The Book of Travels. Hannā Diyāb

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СКАЧАТЬ Manuscript

There is only one known manuscript of Ḥannā Diyāb’s Kitāb al-Siyāḥah (Book of Travels), preserved in the Vatican Apostolic Library’s Sbath collection under the class mark 254. The first ten pages of the manuscript are missing, judging from the numbers handwritten in brown ink on the first forty folios. In the absence of the opening pages, both Paul Sbath in his Catalogue and Georg Graf in the Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur categorized the text as anonymous. This erroneous designation may explain why the text was disregarded until the early 1990s, when Jérôme Lentin identified the author as Ḥannā Diyāb.⁵³

The binding of the codex is typical of Ottoman codices. It contains some fragments, including a page in Syriac script. Aside from the missing pages, which were evidently torn out after the book was first composed,⁵⁴ and some water stains, the codex is relatively well preserved. Although it has some of the features characteristic of professionally prepared codices, it also shows signs of being a work in progress. As was typical for Diyāb’s time, the text is laid out in black ink interspersed with red for decorative and structural purposes. The first six chapter headings are centered and followed by a short subtitle in red. The subsequent chapters lack rubrication. The last sections seem to have been planned as chapters but are not marked as such, nor is there any room left for large chapter headings. On nearly every page, letters and words have been struck through or replaced. Most of the strikethrough lines are colored in red ink. Red ink is also used for scribal marks, such as the pilcrows that indicate the ends of episodes. Some of the lines bearing paragraph marks at the end are indented, as can be seen frequently after folio 45 of the manuscript. Another structuring device is the use of dots to mark the end of syntactic units such as interrogative sentences and to mark a change of speakers. With its subdivision into paragraphs and its proto-punctuation, The Book of Travels is in some respects reminiscent of a modern book. The manuscript text, which ends on folio 174, is followed by a few names, such as the mention (given also in Roman script on the same page) of the book’s owner, Anṭūn Yūsuf Ḥannā Diyāb, probably the author’s son. On the bottom of the page that describes Diyāb’s journey from Marseille to Paris, a great-grandchild left an ownership note: “This account of the voyage of my father’s grandfather entered the possession of Jibrāyil, son of Dīdakūz Diyāb, of the Maronite community, on the 19th of April in the year 1840 of the Christian era.”

      Previous Edition

      Min Ḥalab ilā Bārīs. Riḥlah ilā Balāṭ Luwīs al-Rābiʿ ʿashar. Edited by Muḥammad Muṣṭafā al-Jārūsh and Ṣafāʾ Abū Shahlā Jubrān (Beirut: Manshūrāt al-Jamal, 2017).

      This edition, the readings and annotations of which rely heavily on the published French translation (see below), follows a diplomatic standard—that is, it reproduces the original handwritten text as closely as possible. It does, however, normalize some spellings such as the tāʾ marbūṭah and omits some of the hyper-corrective hamzahs. There are some typographical errors and omissions: misreading tajrīd for tajribeh, for example, and sometimes leaving out the colloquial bi- prefix of imperfect verb forms. Some terms, rarely attested in dictionaries, are not annotated.

      Previous Translations

      French translation: Hanna Dyâb, D’Alep à Paris. Les pérégrinations d’un jeune syrien au temps de Louis XIV. Récit traduit de l’arabe (Syrie) et annoté par Paule Fahmé-Thiéry, Bernard Heyberger et Jérôme Lentin (Paris: Actes Sud, 2015).

      This meticulous rendering, on the basis of Lentin’s linguistic study of the text, is the result of collaboration by three expert scholars. The extensive apparatus contains linguistic explanations and historical remarks on the early-modern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Christianities as well as original biographical material on individuals mentioned in the text. Both the introduction and the note on the language are detailed but accessible. The translation is often literal, but captures the liveliness of the original. We record in the English endnotes those places where our translation adopts a different interpretation of the original.

      German translation: Hannā Diyāb, Von Aleppo nach Paris: Die Reise eines jungen Syrers bis an den Hof Ludwigs XIV. Translated by Gennaro Ghirardelli (Berlin: Die andere Bibliothek, 2016).

      This is based on the French translation, the introductions of which it reproduces. It emends the French rendering in a few places. The wording of the translation is occasionally archaic.

      English translation: Hannâ Diyâb, The Man Who Wrote Aladdin. Translated by Paul Lunde (Edinburgh: Harding Simpole, 2020).

This book was published four years after the death of the translator, who apparently never planned to publish it.⁵⁵ Caroline Stone added an introduction to the volume with a focus on historical keywords. The English text, which is structured into subchapters and indented secondary narratives, is followed by an appendix containing historical information.

      This Edition

Our edition aims to preserve most of the distinctive features of Diyāb’s Middle Arabic text. Though often repetitive and marked by oddities carried over from oral performance, The Book of Travels is remarkably rich in its vocabulary, orthography, and linguistic variety, though the manuscript is generally unvocalized. Evidently, the author was familiar with the style of the coffeehouse narrator as well as with the conventions for telling stories in written form (see the introduction to the translation).⁵⁶

      Our paragraphing largely follows the structure suggested by the manuscript text, though we have added some additional breaks for the sake of readability, notably where there is a change of speaker (for example, from the general first-person narrator to the speech of a character in the text, creating an embedded narrative), and when a transitional word such as اخيرًا or حيندٍ, or the frequently used formula فنرجع الى ما كنا في سدده indicates a break in the narration.

In dealing with the linguistic particularities of the text, we have relied on the studies of Jérôme Lentin, Elie Kallas, and Paule Fahmé-Thiéry.⁵⁷ Also useful were Adolf Wahrmund’s Handwörterbuch der neu-arabischen und deutschen Sprache, which contains a whole range of vocabulary of Turkish origin and from Arab-Christian contexts, and Adrien Barthélemy’s Dictionnaire arabe-français, which is especially valuable for its coverage of historical Levantine Arabic.⁵⁸ In cases where water stains and marks made by the author have left some passages difficult to decipher, we have often benefited from the reconstructions in the French translation and the previous Arabic edition.

      The footnotes to the Arabic record marginal additions as well as a few significant passages crossed out in the manuscript or added to the borders of the page. They also note cases where we have amended rare scribal peculiarities, such as the omission or addition of consonants.

The Book of Travels is one of many works composed in so-called Middle Arabic—that is, in a written form that diverges from the standard fuṣḥā (“pure speech”).⁵⁹ It is often imagined to be the result of a failed effort to use the formal literary register. СКАЧАТЬ