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A review by siria
Epic of the Commander Dhat al-Himma by Melanie Magidow
3.0
Despite the title, in the Epic of the Commander Dhat al-Himma Melanie Magidow translates only part of this medieval Arabic epic—perhaps unsurprisingly, given that the original stretches to some 5,000 pages in print. She focuses on an early part of the epic, in which the eponymous heroine is abducted by a neighbouring tribe while still a girl and grows to become a renowned warrior.
As I don't read Arabic, I can't comment specifically on Magidow's translation choices, though her prose is crisp and should be accessible to undergraduates at any level of study. However, I found myself a little bemused by some of her methodological choices as explained in the introduction. It's one thing to produce a rather loose translation in order to better capture the spirit of the original. It's another to say that you've altered the translation—in ways that can't be observed by most of the edition's readers—because you disagree with the worldview of the epic's first tellers. The process of translation inevitably involves choices, but this seemed an odd and not particularly defensible one to me.
As I don't read Arabic, I can't comment specifically on Magidow's translation choices, though her prose is crisp and should be accessible to undergraduates at any level of study. However, I found myself a little bemused by some of her methodological choices as explained in the introduction. It's one thing to produce a rather loose translation in order to better capture the spirit of the original. It's another to say that you've altered the translation—in ways that can't be observed by most of the edition's readers—because you disagree with the worldview of the epic's first tellers. The process of translation inevitably involves choices, but this seemed an odd and not particularly defensible one to me.