Book Talk: "The Islamic Book of Odes and the Horizon of Translation in Modern China", Michael Hill
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- Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures Co-Sponsors: School of Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics Center for East Asian and Paciöc Studies Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Department of Comparative & World Literature
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This lecture discusses theIslamic Book of Odes(Tianfang shijing), a translation ofThe Mantle Ode(Qasidat al-Burda) by MaDexin(1794-1894) and Ma Anli(1820-1899), as an alternative archive of comparative thinking on translation and culture fromthe mid- to late nineteenth century. TheIslamic Book of Odesis a deeply sourced translation from Arabic that in many wayssurpassed the scholarly standards of more famous translations of Western literature and social thought from the late Qing. Assuch, it challenges us to expand our view of the flows of texts and knowledge to and through “China” at the end of empire.By insisting that theIslamic Book of Odesis a “classic” orjing, the book’s translators also test relatively secular definitions ofliterature and the literary (orwenxue) that took shape during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries