Journal articles on the topic 'Arabic poetry Names'

The phenomenon of plagiarism has been commonly dealt with in Arabic criticism heritage,and many traditional Arab critics have written a specific part in their books covering this phenomenon under the title of "literary thefts". Literary thefts have been condemned in Arabic heritage as one poet takes some expressions or phrases from his predecessors, and such a tendency leads to the underestimation of the poet’s status. This phenomenon is called "citation" in Arabic rhetorics when the cited materials are extracted from the Glorious Qur'an or the Prophetic Traditions. This phenomenon has been given different names in Arabic heritage depending on the source of taken materials like sayings, poetry, etc.The phenomenon of plagiarism can be found in the poetic antithesis. Accordingly, plagiarism is the focus of this study. This study is organized around an introduction and three sections. Section one presents the concept of plagiarism from linguistic and terminological perspectivesa long with its history. Section two is limited to the different types of plagiarism in Arabic criticism heritage. Section three deals with the construction patterns of Arabic criticism heritage. Finally, conclusions are drawn out.

Abstract The blind Syrian poet, man of letters and scholar, Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (363 H/973 CE-449 H/1057 CE) is the author of two celebrated diwans. The second of these, his controversial double-rhymed and alphabetized, Luzūm Mā Lā Yalzam (Requiring What is Not Obligatory), known simply as Al-Luzūmiyyāt (The Compulsories), features his uninhibited, often highly ironic and usually pessimistic, religious, and ‘philosophical’ ideas along with mordant criticism of politics, religion, and humanity in general. In his introduction, he abjures the corrupt and worldly qaṣīdah poetry of his otherwise celebrated early diwan, Saqṭ al-Zand (Sparks of the Fire-Drill), to turn in al-Luzūmiyyāt to a poetry that is “free from lies.” In the present study I take a ‘biopsy’ from Al-Luzūmiyyāt of the eight poems with the double rhyme b-d to explore al-Maʿarrī’s excavation and reclamation of meaning from the Ancient Arabian past through the intertwined legacies of philology and poetic lore. The constraint (luzūm) of the double b-d rhyme in these poems leads inexorably to two proper names, the legends and poetry associated with them, and the etymological-semantic complex that yokes them together and generates related names and themes. The first name is that of the renowned poet of the Muʿallaqāt, Labīd ibn Rabīʿah; the second is that of Lubad, the last of the seven vultures whose life-spans measured out the days of the legendary pre-Islamic sage, Luqmān. Not surprisingly, the ancient Jāhilī poet-knight ʿAbīd ibn al-Abraṣ, likewise, cannot escape the pull of the b-d rhyme. The study demonstrates the mythophoric power of proper names from the Arabic poetic and folkloric past, once lexically and morphologically generated by the double consonants of the rhyme pattern, to evoke poems and legends of the past but also, by the force of al-Maʿarrī’s moral as well as prosodic constraints, to be reconstructed in accordance with the prosodic and moral constraints of Luzūm Mā Lā Yalzam, into a new poetic form, the luzūmiyyah. Quite at odds with the moral, thematic, and structural trajectory of the qaṣīdah form, the luzūmiyyah is by contrast static, directionless, and oftentimes a dead end.

Arabic is the language of the tribes that inhabited the peninsula from Yemen to the Levant to the race and the borders of Palestine and Sana to reach their purposes, which is one of the Semitic languages, and the subject of the emergence of language of the subjects addressed by the researchers of old and recent, and expanded in them a lot and their work that some opinions, The most important of these are: humility and terminology, and language inspired by God. The first person was taught the names of everything (arrest), and the language was born cumulatively subject to the factor of space-time and human need. After the advent of Islam, the Arabic language evolved with the decline of the Holy Quran, because the Arabic language before the descent of the Qur'an was classified into poetry and prose. When the Quran came down, the linguistic expressions in the three Arabic languages became Quran, poetry and prose. There is no doubt that the Arabic language reached the height of its glory and rose in the era of Islam because it became part of religion, and in the era of prophecy and the origin of Islam, people take care of Arabic a lot and are keen on it because it is the language of the Koran and religion and the true and faithful messenger. Other factors affecting the development of Arabic are political, social and cultural factors.

