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Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of new books in Islamic Studies, a podcast of the new books network. My name is Sam Throp, and I'll be your host for today. I'm very excited to be talking today with Beatrice Gwynler and Isabel Torral, both of the Frig University in Berlin, about their latest book, An Unruly Classic on Kaleela Wudinna. So we're going to be jumping right into the conversation, but first I wanted to introduce both of our guests.
So Isabel is a professor of Arabic Studies at the Frig University in Berlin, a cultural historian who's worked on Late Antique and Early Islamic Iraq and Al-Andalus, and Beatrice is also a professor of Arabic, again at the Frig University, formerly of Yale, and studies Arabic in a global context. So welcome to both of you. It's a pleasure to have you here with us. So I want to start out, just to give you a chance to both say a little bit about yourselves and about your academic journeys.
It's important and always interesting to know about the scholars whose books we enjoy and whose books we read. So how did you both come to Arabic and also how did you come to work on Kaleela Wudinna? So Beatrice, please start. Okay, yeah, thank you.
It's my pleasure to tell some little bits and pieces of the story. It goes back to when I was at Yale as a professor, and the way two initiatives. One was at the time at American College campuses, a world literature came about from an awareness that we've been teaching our kids, the classics and some things. Of course, I was very excited.
All us colleagues from the non-European and pre-modern teams were invited, but it started with, okay, we organized this by the three categories of epic drama and lyrics. And I thought, wait a moment, where are scriptures? Where's the literature? And nonetheless, I tried to, as much as I could, bring in something that represents, we could put one work or two forward.
And most people would think of the Arabian Nights as Leila Willaila, which I think is a special case since it's really in East Western core production. And it also does not represent what Arabs would think of Arabic literature, because it's popular literature. So I came up with Kaleela Wudinna thinking, this is a book translated into 40 languages worldwide. It was so famous, everybody should know this book.
And the first thing I noticed is, well, there's no addition, even less is there in decent translation. So basically, I had to translate chapters myself. And so I'm Eomarked as work to do. And another thing is, it had to do with another book I was writing at the time about the history of the Arabic book.
And I also realized in media history, the Middle East on parts, and I go very far back to the invention of script, to the invention of the alphabet, and also the first book culture in the Near East, the earliest book culture, book revolution one calls it sometimes. None of this was known. And I thought, this is not acceptable. So I told a quote about it, which was very interdisciplinary.
He started with a Canadian and international Egyptian and ended up with the internet about the history of human communication. That then became a book, but it made me aware that if we arabists don't do something about it, people from other fields will not know. And I started to see that as a bit of a duty in our field to make those amazing things more available to a general public. And before we turn to Isabelle, how did you get into Arabic studies?
Like how did you start to work on Arabic literature, even to take the story a little further back? I was a kid, my father's a graphic designer, that was always interested in languages and scripts. I grew up at the border to France, and I found foreign languages always totally exciting living myself in a little village of 4,000 people. I thought this is the most boring place in the world, and I wanted this to get out.
And one way before I could travel myself, first thing when I was turned 18, I went to Cairo, but before I learned any language and found myself always seeing the same thing over and over English, French, Spanish, and so you're still in Europe. And then I wanted to learn a language that worked in a different way, and I ran into Arabic, and that kept me busy for a while. Until today. It's still done.
So Isabelle, same question for you. How did you get into the field? And then how did you get into the field within them? So how did I get into the field?
So I myself, I'm bilingual. I grew up in Spain, and I think if you grew up in Spain, it's much like natural to get interested into Arabic stuff. And actually, because I'm bilingual, I was always interested in transfer of cultural translation, and multiculturality, and all these stuff. And actually, medieval Spain is a kind of paradise in this regard in terms of topics.
And for me, it was like natural to be interested in Arabic language and history, which for us, Spanish people are like part of their background. However, I went to Germany to do it because of my German part. So I went to study in Germany because I wanted to go to another place, like Robin Spain has said. And there I met a wonderful department.
I learned a lot. And I met Beatrice, by the way, as well, in Tübingen. So that's how I started. Yes.
So regarding the DIMDA, that has is connected in a way as well because I'm a sad, more I consider myself more cultural historian. So and I was always interested in phenomena of cultural exchange, hybridity, translation, cultural transfer, and so on. And I have worked on Laetantic Iraq on the city in the borders, boundaries between, let's say, the Iranian and the Arabic sphere. And from this perspective, everything that has to do with that kind of exchange interest me.
