The University of Iowa • International Writing Program – 91° Meridian

ANONYMOUS SOURCES
Transcript of a talk given at the "Lost & Found" conference on translation
Iowa City, 13 October 2001
Eliot Weinberger

I live in New York, not so far from Ground Zero, and I can't help but say that in the
still immediate aftermath and its proliferating events and emotions, it strikes me as
legitimate to wonder why one would want to talk about translation at all. Perhaps the
only point of convergence is to note that our government lacks, among so many other
things, an awareness that all translators must have: the understanding that specific
words carry very different meanings and associations in different languages and cultures.

An obvious example is George Bush's call for a "crusade" against terrorism.
"Crusade," for us, of course, is merely a hyperbolic term for things like charity
fund-raising drives, and little George, like me, spent his formative years watching
"Crusader Rabbit" cartoons on television. But in Islam, the word still carries its
Medieval freight. For example, Osama bin Laden's umbrella organization for various
terrorist groups is called the International Islamic Front Against Jews and
Crusaders. [Though lately Bush has become more sensitive. In his speech the other
night, he referred three times to "women of cover." Next thing you know, he'll be
calling the CIA "men of cover." Or maybe "men of covert."]

Or, to take another example, the greatest translation tragedy of our times: the
Salman Rushdie case. It is rarely said that the fatwa and its subsequent global
mayhem, riots, and deaths were the result of a mistranslation. Rushdie's book was
named after a strange legend in Islamic tradition about the composition of the
Qu'ran, which was dictated to Muhammad by Allah Himself through the angel Gabriel.
According to the story, Muhammad, having met considerable resistance to his
attempt to eliminate all the local gods of Mecca in favor of the One God, recited
some verses which admitted three popular goddesses as symbolic Daughters of
Allah. Later he claimed that the verses had been dictated to him by Satan in the
voice of Gabriel, and the lines were suppressed. The 19th century British
Orientalists called these lines the "Satanic verses," but in Arabic (and its cognate
languages) the verses were known as gharaniq, "the birds," after two excised lines
about the Meccan goddesses: "These are the exalted birds/ And their intercession is
desired indeed." In Arabic (and similarly in the cognate languages) Rushdie's title
was literally translated as Al-Ayat ash-Shataniya, with shaytan meaning Satan, and
ayat meaning specifically the "verses of the Qu'ran." As the phrase "Satanic
verses" is completely unknown in the Muslim world- which Rushdie apparently didn't
know- the title in Arabic implied the ultimate blasphemy: that the entire Qu'ran was
composed by Satan. The actual contents of the book were irrelevant.

Translators were among those who paid for this mistake: In July of 1991, the Italian
translator of The Satanic Verses, Ettore Caprioli, was stabbed in his apartment in
Milan, but survived. Days later, the Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, an Islamic
scholar, was stabbed to death in his office at Tsukuba University in Tokyo.

The point is simply that words matter; it's possible to die because of a word. And our
ignorance of words, in however small a way, helped to precipitate this crisis. The
former head of the State Department Middle Eastern counter-terrorism unit,
stationed in Beirut, admitted in an interview last week that he didn't know a word of
Arabic. The first Trade Center bombing, in 1993, might have been averted if the FBI
had bothered to translate the boxes of letters, documents, and tapes it had already
seized in the course of various investigations. But they were in a foreign language,
and who could be bothered? >>

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