The premier position of the Lāmiyyat al-'Arab among the poetry of al-shu'arā' al-Ta'alīk (the brigand-poets) of the Jāhiliyya is undeniable. Among scholars and philologists, both Arab and Orientalist, it has remained over the centuries the object of the most minute philological commentaries. Its Arab commentators number more than 20, among them the foremost names in classical Arabic literary scholarship: al-Mubarrad (d. 285/898), the doyen of the Basran school, whose commentary is said actually to have been taken from his Kufan archrival, Tha'lab (d. 291/904); the renowned poetic commentarist al-Tibrīzī (d. 502/1109); and the famed grammarian and Qur'anic commentator, al-Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1143). Its European popularity—a phenomenon that Blachére attributes to its appeal to the sensibilities of nineteenth-century Romanticism—dates to Sylvestre de Sacy's study and translation of 1826, followed by Rückert's German translation in his Hamāsa of 1846. In philological studies, of note are the more than 20 pages of his Beiträge that Nöldeke devotes to lexical matters and Jacob's extensive two-part Schanfará-Siudien.

The metaphor of the pronoun is the substitution of a pronoun with another pronoun that differs from it in connotation and in the Arabic position, such as the occurrence of the accusative pronoun subject to the raised pronoun or the accusative pronoun subject to the accusative pronoun, and so on, such as the saying of the one who said: "You passed by me" and it was better for him to say: "You passed by me." It is correct to say: "I honored him I followed in this research tagged with (Intentionally borrowing the pronoun in Arabic grammar) A clear approach to explaining its issues, as I present the issue and clarify its forms and list the opinions of scholars about it and the evidence that back it up, then explain its relationship to the main topic, which is the metaphor of the conscience. I devoted the second topic to explaining the places of the metaphor of the conscience and its applications in Arabic, and then the conclusion in which I presented a number of results reached by the research, including: The metaphor of the conscience was mentioned in the Holy Qur’an, Qur’anic readings and hadiths in addition to its inclusion in Arabic poetry and the sayings and words of Arabs, then some Wills, the last of which is a list of the names of sources and references.

The article considers the strengthening of the Turkic factor in Egypt after the Mamluk Emirs, natives from the Khwarezm, Turkmen and Kipchak tribes, who came to power in the second half of the XIII century. The influence of the Turkic factor affected all aspects of life in Egypt. Under the leadership of the Turkic Emirs, the Egyptians defeated the crusaders who invaded Egypt in 1248. This defeat of the 7th crusade marked the beginning of the General collapse of the Crusades. Another crushing defeat of the Mamluks led by Sultan Kutuz caused the Mongols, stopping their victorious March through the Arab world. As a result of these brilliant victories, Egypt under the first Mamluk Sultans turned into a fairly strong state, which developed agriculture, irrigation, and foreign trade. The article also examines the factors contributing to the transformation of Egypt in the 13-14th centuries in the center of Muslim culture after the fall of the Abbasid Caliphate. Scientists from all over the Muslim world came to Egypt, educational institutions-madrassas were intensively built, and Muslim encyclopedias were created that absorbed the knowledge gained in various Sciences (geography, history, philology, astronomy, mathematics, etc.). Scholars from Khwarezm, the Golden Horde, Azerbaijan, and other Turkic-speaking regions along with Arab scholars taught hadith, logic, oratory, fiqh, and other Muslim Sciences in the famous madrassas of Egypt. In Mamluk Egypt, there was a great interest in the Turkic languages, especially the Oguz-Kipchak dialect. Arabic and Turkic philologists write special works on the vocabulary and grammar of the Turkic languages, and compile Arabic-Turkic dictionaries. In Egypt, a whole layer of artistic Turkic-language literature was created that has survived to the present day. The famous poet Saif Sarayi, who came from the lower reaches of the Syr Darya river in Mawaraunnahr was considered to be its founder. He wrote in Chigatai (old Uzbek) language and is recognized a poet who stands at the origins of Uzbek literature. In addition to his known the names of eight Turkish-speaking poets, most of whom have nisba “al-Khwarizmi”. Notable changes occurred in Arabic literature itself, especially after the decline of Palace Abbasid poetry. There is a convergence of literature with folk art, under the influence of which the poetic genres, such as “zazhal”, “mavval”, “muvashshah”, etc. emerge in the Egyptian poetry. In Mamluk Egypt, the genre of “adaba” is rapidly developing, aimed at bringing up and enlightening the good-natured Muslim in a popular scientific form. The works of “adaba” contained a large amount of poetic and folklore material from rivayats and hikayats, which makes it possible to have a more complete understanding of medieval Arabic literature in general. Unfortunately, the culture, including the fiction of the Mamluk period of Egypt, has been little studied, as well as the influence of the Turkic factor on the cultural and social life of the Egyptians. The Turkic influence is felt in the military and household vocabulary, the introduction of new rituals, court etiquette, changing the criteria for evaluating beauty, in food, clothing, etc. Natives of the Turkic regions, former slaves, historical figures such as the Sultan Shajarat ad-Durr, Mamluk sultans as Kutuz and Beybars became national heroes of the Egyptian people. Folk novels-Sirs were written about their deeds. And in modern times, their names are not forgotten. Prominent Egyptian writers have dedicated their historical novels to them, streets have been named after them, monuments have been erected to them, and series and TV shows dedicated to them are still shown on national television. This article for the first time examines some aspects of the influence of the Turkic factor on the cultural life of Mamluk Egypt and highlights some unknown pages of cultural relations between Egypt and Mawaraunnahr.