I had always also worked on the Balam and Yousafat romance, which is a text that is another fascinating text that has Indian background. And so actually, it is basically the Buddha legend. And that through translation adaptations and from an Arabic version, also came to be a kind of part of world literature. And that's where it started.
So in this regard, I was telemetically connected. And Beatrice told me that she had a project in mind about Kanilavadimna. I thought, well, that's a wonderful place to do all that stuff together. So and I joined the project in 2018, I think, after two months of time and started.
So that's how everything came together. Yeah. So I'm very excited to talk about the project, which is much bigger than this book. But first, I mean, anyone who's taken an introductory class on Arabic literature, I'm sure has heard the name Kaleela Wodimna or the title Kaleela Ndimna.
It's one of the foundational works in the language. But could you briefly introduce the text and its history, including its manuscript history, which is really in a way what we're talking about in the book, an overly classic? Could you introduce it for those who may not yet be familiar with the work? My pleasure.
Indeed, one nobody should feel bad not knowing it until now, because it, after having been very popular in also a subject in scholarly literature, I'm not written about in the 19th and 20th century, it dropped off the face of the earth. And it is a book that has been translated into more than 40 languages worldwide. And that includes, you know, in the beginning from Sanskrit to Icelandic and Yiddish and back to Southeast Asia, it is quite amazing. Somebody once compared us to that of the New Testament.
I think it's a little less. But any country in the world you travel to, Sweden, Norway, anywhere I travel to, first thing is I get my version of Kailila within them. So other than being in many languages, it has a long history with its pieces, not the book as a whole, originating in India. And that is true for a number of works in Arabic, Yiddish, Abalam, and Yozafar, which either may mention also the seven sages.
So Kailila, in that sense, is not unique. What is unique is in Arabic, it was translated via from the Middle Persian version, which is the redacted version into Arabic into what then became elegant, Arabic prose. It's one of the first prose works, long prose works in Arabic, about 750, that happened. And also, it became the model for describes to learn elegant Arabic.
So let's keep that in mind, this will change. And it is what a fiction is. It is also the first Arabic word of fiction. And it has a double layer.
So the outside layer being fables about animals, annuals, it's entertaining. Also very often illustrated. But underneath is a political strategy meaning the book is to be decoded. So it functions, it's a bit like Shakespeare and drama functions at different levels.
Having these illustrations is also an important object for the author of the book. There is a group of French members who will talk about that. And I'll leave it at that. Is that bad?
You can absolutely. Yeah, I think you have said a lot of important things already. So I think what is fascinating about this text is that it is one of the first prose text that has in Arabic that has been recorded, and which became an inspiration for many genres, prose genres to come. Because actually prose Arabic didn't exist at that age.
And actually it was the point of the part for many texts in the following centuries. And as well it acted as a kind of channel for notions and years from India and Persia in their passage cultural coiné. And their passage cultural coiné would be then the classical Arabic literature model for later generations and other places or for London as well or Syria, whatever you want to go through. So that is a very important channel.
Another thing that is very important about this text, that this in a way this text traveled through many genres and social context. So in a way it has many lives. So it's like it starts as Beatrice has said as kind of highly literature. It was written in a Catholic context and by a man close to the ruling dynasty of the Calipse and became part of the Royal Library as a luxurious illustrated manuscript.
But later on it readily became part of proper narrative and fiction and kind of tale collection. And seems to have become very popular among people of all social classes and was also performed sometimes orally. And today, Gudim has also still performed and read and performed a theatre, performed a piece in children's literature in comics and cartoons. So it's still very much alive, very much alive.
It has another, and it became very important also in the Nakka period where it became a model for the new style that they look for, classical style. So it has many lives and so it's a very vivid text until today. And another point that is very interesting that actually it's translation, so the function of its translation. So it became foundational for many language communities into which it was translated.
For example, the first complete translation became the inspiration for Persian prose. And actually, Calipse and Kallia Bader became a kind of genre of its own because there are so many Persian versions of Calipse and like spin-offs in many ways. And so this has a whole life of its own in the Iranian literature. And for example, in Castilian, it was the first translation into Castilian of the 13th century, it was one of the first prose texts ever written.
And later on, it became translated several times. And it was this Castilian version of the version translated in Spain that became the point of the part for all the other translations into European languages. So that's why the Castilian version is so important because actually it became the bridge for the others. That's something that of course interests me particularly, but it is very interesting to observe that.
