The Translator of Desires (By Muhyiddin Ibn ?Arabi, [Translator: Michael Sells

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Translator of Desires by Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Rosabel Ansari (bio) The Translator of Desires Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Michael Sells (Translator) Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation Princeton, NJ—Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021. xxxviii + 323 Pages. In this book, Michael Sells presents the first complete English translation of Ibn ʿArabī's (d. 1240 CE) collection of sixty-one love poems, Tarjumān al-ashwāq (The Translator of Desires), in over a century. The English translation is provided in a bilingual format side by side with the Arabic text. With an astounding capacity to produce a work that is simultaneously accessible and scholarly, Sells succeeds in catering to both a general and specialist readership. In addition to the translation, Sells provides an engaging introduction, notes to the poems, an array of appendices, a glossary and endnotes. As such, this book provides a first-class entry point into Ibn ʿArabī's poetry that provides the newcomer with all the tools to delve deeply into the poems without being unwieldy. At the same time, its creative translation of Ibn ʿArabī's classical Arabic into fluent, natural English offers pleasurable and stimulating reading for the casual reader or beginning student. The specialist reader of Ibn ʿArabī's poetry, however, will find in Sells' introduction and notes, a profound engagement with Ibn ʿArabī's theory of love in the Tarjumān and its relation to religious ritual, belief and mystical philosophy. Spanning thirty-one pages (pp. xiii–xxxiii), the translator's introduction is a masterful piece of prose that situates the Tarjumān in Ibn ʿArabī's life [End Page 137] and oeuvre. The writing is both captivating and concise. Most striking in the introduction is Sells' discussion of Ibn ʿArabī's "shawq-conditioned human existence." Explaining the Arabic term shawq (pl. ashwāq) ("love, desire, passion, or longing") as "analogous to the classical Greek eros insofar as it was taken as a fundamental driving force within human life, art, and thought" (p. xv), Sells enthrals the reader into joining the lover on a journey in search of the beloved. At times the writing is so concise the reader feels short-changed. For example, the three sentences on the meaning of tarjumān ("translator") on page xv are tantalisingly short. Yet, at the end of the introduction, Sells circles back to this theme telling us that just as the forms of the beloved constantly change in their manifestations, "To be is to be moved from site to site, from word to word, from self to self, ever lost and ever regained-always in translation" (p. xxxiii). Not only gratifying the earlier frustration, the reader cannot help but feel that Sells' introduction is imbued with the philosophy it introduces and analyses. Likewise integrated into this philosophy is Sells' analysis of the Arabic rhetorical feature of iltifāt, a radical shifting in voice that is used extensively in both the Qurʾan and classical poetry. Sells explains clearly the shifts in voice from singular to plural, first to second to third person and male to female, allowing the reader new to this Arabic rhetorical device to understand its context and meaning. He also combines this with a meta-analysis of what iltifāt signifies for Ibn ʿArabī's perspective on love and the world: "ever-repeated acts of reenchantment as the beloved is brought back to the present and the withered world is revived" (p. xxii). Similarly, Sells draws out the connection between the love poetry of the Tarjumān and the mystical philosophy of wahdat al-wujūd (the oneness of being) commonly associated with Ibn ʿArabī, albeit developed by his disciples. On the surface, the relation between the two is not evident. However, Sells signals the connection between the poet-lover's goal of self-annihilation in the beloved and the union with God sought in Islamic mysticism (pp. xxvi–xxvii). Most importantly, there exists a "bittersweet dynamism" in both cases: neither the manifestation of God nor the beloved can last longer than momentarily in the heart of the lover. It can only occur as flashes, never to be possessed. Beyond the treatment of the philosophy of love, another impressive feature...