From the Emotional Orient to the Distortion of Islam
Does anyone still remember the supposedly ancient Gaelic epic allegedly written by the legendary Ossian? The real author was the Scottish writer James Macpherson: he simply passed himself off as the
From the Emotional Orient to the Distortion of Islam
Does anyone still remember the supposedly ancient Gaelic epic allegedly written by the legendary Ossian? The real author was the Scottish writer James Macpherson: he simply passed himself off as the translator. Yet it was precisely this deception that led to the Poems of Ossian achieving phenomenal success in the eighteenth century. It's an interesting case, because here the translation is revealed to be that which, potentially, it always is: the extremely questionable claim to have privileged access to something Other, something foreign, something new. Taking the somewhat naïve understanding of translation as dressing a foreign literary body in new linguistic robes, in the case of Ossian all we have is the robe.
Let us remain in the glorious eighteenth century. The French Orientalist Antoine Galland, who worked for many years at the French embassy in Istanbul, returns to Paris. In his luggage he has with him the manuscript with the tales of The Thousand and One Nights. Galland translates them in the literary style of his time – a form of translation that was later decried as belle infidèle, a beautiful, unfaithful woman.
The Thousand and One Nights was a kind of Ossian. The tales owed the phenomenal success they enjoyed all over Europe to the time-bound style of the translation. If Galland had presented a translation of The Thousand and One Nights that was as sober, as fidèle, as the one published by Claudia Ott in 2004, we can be sure that The Thousand and One Nights would never have been noticed at all – just as today the translation practices of Galland and the majority of his successors, about whom Jorge Luis Borges writes so vividly in his essay on 'The Translators of the Thousand and One Nights', are no longer to our taste. However, the question of which translation is better misses the point of what, above all, a translation has to offer.
The magic of poetry
Linguistically, The Thousand and One Nights is a relatively simple text. Needless to say, literary fashions and linguistic expectations play a far greater role where translations of poetry are concerned. We may therefore assume, by analogy with the translations of The Thousand and One Nights, that in Western languages Oriental poetry, too, was made readable in a manner that had less in common with the original than it did with the context of the target language.
And it is no coincidence that the upturn in the literary reception of the Orient begins in the same period and with the same protagonists who were so strikingly deceived by the Ossian fabrication. Both mark the beginning of a rebellion against the disenchantment of the world, against the devaluation of emotion in favour of reason.
'Empathy' is the magic word coined by Johann Gottfried Herder in this context. Herder believed he could sense the same originality of genuine feeling in the poetry of the Bible as in that of Ossian. For poetry was, according to a famous phrase by Johann Georg Hamann, the'mother tongue' of humankind. In this respect the people of the Orient were considered to be sources of unparalleled authenticity.
In a commentary on his collection of traditional folk songs Herder expressed it thus: 'There is more poetry and a greater poetic treasure trove in what are called the prejudices of the common people, in the madness, the mythology, the tradition, the language, the customs, the peculiarities of any savage, than in all the poetics and orations ever written; and if anyone were to collect these forms of madness, fiction, these fantasies and prejudices even somewhat efficiently, I am certain he would be rendering to human understanding a service that ten logics, aesthetics, ethics and politics most likely will not render it.'
The emotional Orient
The anti-Enlightenment attitude of this statement is unmistakable. There are two sides to it. The prettier side is that Herder here defends all foreign poetry against rationalistic or otherwise narrow-minded criticism. He is thus establishing a space in which the foreign poetry is entitled to reside, regardless of how strange or abstruse it may appear to some of its readers. Even a prejudiced poetry could and should now be collected without prejudice. This is nothing short of the beginning of the end of ethnocentrism.
But there is a price for this openness, a darker reverse. Any form of poetry that does not originate in the European cultural realm runs the risk of being labelled along with all the 'forms of madness' as soon as it enters the space Herder opened up. Foreign poetry is thus welcome on the one hand, but at the same time excluded from participating in the future of the Occident. The Occident is responsible for Reason, while the Orient is responsible for Emotion.
From this we see that Herder found material for his attacks against the rationalistic 'logics, aesthetics, ethics and politics' in almost arbitrary places. Emotion could be just as much the responsibility of the Bible as of the'savages', or of the yet-to-be-unmasked Ossian, i.e. the Celts. The 'Emotional Orient' had become a metaphor, the metaphorical quality of which, however, often remained hidden. It is still popularly confused today with the actual meaning of the word 