Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī on Prayer and the Planets: An Islamic Theory of Theurgy

Swearwords, not unlike humour, dialect, and poetry, are notoriously difficult to translate, and rather like the words and images of poetry, or the colourful expressions of jokes, dialect, and slang, swearing can have a powerful emotional effect. If one plays around with the taboo words of a foreign language, they seem like completely innocuous clusters of vowels and consonants, whereas one’s own swearwords seem blessed — or rather cursed — with almost supernatural powers. In addition to its power to offend or to violate taboos, swearing can be a source of humour, and can provide an insight into a speaker’s personality and preoccupations. Several of the characters in Niccolo Ammaniti’s novel, Ti prendo e ti porto via, make liberal use of swearwords.1 The novel’s humour, as well as its depiction of a particular social milieu, depends in large part on the way the characters express themselves. It has been translated into English by Jonathan Hunt, and a close reading of the original (source text) and the translation (target text) provides insights into the task of the translator and into the analytical potential of translation itself.2 Hunt’s approach, as well as significant differences between source and target languages, has implications for the target text’s manifestation of satirical, ironic, and grotesque effects. A ‘stereoscopic’ reading of source and target texts, in which the two are read and analyzed side by side, illuminates some of the challenges inherent in the translation of swearing, and highlights the role of language, especially taboo language, in this particular novel.3

Despite the fact that Levinas has often been accused of having little or no room for the maternal in his writing, his rhetoric nonetheless applies maternal tendencies that complicate his ethical stance and its relation to the experience of vulnerability. Haunting Levinas’s oeuvre as the locus classicus for the un-substitutable, which in turn breaks with ontologies of sacrifice, the maternal inflects Levinas’s thought in crucial junctures, whether this be the responsibility for the Other, or his thoughts on ipseity, as well as his articulation of the relation to the Same. Through a close reading of the two versions of “Substitution” as well as select passages from Otherwise than Being, the article demonstrates how Levinas’s ethical inflection and grid of utterance simultaneously depend on and disavow the maternal as an ontological occurrence.

The study offers variant translations of Robert Burns’ A Red, Red Rose has written in Indonesian. The research design of this paper is qualitative descriptive, in any case, the source of the data is a text of poem presented in a description of the products of translating the poem; The source of data is the original Scots dialect Poem text of Robert Burns’ A Red, Red Rose, as the source text (ST). The units of analysis are words, phrases, and sentences in lines and stanzas of the poem. In translating process, the writer conducts three steps. Those are (1) analysing the source text by close reading using syntactic framework by identifying clause and sentences in order to comprehend the substance of the text, (2) Transferring the meaning of the source text into the target text. This step can be defined as evaluation and revision activity in creating appropriate equivalence, and (3) restructuring the equivalence meaning to the target text. The significant findings of the study as the implication are Indonesian translation variants of Robert Burn’s A Red, Red Rose and helpful model to English teachers, learners, and translators of any language.

This chapter comprises as poem, with an author’s note on composition, made in response to, and as a ‘queer mothering’ of, the first edition of Woolf’s prose poem collection Monday or Tuesday (1921). Inspired by Woolf’s creative model of close attentive reading in the essay ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ (1926), and by the ‘additive and accretive’ impulse of queer theorist, Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick’s ‘reparative reading’, both poem and note offer up close critical and creative scrutiny of Monday or Tuesday . The poem’s compositional methodology strictly follows the pioneering diastic poetics of Jackson Mac Low’s Virginia Woolf Poems (1985), but eschews his preference for lineation by arranging the text in the double margins of Woolf’s own prose poetry. While the ‘source text’ is Monday or Tuesday , the ‘seed text’ is ‘life’, as in the phrase ‘the life of Monday or Tuesday’ in Woolf’s essay ‘Modern Fiction’ (1925).