Abstrak Jubran Khalil Jubran (1883-1931) adalah seorang tokoh sastra Arab Modern. Namun karena ia tinggal di perantauan Amerika, akulturasi budaya dirinya pun terjadi, sesuai tradisinya di Barat, ia hanya menggunakan dua suku kata yaitu Khalil Jubran. Akan tetapi orang Amerika kesulitan melafalkan huruf kha ( خ) dari nama Khalil ( خليل ), maka lafalnya kemudian menjadi Kahlil. Transliterasi ini keliru dan tidak ada nama Arab yang ditulis sebagai Kahlil ) كهليل ). Namun Khalil menggunakannya untuk memberi kemudahan masyarakat menyebut namanya tanpa kesulitan. Sedangkan perubahan nama Jubran menjadi Gibran terjadi karena proses peralihan dialek. Diantara kontribusi sastra Arab yang sempat ia berikan adalah memperkaya keragaman sastra dengan puisi dan prosa liriknya, menyebarkan aliran simbolik dan mengangkat suara-suara kemanusiaan yang terzhalimi. Melalui karya itulah ia menyuarakan rasa cinta dan kerinduannya akan keadilan sejati sampai akhir hayatnya---Jubran Khalil Jubran(1883-1931)was a prominent figure in modern Arabic literature. According to the West tradition, he only uses two syllables, namely Khalil Jubran. Bu tthe Americans difficulty pronouncing the letter kha ( خ) of the name Khalil ( خليل ), then the pronunciation then becomes Kahlil. Actually, transliteration is wrong and there are no Arabic names are written as Kahlil ( كهليل ). But Khalil used it to ease the public naming him without any difficulties. Meanwhile, the name of Jubran changes to Gibran because of transitioning dialect. Among his contributions to the Arabic literary are enrich the diversity of literature with poetry and prose lyrics, spreading flow of symbolic and voicing of oppressed people. Through his work, he voiced a sense of love and longing for true justice until his death.

