More Gravy than the Grave: classical Arabic lexical monographs in translation

• Published in: Postmedieval a journal of medieval cultural studies 2015-06, Vol.6 (2), p.127-135
• Main Author: Larsen, David
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Arabic language; Cultural and Media Studies; Digital Humanities; English language; Historical text analysis; History of Medieval Europe; Language; Language history; Linguistics; Literature; Medieval Literature; Philology; Philosophers; Reading; Traditions; Translation; Translations; Vocabularies & taxonomies; Writers
• ISSN: 2040-5960; 2040-5979
• DOI: 10.1057/pmed.2015.16

With the appearance of Ramzi Baalbaki’s The Arabic Lexicographical Tradition in 2014, the early history of Arabic language scholarship lies open for appreciation as never before. Meanwhile, the tradition’s surviving texts remain closed to non-readers of Arabic. This essay suggests that an English-language readership would rejoice in access to selected ‘Abbāsid-era lexical monographs through the medium of critical translation. Besides the primary-source value of these texts to cultural studies, anthropology and intellectual history (not to mention their appeal to bare logophilia), I point out their power to induce in the modern reader a ludic estrangement from the dominant categoricalities through which the world’s realia are rendered unto knowledge. By virtue of this disorienting, category-lifting power, I argue that lexical monographs that were current over a thousand years ago might well serve today’s avant-garde reading public as a hedonic resource.