently, the situation for contemporary Arabic-language literature was only slightly better, as a mere handful of English-language publishers (including the American University in Cairo Press, Saqi Books, and a few university presses) were consistently publishing translations of major Arab poets and writers, such as Mahmoud Darwish and Naguib Mahfouz, in translation.
A changing publishing ecosystem was allowing smaller publishers to find cracks in the traditional Anglophone wall of resistance to translated literature.
For those who love and admire the Arabic literary tradition but were frustrated by its invisibility to English-language readers, the Library of Arabic Literature (LAL) book series did much to change this bleak picture. I was fortunate enough to be deeply immersed in this series as its full-time editorial director from its beginning to its formal conclusion last year. Over the course of sixty-one hardcovers and forty-five paperbacks, LAL offered English readers new translations of Arabic texts across fourteen centuries and in a range of genres that included poetry, historical narrative, memoir, philosophy, religion, travel, and what we might call fiction. The literary register of its books ranged from classical poetry in formal Arabic to prose narratives in the non-standard writing known as “Middle Arabic” and oral poetry in the colloquial Arabic of the Gulf.
Chronologically, the scope of its list ran from the pre-Islamic era to the early twentieth century, near the end of the nahdah period. At one of its first meetings, LAL’s editorial board made the decision to leave modern texts to other publishers, in large part because by 2010, the situation for contemporary Arabic literature in translation had improved somewhat: high-profile literary awards such as the International Prize for Arabic Fiction were drawing the attention of global publishers to new Arabic novels for translation. At the same time, a changing publishing ecosystem was allowing smaller publishers to find cracks in the traditional Anglophone wall of resistance to translated literature.
LAL benefited from a happy confluence of factors: it had solid financial backing, which allowed us to think ambitiously about the scope of the series. It thrived on a collegial spirit among its series editors — something not always guaranteed when academics collaborate. And it also had a rigorous review and revision process for its texts in progress: some of our translators may have initially balked at the level of revisions their drafts underwent, but almost all came to appreciate the final books that resulted.
LAL began in 2010 with funding from the UAE, as one of an initial round of grants awarded to faculty at the newly-established NYU Abu Dhabi. The faculty in this case was Professor Philip Kennedy, who had envisioned an Arabic translation series akin to the venerable Loeb Classical Library series published by Harvard University Press, which has produced facing-page English translations of ancient Greek and Latin texts for over a century. The logical publisher for LAL was NYU Press in New York, which had recently published a similar bilingual translation series, the Clay Sanskrit Library.
In addition to Kennedy as General Editor, LAL had a small but active editorial board, made up of top scholars, all of them experts in various aspects of early and medieval Arabic, such as Abbasid poetry, law, religion, and history. Many of the early decisions made by the board reinforced the importance of the original texts, not just the English translations. They determined early on that LAL would publish only complete texts from the Arabic literary tradition. There would be no abridgments or “selections” taken from longer works to cater to the expectations of twenty-first-century readers.
The underlying reason was that LAL disagreed with the somewhat glib notion that certain texts or parts of a text could be considered “untranslatable.” The renowned Arabic-English translator Humphrey Davies — who ended up editing and translating ten LAL hardcovers before his death in 2021 — expressed that same idea in a 2013 interview with a comment repeated by many and that has stuck with me: “Everything can be translated, or nothing can be translated. Either of those positions is logical, anything in between is illogical.”
LAL opted for a similarly rigorous approach to its Arabic editions. The easier approach (setting aside the thorny question of permission and copyright) would have been to let a translator select a previously published edition of the Arabic text and simply translate that. LAL insisted that scholars instead first produce their own Arabic edition by collating and comparing original archival manuscripts. As a result, LAL pushed its translators to do the kind of philological work that had fallen out of fashion in the academy, reviving nineteenth-century academic skills even as it was pushing for twenty-first-century translations.
Translation of old texts poses its own challenges. There is a chasm of knowledge, context, and convention that separates a modern reader from, say, a pre-Islamic ode. How does a translator render a poem filled with mentions of unfamiliar flora, fauna, and geography? How does she convey metaphors and metrical feet in a way that makes sense to a reader more familiar with Shakespeare, Plath, or Ocean Vuong? In such cases, a common temptation — and I admit this as a translator myself — is to shave away the rough edges of everything the English reader might find daunting. An opposite temptation, born from a fear of “losing” something in the translation, is to hew so closely to the original that the English becomes stilted and virtually unreadable. Both temptations guarantee a translation that is either boring or incomprehensible.
In After Babel, his monumental study of translation, George Steiner noted that a translator working from a source text that is linguistically and culturally remote from the target language can easily slip into producing a stylized translation. Steiner specifically points to past English and French translations of the Thousand and One Nights, which he says tended to share “the same rosewater tint,” under the weight of pre-digested Orientalist cliché.
We were injecting Arabic into the bloodstream of world literature.
Victorian rosewater tint may be less of a hazard for contemporary translations, but it is still a challenge to find an approach to translation that doesn’t cling too closely to the syntax and form of the original, particularly with poetry. To do that, the LAL board members sometimes held day-long group translation workshops, with the aim of re-training themselves as translators. In one of these sessions, we tried our hand at some poems by the pre-Islamic warrior-poet ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad. One of the biggest stumbling blocks, we soon realized, was the length of the Arabic metrical line, which contained a level of lived detail and cultural references that could not be stuffed into English verse with any kind of musicality. Our initial translations read like unwieldy footnotes, the line breaks a halfhearted reminder that our efforts were supposed to result in poetry.