As it is suggested and recommended in the first part of a previous paper that carries the same title, this paper is a continuous effort not to claim to be wide-ranging in mastering a poetic piece as one sort of expressive manuscript in Arabic but an impartial effort through analytical assessment of a poem. The study is limited to a few selected verses of Hassan ibn Thabit poem named ‘Al Alef rhymed (????? ?????).’ It is a representative of the Arabic tongue and its magnificence. It is a piece of poetry that cannot be examined and scrutinized in a short paper like this.The study focuses, with analysis, on six verse lines – 17/22 – of Hassan ibn Thabit's poem mentioned above. It employs an analytical and critical method, makes an effort to illustrate the inspiration of Arabic poetry as a means of the tongue and its grandeur and glory. The study initiates with an introduction raising the importance of Arabic classical poetic tongue. Then it goes go forward to give a picture of Hassan ibn Thabit as a man and a poet. The researcher, then, shifts to the foremost segment of the study, attempting to bring an interpretation to some selected verses of Hassan’s above-mentioned long poem. The paper reaches its conclusion by a concise discussion and recommendatory afterword.

On 9 November 1956, a poem in colloquial Arabic appeared in the month-old Cairo daily al-Masāʾ. The poet was an unknown named Hamid al-Atmas, a carpenter from the Delta city of Damanhur. Entitled “That's It, I'm Off to the Battlefield,” al-Atmas's poem celebrated the worker as soldier, for British and French troops had just landed in Port Said. The narrator states that he will put down his tools—as will many laborers and craftsmen—to go and fight. Following victory, he will return to his shākūsh (hammer) and mingār (plane). This, he stresses, is a people's struggle.1 The point is made no less subtly through the poet's choice of language: the narrator's diction is based on that of shop, home, and street.

In Timurid times Persian littérateurs devised a new kind of logogriph (muʿammā) that differed con­siderably from the muʿammā as was known in the Arabic tradition. The most salient feature of the new, Persianate muʿammā, which is normally a couplet, is that it has two levels of meaning: an obvious or surface meaning (‘the poetic meaning’), and an encoded ‘riddle meaning’, which gives the clues to the solution of the riddle. Since the 16th century the new, Persianate muʿammā became very popular with Ottoman Turkish and Arabic littérateurs as well. In fact, to judge by the available evidence, it appears that the new muʿammā gradually became the most popular kind of literary riddle in Arabic. The present paper presents Quṭbaddīn an-Nahrawālī’s (917-990/1511-1582) Treasure of Names, the most influential Arabic treatise on the new muʿammā, which is modelled on earlier Persian treatises. It discusses the growth of the new muʿammā in Arabic, describes the rules applying to it as presented in an-Nahrawālī’s treatise, analyses several Arabic muʿammayāt cited in that treatise and concludes by mentioning some additional Ottoman-era Arabic treatises on the riddle that testify to the great popularity of the new muʿammā in Arabic until the late 19th century.

AbstractSt. John of the Cross silences the names of his feminine poetic alter egos. In this essay, I propose a symbolic name for the nocturnal lover of Noche oscura del alma: Layla. In Arabic layl means “night,” and this is the name of the woman Qays loved to the point of madness, according to the famous pre-Islamic legend. Forced to part from his beloved, Qays goes to the desert and writes desperate love verses to her until he feels so spiritually transformed in Layla that he is Layla herself. As “Majnūn Layla,” or “Layla's fool,” the Lover no longer needs the Beloved's physical presence. Sufi mystics like Rūmī read this legend in terms of the mystical union, transforming Layla into the symbol of the dark night of the soul. St. John of the Cross is much indebted to Islamic mystical symbolism, and he closely follows the Islamic symbolism of the dark night in his poem.

