Abstract
The Life of Omar ibn Said (1831) is a narrative written by an enslaved person in Arabic and went through multiple English translations over the centuries. This article examines the ways in which these translations involve the nineteenth-century Christian agenda as well as the translators’ decisions in the twentieth-first century that multiply Omar ibn Said’s voice. In response to the recent scholarship’s effort to find Omar’s “true self” in his writings, which shows the meshing of Christian and Islamic faith, I aim to foreground his voice as a powerful presence at the intersections of the two languages and religions. My reading of Omar’s narrative is informed by other scholarly works on American slave narratives and emphasizes the displacement and multiplicity of his voice, while I argue that his narrative also deepens our reading experience of multi-faceted American literary traditions by introducing criticism of slavery through the Islamic teaching that complicates the description of the “merciful master.”
Recommended Citation
Coller-Takahashi, Rumi
(2024)
"Between Languages and Religions: Omar ibn Said's Voice in the Arabic Narrative and English Translations,"
Living in Languages: Vol. 3, Article 2.
Available at:
https://scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu/liljournal/vol3/iss1/2
Included in
American Literature Commons, Language Interpretation and Translation Commons, Translation Studies Commons