I think that's, I would leave it here. So what I find so fascinating is that this work really connects the pre-Islamic period throughout Islamic history until the contemporary. I mean, it's like a theme that keeps presounding throughout history within Arabic and within Islamic culture, as you were saying, but also outside. Or maybe it's not even right to say outside.
It connects these different cultures that we often think of as so separate. So I was so excited to learn from the book about this long historical archficulate within it, but also about the studies that relate to the different translations and how they feedback and reflect back on the Arabic and even on the Indian versions. But before that, maybe Isabelle could you say a word about the first translator into Arabic about Ibn Al-Mokwapa and his persona and his character and his significance in the whole history of the word? Well, we are in an age where we do not know that much.
It's very difficult to be certain about some of the information we have. But he seems to have been a man of the write-stream background. It seems that his father had converted or himself, so it's a bit unclear. And that he was in Umayyat time, he was a public employee, I think, in the Texas office or something like that.
So very boring thing in a way. But at the same time, he became one of the important translators from texts from Parthavi into Arabic. And also the author of several original works, the works that are attributed to him that he wrote for the first time. Although we know that actually he reused a lot of, let's say, Parthavi stuff probably in his works.
And he died very young, he died about the time and he was accused of being a heretic or something like that. As in Digg, it's not very clear what happened. Actually, what is interesting that in his own works or in Alina, but in a particular day, he treats the topic of the current minister who loses the favour of the ruler and gets into trouble. And sometimes one gets the feeling that some autobiographical aspects are put in here, although the story itself is in the background, but maybe that's made him having some interest in it.
And so we do not know a lot and some of the texts are actually, we are in a time and I think we at least can tell more about where we still do not have completely the invention of the Arabic book. So it's very difficult to know. So for example, in our case, we do not have the original translation by Imal Mukava. That's simply not.
So what we have is much later a manuscript copies or whatever it is. And we will speak a part of that in a way connected to that original translation. But we do not have it. And we have to be very careful of not saying that.
So actually, Imal Mukava is there in a way he keeps that stuff a bit together. So these are texts not normally attributed to him, but it's like it's difficult to get to him really as a persona and as also I have to say. Safer Ontario means more police and prosecutors making sure my card doesn't get stolen. It means building new jails to keep criminals behind bars.
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Learn how at Ontario.ca. The best you might be able to do is when you take narrative like an archaeological site and you pick off layer after layer after layer. And we know that certain complete preface or chapters have been added because they're not the end of version before the older Syriac version of 590 who goes also back to Parlavi. So what he has and the Syriac does not have you know as a chapter is by him.
Or the stories that come from the Mahabharata which we read with our Indologist's partner, Flora Daimini. If you read the Rat in the Cat and you read the Mahabharata version and the Arabic version and the Syriac version, then you see what they added. Guess what? It's the whole long introduction about how important ministers are to the king.
So you cannot say verbatim. This is by them, but that that semantic block that looks different in different manuscripts is for sure an addition here of the Syriac. And then further addition of the Arabic phase. And the same thing is true for the chapter of the Nastrail which is a known addition only in the Arabic manuscripts.
So we know that he had something to say about a courtier on trial and a rigged trial and a brilliant villain. These are the elements of this. The problem is that the overlapping text in the in our edition which is 50 manuscripts is less than 20%. Go figure.
So, yeah, so let's get right to that. I mean, because as we said before, this publication is part of a larger project, right? The anonymous classic project, correct? So could you describe the project?
Like, what is the scope and what are the goals? Because I think this is super important for all of us as we think about how do we make these larger, you know, expansive and projects which have so many scholars working on them. How do we build them in the right way, especially using digital tools? So tell us about it.
Yeah. Well, the two ingredients before you even start was this time and money. And had I not had at the same time two grants and the ERC once run and the life and surprise of certain research foundation, allowing me to put them behind each other to have a period of 10 years. So I knew that.
Also, the money to to hire people and being in Berlin where a lot of those people from different backgrounds are already there, but also as a place you could attract people from elsewhere. So these are the, let's say, the basic competitions, but the project itself. On the one hand, the you need the bread and butter. You need the text in order to come up with, in fact, as I already alluded to, a kind of within that is not a text.
