If you are an independent minded academic and you sit down and learn the Arabic language – my God the amount of stuff you could do! The amount of work that’s waiting to be done, the sources yet undiscovered or under appreciated that one could seize and take one could take almost any major writer in Arabic literature and produce something genuinely new on them, instead of writing minor footnotes to certain interpretations of Great Expectations, or whatever. Most bodies are putting money into mathematics and engineering – that’s the prejudice of the age. I don’t think everyone’s going to want to give lots of funds for translating Arabic. Is it not a field that’s attracting many young academics? You would think now of all times perhaps is an occasion to get to know this ‘other’ culture. The number of people working on the Mediaeval or pre-modern stuff is minuscule. “If you are an independent minded academic and you learn the Arabic language – my God the amount of stuff you could do!” An awful lot of them are working on modern novels and I suppose an even larger number will be working on commercial documents. Why is it? The blunt truth is, first, Arabic’s a difficult language second, there are very few translators, capable translators, in the United Kingdom. A somewhat random, but very interesting, selection has appeared so far. Well now in fact we’ve got the New York University programme of translating Arab texts and publishing them in English and Arabic parallel translations, modelled on the Loeb translations of Latin and Greek texts. When I asked you to recommend classics of Arabic literature, you said it would be tricky because not many works are translated. Foreign Policy & International Relations.

For Lust Of Knowing by Robert Irwin