The paper looks at the ancient Greek thymiateria and aims at finding data in literary, epigraphic and visual sources that would cast light on the use of thymiateria in private and public rituals of the VIІ th century BC – IVth century AD. Systematic collection of data and its comparative historical analysis were in the core of the methodology. Among the main methods of analysing the collected sources, one should mention empirical, analytical, structural-typological and iconographical methods. A thymiaterion (an incense burner) is firstly mentioned in the Vth century BC in Herodotus’ Historia. In centuries to come, the panhellenic name of thymiaterion would dominate and enter to Roman and Germanic languages. This device was used solely with fire, charcoal or heated pebbles to burn aromatic compounds, incense and aromatic plants and flowers in particular. Thymiateria didn’t have any fixed shapes or sizes. In narrative sources, they were also named bomiskos, libanotis (libanotris), escharis, tripodiskos etc. In this paper, I examine the basic constructive elements of thymiateria. As visual sources and lyric poetry suggest, they were used in the archaic period. The earliest instance of the use of thymiateria in the ritual practice date late to the VIth century BC in the Phanagoria of the Bosporus. The thymiateria is depicted on mostly in mythological scenes on the Athenian red-figure pottery late of the Vth – IVth centuries BC found in Panticapaeum and in the surrounding area. The Greek iconography of mythological scenes on the vases was clear for the locals. The majority of visual, numismatics and epigraphic sources that reveal the use of thymiateria on the Bosporus are dating to the IVth–ІІth centuries BC, when they were spread in Hellenistic Greece and, especially in sanctuaries of Delos. Although aroma was an essential part of thymiateria culture, only Orphic Hymns cast light on the use of particular incenses (in pure form or in compound) for each gods or heroes. One important question persists: which aromas were burnt in thymiateria and from which countries were they brought to Greece? From literary sources, we know that plant-based aromas, namely incense and myrrh were brought from South Arabia and Syria. Thymiateria were used during rituals in sanctuaries and temples, during religious processions, funerals, symposiums and wedding that were accompanied by aromatic smoke. The present essay should be regarded as a starting point for the further in-depth study of thymiateria from the Northern Black sea region and Olbia in particular.

Abstract The article examines how the pre-Islamic with its pagan tribal character could be transformed into a core component in Arabic Muslim religious literature. Indeed, it proved to be elastic enough to adapt itself to the realities of running a vast Muslim empire. Moreover, this conventional form of medieval Arab panegyric poetry came to be deployed as a political and religious tool in the monumental struggle between Western Christendom and the Muslim world at the time of the Crusades. To the state the obvious, jihad poetry is poetry in the service of religion. Its function mattered more at the time than its intrinsic quality. Jihad poetry was not the creation of Muslim poets as a response to their unprecedented contact with Western Christendom at the time of the Crusades. What we see in the twelfth and thirteenth century jihad poetry is in fact the easy and seamless transfer of earlier invective against Christian Byzantium to a new Christian target, the Crusaders. The Muslim poets who extolled the virtues of Nur al-Din, Saladin and their successors in the jihad do not belong in the pantheon of the greatest names of medieval Arabic poetry. But their verses resonate with the spirit of a period which would change the relationship between Christendom and the Muslim world and would harden the ideological battle lines between them. The jihad poetry gives us insights into the stereotypical way in which the Muslims viewed the Christian «other».

“Arabic literature is repellent with arts. Takhmees being a major art, carries substantial significance. Takhmees is a kind of poetry in which the poet adds three lines on the verse of another poet. He follows the same rhyme and prefix scheme. The Art of Takhmees started in the era of ignorance in the Islamic period and later in the eras of ummied and Abbasid dynasties, work on the art of Takhmees reached on its climax in the 6th century. There were many poets who had command in Takhmees. A major literary piece of the field of Takhmees is Qasida Burdah of Imam Buseeri. Many poets took successful attempts for the composition of its Takhmees. The major names include Abdullah Al-Rumi, Abdul Samad Al-fume, Shahabuddin Al-Mansuri, Shamsuddin, Ahmad Raza Al-nahwi, Sadaqat Ullah Al-qahri, Shaban Al-Ansari and Ahmad bin Al-Eyashi. This article shed light on the meaning, growth of this art and work of some famous poets who wrote Thkmees o of AL- qasida Al- burda.”