It's rather a text tradition as one of my postdocs, you know, this Jeff and has called it and we're happy with that concept for the moment. It is something that is constantly in flux yet recognizable. So the first thing is to think about a way to present this in an edition. And I was also fortunate to have some good help from some advice from my university and research project in Halibidenberg.
They had this labor tool for aligning comparing texts and then my own team, and then developed our own version of that, which is just to leave all the versions as they are and put them in an edition side by side, but aligned by thematic segments that so that matching parts, small parts, would always stand next to each other so that you can see what is happening across. Of course, then you need to read any manuscripts you can find and then see what are the most different from each other. What is the spectrum of variation? This is complex, but now after five or six years, we have some idea where it's going, though they are still surprises.
We discovered, for instance, a continuum as a kind of grouping or cross copying as a kind of procedure. But that kind of research development and creation of a new kind of edition can only happen if you think about it. And it went hand in hand with theorizing, so theorizing what is cross lingual narratology, you were comparing, you know, the Syriac to the Arabic to the Hebrew, to the Latin, to the Australian to the Persian to the Persian to the Greek. How do you do that?
You have to, because the earliest, the castellian as is a burset from 1254 51 or the Greek from the 11th century or other versions, they are older than the oldest Arabic manuscripts. And they give us a history of what is lost in Arabic. And so for text history, you need them, but also to see what happened, what happened to the text, now we come through the people who changed text, those three factors. I don't call them copyists.
And there's a lot of human intervention in the text so that it constantly changed. Difference being that Arabic copies understand what they copy. In Europe, if it was a Latin, they did not necessarily understand what they copy. And that's why Arabic copies interfere.
That's one of the reasons they set up reasons. So we see rise this, we see a rise frame narrative. It's a young chef. I'm a book made a reading group.
Magic hedon. That was another of my postdocs made a reading group on fiction. What actually is fiction if you committed from a pre model understanding. And us ourselves needed to learn how do you deal with the text that you read horizontally rather than vertically.
I mean, not in the progress of the action, but you read how this is action looking in this manuscript and in this and in this. And what does it mean? So that was a constant learning process. And it still is.
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you very much. Well, I would only want to add some things.
So for example, one thing that is very important for our project is that we really have understood how important is to create a teamwork and an atmosphere and a productive and supportive environment. So we actually meet once a week normally. And the team is composed by people by a lot of very different academic ages that we have from students to professors like everything together. And the people that are members of the team have a very different academic background.
So physically there are studies, studies and so on. And of course, digital engineering etc. And a very multicultural background in a way. So we reflect the multiple plurality of the textos and the in the and how the people are so the components of the groups that we have people from Germany from various countries of the Middle East.
So Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Tunisia also from Israel. We have people from the US. We have people from Spain. And then also we meet in a regulary meetings are hybrid with people with network and partners of all over the world.
So for example, we have, I would say, I cannot like mention all of them, but I think it is a network that spans from Scandinavia to Japan to Argentina. People that regularly join our meetings and we do the readings together. And I think that's a very special atmosphere that has been very helpful. And also we have all these very young scholars with us that learn a lot, I think, by seeing how we do our work.
So, and that is one point. And the other thing, and I think that really demonstrated fruitful this atmosphere was that the Kalidam Vladimir project has been like inspirational for many further projects. So, for example, we have like some offsprings right now. We have the offspring of Kalimat, which is a kind of dictionary, conceptual dictionary of Arab literature that has been developed by one of our postdocs.
And in a way, he uses some of the digital knowledge that we have acquired and some ideas that are related to the insights we have had about the concepts used and the genres used in the Kalidam Vladimir. And then another one closing the gap. I think that is one project that I think Beatriz will introduce a bit later a bit more. But they just see how productive this was.
And that is saying, that's very special about this project and that I have not experienced so far in other projects. We really work together. We meet each other very often in such a presence or not, but so, but we do it a lot and we know each other and there's a very good and productive atmosphere. That's what I kind of to that.
I should say I should add a little bit. It helps to have the outside perspective haven't been in the United States for a long time. And realizing from far what what the German academic system allows to do, which is you can get funding for humanity subjects. And there is a willingness to work collaboratively, which American Ivy League is not exactly what humanities people do.
And the student body is not handpicked. Everybody can come. So, so you're you have way better access to students from very different backgrounds, not only the select few, which I always felt comfortable with. And also, I realized that the only way to deal with the multilingual work is I cannot learn all these languages.
