In Migrations to the north in Al-Ahram Weekly David Tresilian has a look at the recent Penguin Classics translation of Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness, Arab Travellers in the Far North (see their publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk) -- but also looks a bit more generally at translation from the Arabic of older texts, reminding readers that:
Speaking to the Weekly in an interview late last year, the British orientalist Robert Irwin suggested that while more works of modern Arabic literature were now being translated into English than ever before, western readers were still sometimes ill served when it came to translations from the classical literature.Indeed:
"I keep telling publishers they should do Jahiz," the polymath Abbasid writer, Irwin explained, as "he's so witty and so interesting, or the pre-Islamic poets, but they are not very receptive. When I suggest Jahiz, people look blank." At the moment, non-Arabic-speaking readers wanting to read the works of Jahiz have few options aside from older French or German translations, unavailable except in larger research libraries.Of course, now we have the NYU Press Library of Arabic Literature to look forward to -- which will, one hopes, pick up some of the slack.