Before going on, I would very much appreciate your thoughts if you’ve been reading these updates and are invested in the project, and especially if you’re familiar with how editions are usually formatted. I’m preparing to approach potential publishers and I need to settle on a clear idea of how to go forward. Also I’m reaching a point where I have so many notes, it would really help if I knew the final format I’m working towards, so I can organise things in one place. Even a “yep sounds good” would help confirm I’m on the right track 😆
Overall organisation
In terms of the text as a whole, and given I very much want to separate the probably-original text from later additions, I can think of 3 ways of organising it:
A: Keep the whole text (minus doublets) and highlight recipes that were added later. I’m not in favour of this option. It’s very messy and just hard to parse, even/especially if I use different colours to differentiate texts. Also, what is “the whole text”? It would be arbitrarily based on one of the most bloated versions, which is the pitfall all previous editions fell into.
B: Segregate the recipes one chapter at a time. For instance, there would be Chapter 2 (Reconstructed), consisting of what I believe to be the original sequence, followed by Chapter 2 (Additions), grouped by period of addition as far as can be determined (or at least by batch). If you wanted to get the measure of the Umda proper at a glance, you could simply skip the additions chapters. The latter would include recipes copied from other texts (like the many from the Zina), and I’d have to decide how to deal with the marginal notes that turn up in various texts. This feels like the most practical to me, and if I need to grey out recipes I’m not sure about, it’s not an overload of information.
C: Segregate by text altogether. Just the reconstructed Umda, in its entirety (which can only be a tentative reconstruction), and then commentaries and additions chapter by chapter or text by text. My impression is that this approach is common, at least when a definite text is at hand. I can’t decide if this would be a better approach in this case, than going one chapter at a time.
I’m open to thoughts and other options…
Text of the recipes
As for individual recipes, I face the decision of how to approach the language. Since I’m translating into intelligible English anyway, I intend to resist the unquestioned tendency to render the Arabic into Modern Standard Arabic. Adding hamzas and shaddas and dotting tā marbūta so that modern readers can read more smoothly is one thing, but rendering the spoken, dialectal language of these authors into a “correct” synthetic language is to me unacceptable, and it also erases layers of information contained in the language itself (such as words we know to be used in specific places). For instance, Umda3 already renders the language into more literary Arabic, and in the process frequently turns it into nonsense, which it’s not possible to retro-engineer without referring to another text that preserves an older wording. Even without the research aspect, the suggestion that people’s own manners of speech and dialects are not worthy of preserving in writing is offensive to me, and is an ongoing form of colonial enforcement the Arab world has yet to recognise and admit to.
Within these considerations, the recipes still need editing. Dublin’s are so concise that it sometimes looks as if they’ve been copied in a shorthand; UCLA and PseudoUmda usually provide extra detail. Umda3 also tries to provide clearer descriptions, and is occasionally useful but most of the time very muddled. For the Arabic, I can’t decide whether to use the most minimal version, and note the various additions, or to synthesize each recipe from the useful bits of two or more of these voices in the Arabic (which will make them clearer for an Arabic reader but not reflect accurately any of the source texts). I lean towards the former because the English rendering will serve to cast light on even the most elliptical recipes: as usual, I’m not trying to translate verbatim, but to render the intended meaning in clear English. Nobody who’s not an English reader is going to read this, so might as well keep the Arabic authentic, right?
One thing I was considering was to use the second person in the present tense throughout for consistency. Currently the recipes are a mixture of present (تاخذ), imperative (خذ) and passive voice (يوخذ). But now I’m thinking, it may be enough to bring this consistency to the English version and let the Arabic be.
Notes and commentary
All of the above will naturally be accompanied by my notes. And while endnotes seem to be disliked by a lot of readers, I think two tiers of notes will be essential: footnotes for the info the reader needs to appreciate the text (e.g definitions of ingredients, and explanations of processes); endnotes for details that are not essential for reading the Umda, but important for scholarship: differences between witnesses, my thinking process for dismissing or moving certain recipes, and also mistakes propagated by earlier editions. I’m hoping this would keep the text light, for a book that’s accessible to the general public, while still containing all the info required by academic researchers.
If you’ve read all the way to the end of my ramblings, thanks! And please do lend me your thoughts. The next update will cover two short chapters in one…
My two cents, as a general reader with a more academic interest in the translation qua translation:
Overall organization: B
Language: very much in favor of keeping the original as much as you can, even if sometimes elliptical. As you said, this part is of interest only to Arabic speakers, so the more unmediated it is, the better imo.
Re notes: I do find the flipping back and forth to endnotes tedious (publishers: bring back the footnote!), but your case for two different sets here makes sense. At least annotations on the immediate text will be footnotes, which I really appreciate.
One question (you may have already addressed this and I missed it): is the Arabic going to be on a facing page with the translation? Or facing columns on a single page? They won’t be sequential, right?
And thanks for making all these chapters available so far. I’ve really enjoyed getting an insight into your translation/editing process.
Thanks so much for your thoughts, Mandy! I hear you for the endnotes, and I may be able to avoid those altogether by instead having a commentary on each chapter, either right after the chapter or at the end – something people can skip altogether if they don’t need this level of detail.
That’s a good question and I forgot all about it, mostly because it’s a moot point until I know whether I’ll be working with a publisher or self-publishing. You can see an example of what I’ve done so far here: facing columns, but as it’s a pdf without facing pages, you just scroll down and down and there’s never a conflict in the reading vs page direction. In an actual book, publisher cooperating, I think the best equivalent would be facing pages. It would mean turning pages in the wrong direction if you’re reading the Arabic, but at least you wouldn’t have to also struggle with how to move from one column to the other. It’s important that the two languages be facing, though, as nobody wants to have to flip from one version to the other all the time. I would lose my mind altogether.
Very glad you’re enjoying this!