The scholars in the 19th century, they routinely knew, you know, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Latin, Greek. It is not possible. And besides our text body is far broader. So you need to work in teams.
And I think the team working in humanity is now on the rise also thanks to the RC, for instance, or also the DFT in Germany, that it can be done. But it was really a new phenomenon. And it was this timely moment when I came back that all of this was possible. Yeah, I think that I mean, it's a it's critical because I think we're still all learning, like all of us within the humanities, but in Islamic studies, we're still learning how to manage these projects.
What's the right way to build it? What's the right way to build a team? What's the right way to communicate? And which are when people imagine scholarship, they don't imagine organizational culture, exactly.
But that's a big part of what this entails. Yes, maybe one basic parameter is, and I totally agree with you. I my first year, I probably didn't sleep through a night because I was running on the job, but one basic parameter is an absolute openness of information that you share as much information to as many people as you can. Everything from the most complicated to the most simple question about personnel and job opportunities.
And that has helped me along. I think that was the facilitated meeting, spotting problems when they were because then people were equally open and when they had problems, I knew about them right away. And this is how we learned. So, so I have a question also about this book, right, which you are both editors of along with at least Mohana, which and I'm really classic, which is just right one of the products of the larger research project.
But how did you how did you conceive of this book as a separate work? Right? It's a collective volume with contributions on history, the manuscripts and also on the literary side and also on the actual computer science structure that underlies everything. So, so how did this book come about?
That is a funny story that I have to start in Isabelia, I have to complete. I had, of course, when I was I was planning the project, I had planned a monograph on particular aspects on comparative narratology on anonymous reduction on the authorship of obscure people. This is something each each reducter, even if you don't know the name or the name is not otherwise known, all you have is a manuscript. We do have a footprint of this person.
We have the handwriting. And so it's almost a person to us. But then as the project developed its own dynamics and each of the postdocs and researchers associates were developing particular interest and became active in one day. Isabel, you came up with the idea.
Let's just do a collective volume. Remember? Yes. Yeah.
Well, I thought that it could be also in terms of teamwork. It could be very fruitful to try to put something together. So not having everyone doing its own aspect, but putting that together and trying to find a kind of umbrella term that puts all these things together. That's the way we came up, this kind of move on thing.
And I think it will ask me a bit about this concept. So the understanding that this text is moving, let's put it like that very simply. And that is something that in a way, so our task is to describe how it moves in a way, which is sounds simple. It's very complicated.
And actually, I thought that would be like, that could be like the umbrella topic that puts, and it was very fruitful to approach this topic from different perspectives. So in a way, the book is also was very important to give us a kind of synthetic view on the book. So because having us together, writing on things that were different and not at the same time was very insightful. And particularly, and I know from the question we will ask about this, like how we even came up with the idea of including one chapter on digital humanities, because in our understanding, it is also a way, so it's a technique or whatever you want, but it's also these with a moving text.
And that is something that we came up with that. And in a way, it was also the result of the, we understood that it would be maybe better also for the reader to have these things together. So imagining all these topics dealt in separate volumes, even if they're part of the same series, I guess most of the people wouldn't read them together. You know what I mean?
And I think that helps, so it's not that it makes sense for the project itself to have all these different chapters together. And walking in and out was also because we read each other. So one has to say that the volume was produced, of course, everyone did it first separately, but then we read each other. And we tried to find ways of seeing how they were connected.
And if we're maybe at some chapters, I don't have it now, you will have it maybe in your mind. So for example, the same chapter is dealt with in different. I said chapter of the book, I'm saying from Kalya, but you know, for example, state in different places, and how everything is connected with each other. And that was very fruitful, I think.
It was obviously the tasks, you know, what are the aspects we wanted to research. They were planned in the research project. The added benefit was that every member in the group somehow latched onto something that really fascinated them. And so who, for instance, became our manuscript Maven.
And even now if I need to, you know, what about this manuscript and then it wasn't ahead. And another team member in one developed an interesting picture. So she came up with the image cycles, which is another. And of course, me, I want to know what to text later relations.
So I'm the 21 person and the cross copying person line and very much of details. And then all Paul Stocks, Jan van Hinkle and C.O.B.R.s, they had the Syriac versions and the Persian versions respectively under their charge. And because we would read our freshly edited chapters in our colloquium, sentenced by sentence through every language that moved. And our outside partners were reading the Hebrew version for us and the, he's a very often reading the Castilian version, but that's a very nice published version by Yap Dula.