Reviewed by: Denmark Vesey’s Bible: The Thwarted Revolt That Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial by Jeremy Schipper Jason R. Young Denmark vesey’s Bible: The Thwarted Revolt That Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial. By Jeremy Schipper. (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford, U.K.: Princeton University Press, 2022. Pp. xxxiv, 181. $26.95, ISBN 978-0-691-19286-4.) In 1822, Denmark Vesey, a formerly enslaved man living in Charleston, South Carolina, fomented an ill-fated insurrectionary plot against slavery. Subsequent court records make clear that Vesey was convinced (and successfully convinced others) of the incommensurability of slavery and Christianity. Perhaps more important, Vesey found in the Bible justification for the violent overthrow of the system. In Denmark vesey’s Bible: The Thwarted Revolt That Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial, Jeremy Schipper offers a novel account of the Vesey plot through a close reading of extant court records, sermons, newspapers, and personal papers. Much of this material implies that Vesey appealed to biblical texts to justify his use of violence, but the particulars of his antislavery theology remain shrouded in mystery. Schipper hopes to reconstruct something of the biblical verses and interpretations that Vesey might have relied on in support of a general slave uprising. Part of Schipper’s challenge, of course, was that “no writings by Vesey survive” (p. xxix). Indeed, as Schipper observes, “slaveholders’ extensive writings related to Vesey from the early 1820s provide much more documentation of their own use of the Bible to condemn his plot than of Vesey’s use of it to support his plot” (p. xxix). Despite its publication at the two hundredth anniversary of Vesey’s conspiracy, Denmark vesey’s Bible reads primarily as a review of early- nineteenth-century proslavery Christian thought. As a result, the title does little to convey either the contents or the basic framing of the book. To be sure, Schipper offers a close reading of antislavery Christian theology, especially in a convincing review of arguments related to Exodus 21:16. Still, proslavery Christian ideologues take center stage in this book. [End Page 350] In part, this focus reflects the author’s reliance on written and textual sources. Many African Americans living during the era of slavery experienced the Bible as an aural or oral scripture rather than as a literary text. It is quite possible, then, that Denmark Vesey’s Bible—that is, the textual sources from which Vesey drew inspiration—was only partially located in the text itself. Because enslaved African Americans were largely prohibited from accessing literacy, the Bible was, for many Black people living in the South, less a book to be read and more a series of stories to be told and songs to be sung, often outside the purview of the slaveholding class. One thinks here of Olaudah Equiano’s Talking Book episode. In this sense, Vesey’s Bible might be better located outside the authorized textuality of court records, printed sermons, or legal treatises. In the concluding pages of Denmark vesey’s Bible, Schipper argues that his book “has told a story of some early efforts—both hopeful and horrific—to define and control the Bible’s implications in the midst of racial terror and violence in an American city” (p. 127). He notes, “We could ask who interpreted the Bible correctly: Vesey and his fellow conspirators or proslavery apologists” (p. 127). Instead, Schipper proposes a curious equivalency in which Vesey as well as his proslavery adversaries “were not as invested in determining what the Bible means in the abstract as they were in what it implies for the deadly struggle against or the brutal enforcement of American white supremacy” (p. 127). But the violent, if authorized, theology of proslavery ideologues was in no way equivalent—either in its ethics or its effects—to the revolutionary theology of Denmark Vesey and his co-conspirators. The differences between these two positions are perhaps nowhere more elegantly described than in the keen distinctions Frederick Douglass drew between the slaveholding Christianity of the United States and “the Christianity of Christ” (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass [Boston, 1845], p. 118). As a final word on the Bible’s relationship...