Khamza was one of the active organizers of the methods of Jadid schools. As a playwriter Khamza wrote “Zaharli hayot yohud ishq qurbonlari”(1916), “Tuhmatchilar jazosi” (1919), “Burungi qozilar yoki Maysaraning ishi” (1926), “Paranji sirlaridan bir lavha yoki Yallachilar ishi” (1927). He was interested in the world literature and mass media. He read Russian, Tatar, Azar­baijon, Turkish and Arabic literature. He was interested in education of those countries. Lyrical heritage of Khamza Hakimzade Niyazi consists of Divan of a poet (“Divani Nihani”), collection “National poems for national songs” and “Documents of Khamza’s archive”, saved in the State literature museum of the Acamedy of Sciences of the Republic of Uzbekistan named after Alisher Navoi. The article deals with the textual research of the works of the poet and educator Khamza Hakimzada Niyazi on the basis of primary sources.

he concept of artistic unity, in Ancient Arabic criticism, is achieved through the smallest unity. This is expressed through the poetic verse, which is meaningfully and rhythmically a unit that possess its own integrity. Thus, this makes it separate from the poem. However, this separation becomes a connection when it participates with other verses to build the poem. So, we may argue that this unity creates a separation on the level of the poetic line. On the other hand, it also forges connection on the level of the poem as a whole, and its causality with its neighboring verses. And through the numerous objects of the poem, the article "Unity" achieves by what was named Hosn AL kharoj to give a good connection to the point of assemblage of these objects. Keywords: Unity of the Poetic Verse, Unity of the Arabic Poem