That is really on top level. And really also, Toma did a PhD on the early Greek version. So we were able to gather all those different languages to be across and then see where things changed or state, state, same. And then the DH, you're quite right.
And he's about what he said, in the past that was put underneath the carpet, it's like you're underwear, you don't want to show that. And, but that's exactly wrong because we should admit we don't have the manuscripts in our fingers. Sometimes we do most of we work from digital copies, which are way more available now than even 10 years ago. And we could not even reflect on this without this digital tool.
So we want to be as open to the next person who comes and show this is how we did it. And that's why that chapter belonged into the book. Although peer reviewers would usually say, well, what does that have to do in here? And that's just to keep it in.
And many research projects indeed don't document their digital humanities approach. And that's very bad because then the next have to start over and reinvent the wheel. And this is what we wanted to prevent. And this is also what my other project closing the gap in on that script data is about.
We need to start becoming comfortable with digital humanities or here computer science, as well as artificial intelligence. These can be very good philological and literary tools, as long as you keep up the level on all and to establish a dialogue so that the development of a particular. And that was the case was as a product is dialogical that the question of the one is solved and the other one from the other arises and you question that there has to be solved back here. And this dialogical process is quite valuable and it works.
Yeah, I mean, as I wrote you before, I found this last chapter, right, when we're talking about. I'm a cause I use right, because the software used in the Cleveland dinner project, which as you said is, there's not usually a chapter on the software at the end of a collective volume in the humanities, but it was a revelation. I do have to say just because this, you know, the research in the computer science and the application of those tools to manuscripts or other, you know, the text to the text service as the bread and butter in the humanities deserves as much thought and as much reflection and as much as much. So, you know, we need to know that also, we need to know that and for it to be a part of the project on the same level.
So, so thank you, basically, I mean, I think that was that's a model that we should all be following in our work in the in the age moving forward. Yeah, so it's about you raised the concept of move on, which I'm not pronouncing correctly, I'm sure. Okay, so, so what is that concept of you raise it in the introduction to the book, and how does it, how does it illuminate the window. Well, move on, this is a concept that was basically developed by medievalist to capture the mobility and instability of medieval texts in Europe.
Those texts that survive in more than one manuscript, which is not that much. So, actually, anyway, from Arab is always I'm always surprised how few manuscripts are left in European Middle Ages and contrast to our field. So anyway, so that is the concept was developed there and actually they discovered that each manuscript of the same text is slightly different, and that these different cannot be explained just by faulty transmission or let's say copies errors, which was the case how it was interpreted before when they tried the editors and tried to reconstruct the original version by comparing manuscripts and correcting the text. That is how traditionally a text work edited, and actually they found out that it doesn't work.
You cannot explain the differences just with kind of like mistakes. And they changed the challenge that and the idea was that actually the concept of authorship maybe was different in the Middle Ages and the concept of copy, and that transmission was in general different, was made in a different way that we imagined in pre-born times. And that actually the idea of a text of a book was much more fluid and engaged readers in different ways so that in a way they intervened much more. And in a way, this concept of move on challenges or idea of stable text and the idea that a text is just copied and reproduced.
And this challenge is very productive, I think, just to revise our idea what is a text and what is a stable text, and that is the point of the part. So this model and this concept of move ons has almost never applied to text or Arabic literature, as one has to say. And actually where there were some people that tried a bit, but actually our project is one of the first that really does it systematically. And actually what we have done is with our project we have shown that it is very, very much appropriate in our case.
Because we have a text that survives and almost betweets maybe you correct me 140, where are we right now? How many manuscripts do we have? We studied 119, but the dark number of those, there are 20 more we were not able to get due to them being in places that one cannot travel. But we also have not done series archival research, let's say in India, so there may be many, many more we don't know of.
So actually, as Beatrice said, we have studied 119 or many, many manuscripts and actually everyone of these manuscripts in a way are more or less unique versions of Khali-Lawadimna in a way. So although they will obviously belong to the same textual tradition, so that's the term that we coined to collect to embrace all these texts. So actually we have different versions of the same. So the main difference to the middle ages is the enormous number of manuscripts we have at hand.
So we are speaking in the case of the medieval text normally of like four or five copies, maybe not more. We are speaking here as said about like 156 whatever manuscripts. So the number and then of course a version as well and the deep chronology of the manuscripts. So we start with translation in the 8th century, let's say the version by Immanuel Kaffa.