Salvaging Literary Models in Translation Andre Lefevere describes translation of rhymed, metrical poetry into target-language rhyme and meter as a double bondage, and dismisses enterprise as doomed to failure from start in his prescriptive study, Translating Poetry: Seven Strategies and a Blueprint (49). This landmark work of Translation Studies movement he helped spearhead may be faulted for its excessive reliance on outdated, quirky, even mediocre English versions of Catullus 64 he selects as basis for his analysis of poetic translation, a specialized act which, he writes, becomes necessary when `variations' obscure rather than express original author's interpretation of a theme (99). While surely Lefevere's insistence that a translation capture source text's communicative value is central to this endeavor, his position seems to preclude translating a poem written in rhyme and meter into anything other than a vaguely poetical diction too timorous to assume identity of an entirely new text. This rather confining conceptualization of poetic translation thus seems to allow no other option than loose metrical transliteration. It is telling that Lefevere never provides reader with his own rendering of Catullus 64, after having judged, often harshly, nearly twenty models to be, in their own specific ways, misguided or deficient. Translation is a most pragmatic process, and for influential author of Translating Poetry, highly normative theoretical precepts occlude very real demands of choice. Lefevere does, however, raise an often neglected point with regard to preserving intertextual echoes in target-language versions. Broadly stated, he is troubled that the demands of meter require sacrifice of accuracy (55), an accuracy, given his staunch opposition to carrying over meter and rhyme, one must assume he conceives to be primarily semantic in nature. Lefevere objects, for instance, to T. Hart-Davies's rendering of lines 204-6 of Catullus 64, annuit invicto caelestum numine rector/quo motu tellus atque horrida contremuerunt/aequora, as mighty Thunderer his dread assent/Nodded propitious and sound was sent, for being a quiet falsification, and writes: No sound at all is sent in source text; mere fact that Jupiter nods is enough to make earth and seas tremble. In source text passage is, moreover, a hardly veiled allusion to Zeus' nod in Iliad; to give a garbled translation of this particular passage is to obscure poem's lines of descent, which Catullus definitely wants to establish, because they are part of what is expected of doctus poeta he is trying to be. (55) Putting aside Lefevere's fondness for authorial attention as well as his witheringly close cross-reading, observation that source materials--whether direct quotations, paraphrases, oblique echoes or allusions--are carelessly overlooked, poorly translated, or simply too foreign to survive transference into target-language texts appears well taken. The thorny problems of historical relevance and cultural equivalence vis-a-vis linguistic intertexuality are too often obscured by resulting distortions in target-language texts, which may clumsily veil their originals' aesthetic intent or provenience. Decades of structuralist and post-structuralist poetics have refigured New Critical conceptualization of aesthetic text as a self-contained, spatial object whose more or less stable meaning lies latent, but poised for extraction, beneath a congeries of tension, paradox, repetition, and contradiction. The post-formalist poetic text is now more widely perceived to be a fluid, experiential, even temporal matrix where language, culture, reception, and history, both socio-political and literary, combine to complicate faith in poem as static artifact whose unchanging significance remains readily retrievable through tried-and-true methods of close reading. …

This thesis analyses the English translation "My Life and Struggle" by Imtiaz Ahmad Sahibzada, of the Pashto text "Zama Jwand Ao Jidojehad" by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. In the current study "Zama Jwand Ao Jidojehad" is the source text, while "My life and struggle" is the target text for analysis. Selected excerpts of the said books are extracted for translation purposes. It adopts a qualitative method and close reading technique for the analysis of this study. Antoine Berman's twelve Deforming Tendencies is used as a theoretical modal for this study. It highlights that there are deforming tendencies in the source text's English translation.

In 2005, Franco Moretti introduced Distant Reading to analyse entire literary text collections. This was a rather revolutionary idea compared to the traditional Close Reading, which focuses on the thorough interpretation of an individual work. Both reading techniques are the prior means of Visual Text Analysis. We present an overview of the research conducted since 2005 on supporting text analysis tasks with close and distant reading visualizations in the digital humanities. Therefore, we classify the observed papers according to a taxonomy of text analysis tasks, categorize applied close and distant reading techniques to support the investigation of these tasks and illustrate approaches that combine both reading techniques in order to provide a multi‐faceted view of the textual data. In addition, we take a look at the used text sources and at the typical data transformation steps required for the proposed visualizations. Finally, we summarize collaboration experiences when developing visualizations for close and distant reading, and we give an outlook on future challenges in that research area.

This book discusses sharecropping in the Yemen against the background of Islamic law and customary law. Sharecropping is particularly interesting in Islam since its basis (rent as a proportion of an unknown future harvest) is ostensibly inconsistent with the Islamic prohibition against transactions involving gharar (risk or uncertainty). The first half of the book analyses how Islamic theory views sharecropping and is based on a detailed analysis of key legal texts, while the second half focuses on sharecropping as it exists in practice in the Yemen. Textual sources (Islamic legal texts, contracts, pleas and fatwas are related throughout to Yemeni sharecropping in practice, a task not previously attempted, and the work has been written so as to be accessible both to social scientists and to Islamic legal specialists.

The use of computational approaches in history is not new (Boonstra et al 2004). However, until fairly recently, their use has been restricted to a relatively small number of fields such as economic history and historical demography. These are fields that make extensive use of quantitative sources, typically in tabular form, that have long been wellsuited to analysis using a computer. Despite the potential benefits of quantitative sources, the overwhelming majority of historians use textual sources and thus, computational approaches have traditionally had little penetration into mainstream history. Over the past decade or so this has changed rapidly. The mass digitisation and dissemination of historical source material such as Early English Books Online (EEBO), Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), the British Library Newspaper Collections, The Times Digital Archive, Project Gutenberg, and many others have meant that large amounts of historical texts are now available in digital form (Hitchcock 2013). Thus, historians now have access to an unprecedented volume of digitised source material. However, the computational techniques used to analyse such materials them remain rooted in traditional close reading with the digital simply providing ease of access and the use of keyword searching. There is thus a requirement to adopt and adapt the digital approaches available from other fields, and develop new techniques where appropriate, such that scale of the resources available to us can be exploited in a way that is impossible for close reading alone. This challenge is not unique to history; it has occurred across humanities disciples, providing a major impetus to the field of digital humanities (Kirschenbaum 2010; Schreibman et al. 2014; Terras 2016) where a major theme is the use of digital approaches to the analysis of texts in disciplines including English Literature (Moretti 2013; Jockers 2013) and History (Atkinson & Gregory, 2017; Pumfrey et al. 2012).

