circulating through the Ottoman Empire in Greek, Arabic and Turkish – literary translation at the eastern end of the Mediterranean offered worldly vistas and new, hybrid genres to emerging literate audiences in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Whether to propagate ‘national’ language reform, circulate the Bible, help audiences understand European opera, argue for girls’ education, institute pan-Islamic conversations, introduce political concepts, share the Persian Gulistan with Anglophone readers in Bengal, or provide racy fiction to schooled adolescents in Cairo and Istanbul, translation was an essential tool. But as these essays show, translators were inventors. And their efforts might yield surprising results. Key featuresA substantial introduction provides in-depth context to the essays that followNine detailed case studies of translation between and among European and Middle-Eastern languages and between genresExamines translation movement from Europe to the Ottoman region, and within the latterLooks at how concepts of ‘translation’, ‘adaptation’, ‘arabisation’, ‘authorship’ and ‘untranslatability’ were understood by writers (including translators) and audiencesChallenges views of translation and text dissemination that centre ‘the West’ as privileged source of knowledgeContributorsOrit Bashkin, University of ChicagoMarilyn Booth, Oxford University Raphael Cormack, independent scholarTitika Dimitroulia, University of Thessaloniki Peter Hill, independent scholarAlexander Kazamias, Coventry UniversityYaseen Noorani, University of ArizonaKamran Rastegar, Tufts University A. Holly Shissler, University of Chicago Johann Strauss, University of Munich |