New Warrior Woman Translation
Here’s my new edition and translation of part of the medieval Arabic Sirat al-Amira Dhat al-Himma ‘Epic of the Commander Dhat al-Himma’ https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2151&context=mff
Available online and open-access at the above link! Check it out if you’re interested in medieval epics, classical Arabic literature, popular culture, or warrior women. This publication includes the Arabic excerpt, my English translation, and a scholarly introduction. For more background, see my previous posts on Arabic epics and on the NEA Grant that helped fund this work. If you like this work, you’ll also be interested in the book-length translation of this and other excerpts from the epic. It’s in progress, to be published by Penguin Classics (inshallah!).
To get you in the mood for an oral epic, here’s a passage about storytelling that caught my eye in the recent novel Once Upon a River (Diane Setterfield, 2018, p. 6). The character Joe Bliss discovered his destiny as a storyteller: “With a bit of practice he found he could turn his tongue to any kind of tale, whether it be gossip, historic, traditional, folk, or fairy. His mobile face could convey surprise, trepidation, relief, doubt, and any other feeling as well as any actor. Then there were his eyebrows. Luxuriantly black, they told as much of the story as his words did. They drew together when something momentous was coming, twitched when a detail merited close attention, and arched when a character might not be what he seemed. Watching his eyebrows, paying attention to their complex dance, you noticed all sorts of things that might otherwise have passed you by…”
For a performance of the beginning Sirat al-Amira Dhat al-Himma in Arabic, check out this storyteller from Egyptian TV.
Storyteller
From initial reactions:
Storyteller Image Source