This research aimed to explore the translation strategies and identify the types of idioms found in the novel The Adventure of the Speckled Band: Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The study was based on two main theories. Baker’s theory was applied to identify the translation strategies used, including using an idiom of similar meaning but dissimilar form, using an idiom of dissimilar meaning and form, translation by paraphrase, and translation by omission. Meanwhile, McCarthy and O’Dell’s theory was employed to categorize idioms into types such as similes, binomials, proverbs, euphemisms, clichés and fixed statements, and idioms from other languages. The research employed a descriptive qualitative method and was designed as library research. Data were collected through five steps: close reading, identification, note-taking, classification, and coding, in order to ensure the validity of the findings. The results revealed that fifty-eight idioms were identified in the novel. The most frequently used translation strategy was translation by omission, indicating that the translator often chose to exclude idiomatic expressions that might not transfer well into the target language. Furthermore, the most common types of idioms found in the novel were clichés and fixed statements, suggesting the frequent use of conventional expressions in the source text.

Reviewed by: Exilio y cosmopolitismo en el arte y la literatura hispánica ed. by Araceli Tinajero Roberto Rey Agudo Tinajero, Araceli, ed. Exilio y cosmopolitismo en el arte y la literatura hispánica. Madrid: Verbum, 2013. Pp. 227. ISBN 978-8-47962-850-5. Hispanicists will find in Araceli Tinajero’s Exilio y cosmopolitismo en el arte y la literatura hispánica a useful addition to the study of exile in Latin American Studies. One of the book’s strengths is drawing on disciplines like sociology, art history, film studies, and literature. Its ten essays offer a heterogeneous sampling of exile studies across Mexico, Spain, Cuba, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Chile, and Venezuela. Another important contribution is focusing on seldom explored representations of exile and diaspora (e.g., Cuba as a refugee destination or the Venezuelan exile under Chávez), and choosing less familiar texts and films to discuss better-known episodes in contemporary Spanish and Latin American history. The most insightful moments come in close readings and analyses of particular texts, films, and paintings. However, the quality of the chapters is somewhat uneven. Given that concepts like exile and diaspora are of great interest in contemporary theory and criticism, it would have been interesting to find more of the authors of [End Page 836] these chapters in dialogue with the critical literature on exile beyond the scope of each chapter. As a result, there is very little overlap in the bibliography on exile between chapters. Other than Said’s Reflections on Exile, cited in three chapters, few critical studies on exile are cited. Notable absences in the bibliography include Chinua Achebe, Terry Eagleton, Nico Israel, Michael Seidel or Kobena Mercer, and, surprisingly, Claudio Guillén. With the exception of the introduction, and the first and ninth chapters, which have only footnotes, all chapters include a bibliography at the end. With that being stated, Araceli Tinajero’s introduction makes a convincing case that most of the contemporary Latin American canon has been written in exile or deals with exile in one way or another. This section would have been a good place to frame the subsequent chapters in the wider critical examination of exile. Martínez-Assad’s thesis in the first chapter, supported by demographic data and his detailed, street-by-street account of how successive waves of foreigners settled in Mexico City, is that foreign contributions to Mexican culture are qualitatively high considering how many fewer foreigners Mexico attracted compared to the United States, Brazil, or Argentina. In the following chapter, Lemus argues that Martín Luis Guzmán’s ideas about the role of the intellectual in the construction of national identity in post-Revolutionary Mexico took shape during his exile in New York (1916–19), as seen in his personal letters and the collection A orillas del Hudson. Chapter 3 summarizes four unpublished testimonies of exiles in Monterrey. The chapter includes some inaccuracies (the term “niños de la guerra” was definitely in use before 2005) and would have benefited from a more analytical perspective. The source texts seem underutilized either as memory texts or as literary artifacts. Chapter 4 traces the lineage of the imagery of Jewish diaspora in four Latin American artists: the transatlantic crossing in Víctor Manuel’s Olvidados, the iconography of Jewish persecution by the Inquisition in Frida Kahlo’s Sin esperanza and Diego Rivera’s Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central, and José Gurvich’s use of Jewish themes after moving from Uruguay to Israel and finally to New York. Remba’s comparative analysis of the imagery of Alfred Stieglitz’s iconic photo The Steerage (1907) and Víctor Manuel’s Olvidados (depicting the diplomatic crisis of the SS. St Louis, whose Jewish refugees were denied asylum by Cuba in 1939) is one of the highlights in the book. Chapter 5 explores the double sense of alienation felt by exiles in their countries of origin and destination through a close reading of Francisco Ayala’s “El regreso.” Suárez-Galbán Guerra argues that the many layers of meaning in the story—biblical allusions to Cain and Abel, suppressed homoerotic desire, incest, revenge—insinuate the violence...