And then we have the first manuscript just looking at the Arabic, we are not mentioning the translation, then first manuscript from the 13th century onwards and I think the last version states from the 20th century actually, or late 19th, I think we have also from the 20th century. So manuscripts are being read by manuscripts, of course they are printed versions that are in interest as well. So you can imagine that in this context digital technology is key to analyze and map and describe and structure and interpret and display this complexity and fluidity. On the one hand you have the move on as a concept to capture what is happening, to speak about this mobility that I'm not going into the details how it moves, I'm just saying that it moves, to study how it moves, that's probably what Beatrice will tell us in the following.
But the only way to capture that and really to display that is by digital tools is impossible to read that or to publish it, you can do a kind of addition of that, a normal addition how it was made in the past. So I'm trying to explain it, in a way you imagine it's like a text by a computer article where everyone is like, every reader is like changing a bit and you have different versions of the same text and in the way you say it's the same article but everyone is adding a bit. And you have very engaged readers and these readers are copies, or the copies are readers and they engage and I think it is very, so you have many different versions of a text and in a way it is something in a way reminds of how text imagined in digital ages as well. So in a way it's very timely as it is pre-modern and very modern at the same time or postmodern if you want.
And that makes it very interesting and in a way we're developing a bit more this concept of mowongs because actually we're applying it to this corpus. And of course I'm confident that it will be useful for other texts of Arabic literature as well. And sometimes I believe and Beatrice I think we'll agree as well that maybe it's not the exception is the rule. So that's probably many texts and that brings us in a kind of difficult area but it's interesting to think about that and that's why we think that mowongs are very useful concepts for this text particularly.
The issue with Arabic is a very long text tradition in a volcano in the 20th century and what was defined for medieval texts and vernacular languages, this mowongs, obtains for a kind of all across the Arabic history of Arabic writing but certain genres. Whereas other genres work very much what the edition technique was for classical text, the systematic reconstruction of a main text. That the fact that that worked to and existed to within a more scholarly transmission context has in a way covered up the other ways of texts to exist. My colleague, Amos Bertrand, largely was an ESC grant in the metaphysics.
It was also with 100 manuscripts. But you know there's a, they're also changed but they're minor because the transmission happened within under scholarly control with some other with correlation with correction and and by scholars and so on and so forth. But our text was transmitted by people who copied it as time went on for personal use, we know some of our manuscripts have notes of walrus from a library, one has like 40 read out entries that book moved around. So we were working with a non-elip text that was this copied outside the scholarly control and the content was highly interesting, it is about betrayal it's about untast punishment by a king it's about friendship.
So it's also content wise things that normally people would have some opinion about. And so those two elements come together in this text changing and further, I would say an angle point is the Arabic script. It has a Russian is a continental script. If some dots are missing, the word desperation and the courage look the same whether it's the actual bus, you add a dot, you don't vocalize anyway.
So when you have your head full or something and the Russian doesn't quite fit, you change the meaning and oftentimes a completely reorganized part of the text has some words in similar looking Russian but the copies was on a, you know, had an interesting thought and sort of ignored the rest of what was standing on the page and then it got catered away. So they are a couple of dynamics coming together that coming back to other works, I think, is not unique, but if you look at other works coming across languages, also popular science, probably travel books, autobiographies, diaries, you can go on and on. And I think the kind of literature that is some elite and oftentimes in middle Arabic has a lot of comparable works that would be worthwhile to be displayed in a multi multi text edition, like I was. And what I found so interesting about the book and about the project as a whole because you're talking about the history of the manuscripts history of the text and how it moves through, you know, from copies to copies and the changes that they make and a different model for kind of not a standard manuscript and then we get to six versions down at the bottom.
So you're talking about the history but also about the how the stories themselves change as they move from copy to copy, right, keeping kind of the literary aspect using the tools of literary analysis and the history of the manuscripts together within the scope of one study so I thought that was fascinating and also inspiring to have the agility to do both, the agility to do both within within the same project. So, I think we have to, it's not that we were planning each and every aspect from the beginning and the beginning we were interested more in the text themselves. But then, as Isabel said, each is unique. Once you know, okay, that's this text version emphasizes human drama or emphasizes the sense of justice or the other one is better storyteller.