The effects of translation have been felt in the development of most languages, but it is particularly marked in English language and literature, where it is a highly charged topic because of its fundamental connection with colonial expansion. Britain shaped a "national" literary identity through borrowing from other languages and infected and inflected other languages and literatures in the course of cultural migrations that occurred in Europe since at least the medieval period onward. As Stephen Greenblatt points out in his essay, "Racial Memory and Literary History," the discovery that English is a "mixed, impure, and constantly shifting medium" is not a new one, citing the preface to the first etymological dictionary in English, published in 1689, in which its author describes English as a hybrid tongue: a Composition of most, if not all the Languages of Europe; especially of the Belgick or Low-Dutch, Saxon, Teutonic or High-Dutch, Cambro-British or Welsh, French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin; and now and then of the Old and Modern Danish, and Ancient High-Dutch; also of the Greek, Hebrew, Arabick, Chaldee, Syriack, and Turcick. ((Skinner A3v-A4r, in Greenblatt 52) The "English" literary canon has translated material at its heart; there is the Bible, for instance, and classical works in Greek, which are read and discussed in translation by many who study them. Beowulf is a translation that has been canonized as one of the "original" texts of English literature, and Shakespeare was inspired by translations. Consider, for instance, Greenblatt's description of The Comedy of Errors, where a "Plautine character from a Sicilian city, finding himself in the market square of a city in Asia Minor, invokes Arctic shamanism – and all this had to make sense to a mixed audience in a commercial theater in London" (58), and there is a strong sense of the global cultural discourse that has been translated into a "national" and international canon of literature in English. English as a language and as a literature, however, has not been contained by national boundaries for some time, and in fact is now more comfortably conceived in the plural, or as uncountable, like a multidirectional flow. English has therefore been translated from solid, settled, and certain representations of Anglo-Celtic culture in the singular to a plurality of shifting, hybrid productions and performances which illuminate the tension implicit in cultural exchange. Translation has become a popular trope used by critics to describe that interaction within literatures defined by language rather than nation, and as a mutable and mutual process of reading and reinscription which illuminates relationships of power. The most obvious power relationship that translation represents, of course, is that between the so-called original and the translation; between the creativity of the author and the derivation of the translator. In The Translator's Invisibility (1995), Lawrence Venuti suggests that there is a prevailing conception of the author as a free and unconstrained individual who partially shapes the relationship: "the author freely expresses his thoughts and feelings in writing, which is thus viewed as an original and transparent self-representation, unmediated by transindividual determinants (linguistic, cultural, social) that might complicate authorial individuality" (6). The translation then can only be defined as an inferior representation, "derivative, fake, potentially a false copy" (7) and the translator as performing the translation in the manner of an actor manipulating lines written by someone else: "translators playact as authors, and translations pass for original texts" (7). The transparent translation and the invisibility of the translator, Venuti argues can be seen as "a mystification of troubling proportions, an amazingly successful concealment of the multiple determinants and effects of English-language translation, the multiple hierarchies and exclusions in which it is implicated" (16). That is, translation exerts its own power in constructing identities and representing difference, in addition to the power derived from the "original" text, which, in fact, the translation may resist. Recognition of this power suggests that traditional Western representations of translation as an echo or copy, a slave toiling on the plantation or seductive belle infidèle, each with its clear affinity to sexual and colonial conquest, attempts to deny translation the possibility of its own power and the assertion of its own creative identity. However, the establishment of an alternative power arrangement exists because translations can "masquerade as originals" (Chamberlain 67) and infiltrate and subvert literary systems in disguise. As Susan Stewart contends in Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation, if we "begin with the relation between authority and writing practices rather than with an assumption of authorial originality, we arrive at a quite different sense of history" (9) and, indeed, a different sense of literary creativity. This remainder of this paper will focus on Nicole Brossard's Le désert mauve and Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, to exemlify how a translator may flaunts her creativity, and allow the cultural position of the translator vis à vis language, history, or gender to be critically exposed by the text itself. Québécoise feminist writer Nicole Brossard's 1987 novel, Le désert mauve [Mauve Desert], is perhaps the most striking example of how a translator foregrounds the creative process of reading and re-writing. Brossard constructed her novel by becoming her own reader and asking questions, imagining dialogues between the characters she had already created. This "interactive discourse" shaped the text, which is a dialogue between two versions of a story, and between two writers, one of whom is an active reader, a translator. Le désert mauve is a structural triptych, consisting of Laure Angstelle's novel, Le désert mauve, and Mauve l'horizon, a translation of Angstelle's book by Maude Laures. In the space between the two sites of writing, the translator imagines the possibilities of the text she has read, "re-imagining the characters' lives, the objects, the dialogue" (Interview, 23 April 96). Between the versions of the desert story, she creates a fluid dimension of désir, or desire, a "space to swim with the words" (Interview). Brossard has said that "before the idea of the novel had definitely shaped itself," she knew that it would be in a "hot place, where the weather, la température, would be almost unbearable: people would be sweating; the light would be difficult" (Mauve Desert: A CD-ROM Translation). That site became the desert of the American southwest with its beauty and danger, its timelessness and history, and its decadent traces of Western civilization in the litter of old bottles and abandoned, rusting cars. The author imagined the desert through the images and words of books she read about the desert, appropriating the flowers and cacti that excited