This study qualitatively explores how heritage elements are represented in the multimodal discourse of China’s Chagan Lake winter fishing culture, a case of intangible ice and snow folk heritage. Drawing on visual grammar theory as the analytical framework, the research focuses on how textual, visual and auditory modes jointly construct cultural meaning in the original Chinese materials [1]. The study employs both thematic analysis and semiotic analysis: the former identifies recurring cultural themes across source texts, while the latter investigates how visual, auditory and linguistic signs encode and transmit cultural meanings. Data include authentic Chinese videos and English videos. Through close reading and comparative examination, the study reveals how cultural meanings of Chagan Lake’s winter fishing heritage elements are constructed across textual, visual, and auditory modes. The findings underscore the challenges of recognizing intangible heritage and highlight the greater cultural sensitivity. This research contributes to heritage communication studies by offering qualitative insights into the complex cultural meanings in multimodal texts.

This study explores the creative dimension of literary translation by examining how translators move beyond mere stylistic reformulation to engage in a profound reinterpretation of the source text. The central research question addresses the following: to what extent does literary translation constitute a re-creative act, and how can the translator preserve the essence of the source text while introducing interpretative agency? Anchored in a translation studies framework, the paper proposes that translation, particularly of poetic texts, demands not only linguistic competence but also cognitive flexibility, aesthetic sensitivity, and interpretative insight. To investigate this hypothesis, the study adopts a qualitative, text-based methodology, grounded in close reading and comparative textual analysis. The object of analysis is Conte, a prose poem by French poet Arthur Rimbaud, selected for its richness in rhythm, imagery, and tonal ambiguity. The study examines the interplay between source and target texts by identifying moments of semantic density, phonetic patterning, and rhetorical complexity. Particular attention is paid to how the translator interprets and reconfigures these features in the target language, thus enacting a form of literary re-creation. The findings show that the translator’s engagement with the text is not limited to a passive transfer of meaning but involves a dynamic process of appropriation, reformulation, and stylistic negotiation. The act of translation becomes a site of co-authorship, where the translator’s reading is filtered through personal impressions, intertextual references, and cultural knowledge. Each translation choice reflects a balance between fidelity and transformation, positioning the translator as both reader and creator. This study argues for a reconceptualization of the translator’s role, challenging traditional models of translation as interlingual equivalence. Instead, it posits a model in which the translator functions as a re-creator, responsible for generating a target text that resonates with the original while asserting its own artistic legitimacy. The case of Conte reveals that creative translation is not a deviation from fidelity, but a mode of textual engagement that brings new life to literary works across linguistic boundaries.

Only recently have scholars begun to discuss the implications of the Anthropocene for the translation of literature, introducing the new practice and study of ecotranslation. The Anthropocene—a term popularized by Paul Crutzen—describes the current epoch as one where human activity gains a large negative impact on geology and ecosystems. In light of this, an ecological approach to translation is not only useful but necessary for addressing the complex relationship between humans and the natural world. Ecotranslation can be understood as translation that recognizes and retains ecological themes from the source text. This study looks at the application of ecotranslation theory to an English translation of the German poem “so habe ich sagen gehört” by Ulrike Almut Sandig. The poem critiques preconceived notions about how humans relate to and conceptualize nature, making it an ideal source for applying ecotranslation. Through a close reading and interpretation of the poem, its ecological features are noted, then close attention is given to their translation. Comparison of the ecotranslation with an existing translation displays that an ecological approach can lead to a particular recognition and emphasis of ecological aspects. The resulting translation differs significantly from those translations lacking an ecological emphasis.