And you want to know more about what was the copyist. We don't know the copyist but you know what the manuscript looks like and then you want to know what are the other footprints, what kind of orthography was he or she using so far we only have he's, we may be surprised. So, the traditional text is did he add an institute at the beginnings like a mode of instructions. Are there any magic nail yar and is it illustrated.
So, the each manuscript in a way becomes the the the the mugshot of the person of the copyist or the model sometimes we don't know this but this was a way to get closer to the insensiation of Kalila within a particular point in time. Yeah, well, in a way you have already said that I think that the concept of move on explains that very well if you, it's in a way it is connected to it. So, if you imagine that every manuscript is a kind of new performant instance of the same core text. So, each copy is like shows the agenda and the personality of each copyist and who is also a reader.
So, you get a kind of feeling of what the how the people read the text and how they imagine or why they thought maybe to change it. And so, you kind of separate the content for the material and manuscript as such. So, it comes together and actually the materiality of the text on the other hand provides many cases. The sounds of the context.
So, that might also help to explain the adaptation. So, we observe the adaptations. We see how the manuscript looks like. We have a core specialist to look at that and so, and then you can like in a way reconstruct the mind of the copies and of the reader or you can try to do it as well.
And that is so it's not it's impossible to separate them. And actually, it's very useful. So, if you consider that generally speaking, we have a very scarcity of information about readers response in general. So, you have to text, but actually you would like to know how these texts were read.
And it's something that is an emerging field. And that's one of the way of doing that. Of course, we have the real comments sometimes we have, but of course, we have a copyist who is changing the text because he thinks that some things should be adapted in a way that is very important. We know this kind of intervention when we do translations.
So, actually, normally when we work on translations, we use to think about the translator what agenda he had in mind. But actually, a copyist is doing the same. He's receiving a text, he's reading a text and he's changing it. And maybe you can tell a bit in, I think it would be the point to speak about this copy in technique, which in a way, exemplifies that very well.
This is maybe where you can see most clearly other than the translators also diversifies the part where they put their name on it because they change the medium from prose to verse. But certain copies are always say they are as smart as we were. They, they monsterably take different versions we can tell because we can then identify the pieces of those different versions as they are recombined in a mosaic fashion in into a new text which then has more elements. So if we decide by side the cross copies are always longer because they take text segments from different other places.
And there's three manuscripts who are my particular favorites. And one of them also writes text pieces that we cannot locate anywhere could be lost model or could be oftentimes it is a narrative elaboration that this was just a good story teller who wanted to have drama. Of late, I have been yet surprised and otherwise because I have found a 15th century manuscript in which the cross copyist did not only pick and choose but he reorganized the action. And I think he made it in a more thematical order.
Now then he does copies one manuscript for quite a while, then he changes again and copies another one. And, and then he, as first I saw this, he takes two versions from two manuscripts and a dialogue and puts them behind each other that enlarged by by a proliferating duplication and that shows in one case for instance, the two debating fools in the trial case it makes that debate way more aggressive and I told me them more I'd marry miss the character of them now and the Queen mother. And so he pushes things to the point and you can see an author, an author agency behind that more clearly than a manuscript that changed incrementally and you need to compare them to many, many others to sort of dissect the little pieces that are different. And that's why I love the cross copyists and so we have numbers we have five Paris 581 or Paris 347 or ISO what I was so inspired by this book and maybe we can close on this is that linking between the digital and the premodder between the manuscript tradition and and the way that we work today both conceptually but also in terms of the platform and the project but also in how we understand text and narrative and authorship.
Yeah so I want to thank you both if there is there anything else you want to add before we conclude. I just wanted to mention since we promised to do that the second project that we are working with, it's called closing the gap in on that in script data where I gather the team together to showcase the whole database of exit projects if you can look it up. It's funded by the Berlin University Alliance, but also flags the danger that our research data are still quite precarious. And we have one soft question how to preserve research data to keep them fair, accessible reusable interoperable, and that is no single institution has solved that completely.
But we need to become aware that if you work in non-adm scripts right to left or even you know top down who knows we have less institutional support, but we have to educate the public that these are valuable things that we have to document, each are to practice what is rich, but also work together to do this in a way that builds on each other and also make it more complex. That's an incredibly important project and glad that you mentioned it, and to preserve the data of scholarship moving forward. So I want to thank you both. Thank you Isabel.
Thank you Beatrice for your time and for sharing your insight and and I hope you have a great day and thanks for being with us. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having us.