The project was turned over to James E. Montgomery, who, along with scholar and translator of French literature Richard Sieburth, eventually produced a bracing translation of ‘Antarah’s poems, which LAL published under the title War Songs. Montgomery and Sieburth wisely picked their battles, preferring to render ‘Antarah’s voice in short, plainspoken lines of verse rather than trying to replicate the longer bayts of the original.
One of the most gratifying elements of publishing LAL books was the sense that we were expanding the horizons of Anglophone readers simply because so many of these Arabic texts — from travelogues to colloquial poetry — had never appeared in English translation. The moment that clicked for us was the publication of the first text that Humphrey Davies edited and translated for the series: namely the massively inventive 1855 novel Leg over Leg (al-Sāq ʿalā l-sāq fī mā huwa al-Fariyāq), by the Lebanese-born author Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq. Sometimes compared to Laurence Sterne’s mind-bending Tristram Shandy, Leg over Leg draws heavily on the author’s own encounters with European modernity, as his fictional counterpart spends time with British missionaries in Malta and visits both London and Paris. But the novel also contains sharp satire on traditional authority and secularism; whole chapters of it are devoted to obscure Arabic vocabulary taken from medieval dictionaries, and it displays a surprisingly contemporary frankness about sexuality and the rights of women.
Once reviews began trickling in for Leg over Leg, two themes emerged: firstly, that Davies’ translation was a landmark achievement, and more importantly, that older Arabic literature was much richer, stranger, and more inventive than many reviewers had assumed. As one literary blogger honestly admitted in his review: “Leg Over Leg doesn’t fit with the general conceptions most publishers and readers might have of Arabic fiction… It blows our (pre-)conceptions of Arabic literature out of the water. It certainly did mine.”
That idea — that these translations were allowing Anglophone readers to sample the enormous scope of Arabic’s literary and intellectual heritage — remained a lodestar for LAL. We were injecting Arabic into the bloodstream of world literature.
While LAL could sometimes commission scholars to translate particular books we wanted out in the world, more often we had to rely on scholars who brought texts to us. In many cases, those texts were new to the editorial board — a testament to just how rich the repository of Arabic literature is.
For example, early on, the food historian Charles Perry approached LAL about editing and translating a book of recipes from thirteenth-century Syria. Cookbooks were not “high literature” by any means, and the editors held a lively discussion on whether LAL was the right place for it. Judging from the numerous copies of the manuscripts available in archives, the book circulated widely in its day. But did it reflect a sufficient level of creative input from its anonymous author to merit inclusion? Ultimately, the board concluded that it did, and the resulting Scents and Flavors: A Syrian Cookbook (Kitāb al-Wuṣlah ilā l-ḥabīb) turned out to be an astonishing success.
As the series got up to speed, eventually adding a colorful paperback series to its list, it became clear there was an audience for these books in all their variety. Consorts of the Caliphs, by Ibn al-Sāʿī, for example, offered a collection of short biographies of women in the caliphal court in Baghdad, preserving rare excerpts of verse by women poets and singers from that era. ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī’s A Physician on the Nile presented an account by a twelfth-century doctor sent by the caliph to Egypt to make a report about its flora and fauna. His account morphs into a harrowing description of the famine that occurred during his time there, a vivid eyewitness account of a human disaster on a grand scale. In 2020, LAL published Impostures, a translation of the Maqāmāt of al-Ḥarīrī, a collection of fifty short prose narratives from twelfth-century Iraq, each featuring the same roguish character and clever displays of Arabic wordplay. In Michael Cooperson’s award-winning translation, these fifty narratives are transformed into fifty varieties of English, whether as dialect (e.g., Australian English, cowboy slang, Spanglish, or Cockney) or as literary pastiche (Shakespeare, Austen, Joyce, Gilbert & Sullivan). Impostures exemplifies literary translation as an act of literary creation, one that acknowledges both the limitations of translating across a chasm of geography and culture, and the vast possibilities of imaginative approaches.
The closure of the series in late 2025 was a painful loss, not least because so many fascinating potential translations never got published. A few examples of projects in progress should suffice here: the collected poems of al-Khansāʾ, one of the earliest woman poets in Arabic; a text on astronomy by Ibn Arabi, a preeminent scholar of Sufism; and the beloved text on romantic love, The Neck-Ring of the Dove (Ṭawq al-ḥamāmah) by the Andalusi litterateur Ibn Ḥazm. I can only hope that these and other projects eventually find publishers.
The ending of LAL is especially regrettable at the present moment. The humanities in the United States are facing a hostile government climate coupled with a drop in student admissions and program cuts across academia. The current global race to embrace AI will certainly have long-term consequences for how governments and private institutions fund the kind of intellectual work, including translation, that has undergirded initiatives like the Library of Arabic Literature. But national and university archives still contain a wealth of early Arabic works that deserve wider circulation. I can only hope that some other initiative will one day pick up where LAL left off and wash off any rosewater tint readers might still have about this diverse and rewarding literature.