her through their names, seduced her through language. Maude Laures, the translator within Brossard's novel, finds the desert as a dimension of her reading, too: "a space, a landscape, an enigma entered with each reading" (133). From her first readings of a novel she has discovered in a used bookshop, Laures, confronts the "the issue of control. Who owns the meaning of the black marks on the page, the writer or the reader?" (Godard 115), and decides the book will belong to her, "and that she can do everything because she has fallen in love with the book, and therefore she's taken possession of the book, the author, the characters, the desert" (Interview). The translator is fascinated by Mélanie, the 15-year-old narrator, who drives her mother's car across the desert, and who has been captivated by the voice and beauty of the geometrician, Angela Parkins, imagining dialogues between these two characters as they linger in the motel parking lot. But she is unwilling to imagine words with l'homme long (longman), who composes beautiful equations that cause explosions in the desert, recites Sanskrit poems, and thumbs through porno in his hotel room. Le désert mauve was an attempt by Brossard to translate from French to French, but the descriptions of the desert landscape – the saguaro, senita, ocotillos, and arroyo—show Spanish to be the language of the desert. In her translation, Maude Laures increases the code switching and adds more Spanish phrases to her text, and Japanese, too, to magnify the echo of nuclear destruction that resonates in l'homme long's equations. She also renames the character l'homme oblong (O'blongman) to increase the dimension of danger he represents. Linking the desert through language with nuclear testing gives it a "semantic density," as Nicholis Entrikin calls it, that extends far beyond the geographical location to recognize the events embedded in that space through associative memory. L'homme long is certainly linked through language to J Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the original atomic bomb project in Los Alamos, New Mexico and his reference to the Bhagavad Gita after seeing the effects of the atomic bomb: "I/am/become Death—now we are all sons of bitches" (17). The translator distances herself by a translating Death/I /am/death—I'm a sonofabitch" (173). The desert imagined by Laure Angstelle seduces the reader, Maude Laures, and her translation project creates a trajectory which links the heat and light of the desert with the cold and harsh reflective glare of sunlit snow in wintry Montréal, where the "misleading reflections" of the desert's white light is subject to the translator's gaze. Laures leans into the desert peopled with geometricians and scientists and lesbians living under poisonous clouds of smoke that stop time, and tilts her translation in another direction. In the final chapter of Laure Angstelle's novel, Mélanie had danced in the arms of Angela Parkins, only to find she had run out of time: Angela is shot (perhaps by l'homme long) and falls to the dance floor. Maudes Laures is constrained by the story and by reality, but translates "There was no more time" into "One more time," allowing the lovers' dance to continue for at least another breath, room for another ending. Brossard has asserted that, like lesbian desire or the translator, the desert was located in the background of our thoughts. Ondaatje's novel, The English Patient (1992), locates the translator in the desert, linking a profession and a place which have both witnessed an averting of Western eyes, both used in linguistic and imperial enterprises that operate under conditions of camouflage. Linked also by association is the war in the Sahara and the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. As in Brossard, the desert here is a destination reached by reading, how "history enters us" through maps and language. Almásy, "the English patient," knew the desert before he had been there, "knew when Alexander had traversed it in an earlier age, for this cause or that greed" (18). Books in code also serve to guide spies and armies across the desert, and like a book, the desert is "crowded with the world" (285), while it is "raped by war and shelled as if it were just sand" (257). Here the translator is representative of a writing that moves between positions and continually questions its place in history. Translators and explorers write themselves out of a text, rendering themselves invisible and erasing traces of their emotions, their doubts, beliefs, and loves, in order to produce a "neutral" text, much in the way that colonialism empties land of human traces in order to claim it, or the way technology is airbrushed out of the desert in order to conceal "the secret of the deserts from Unweinat to Hiroshima" (295). Almásy the translator, the spy, whose identity is always a subject of speculation, knows how the eye can be fooled as it reads a text in disguise; floating on a raft of morphine, he rewrites the monotone of history in different modes, inserting between the terse lines of commentary a counternarrative of love illumined by "the communal book of moonlight" (261), which translates lives and gives them new meaning. The translator's creativity stems from a collaboration and a love for the text; to deny the translation process its creative credibility is synonymous in The English Patient with the denial of any desire that may violate the social rules of the game of love by unfairly demanding fidelity. If seas move away to leave shifting desert sands, why should lovers not drift, or translations? Ultimately, we are all communal translations, says Ondaatje's novel, of the shifting relationship between histories and personal identities. "We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience" (261). This representation of the translator resists the view of identity "which attempts to recover an immutable origin, a fixed and eternal representation of itself" (Ashcroft 4) by its insistence that we are transformed in and by our versions of reality, just as we are by our readings of fiction. The translators represented in Brossard and Ondaatje suggest that the process of translation is a creative one, which acknowledges influence, contradictory currents, and choice its heart. The complexity of the choices a translator makes and the mulitiplicity of positions from which she may write suggest a process of translation that is neither transparent nor complete. Rather than the ubiquitous notion of the translator as "a servant an invisible hand mechanically turning the word of one language into another" (Godard 91), the translator creatively 'forges in the smithy of the soul' a version of story that is a complex "working model of inclusive consciousness" (Heaney 8) that seeks to loosen another tongue and another reading in an eccentric literary version of oral storytelling. References Ashcroft, Bill. Post-Colonial Transformation. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Brossard, Nicole. Le désert mauve. Montréal: l'Hexagone, 1987. Mauve Desert. Trans. Susanne Lotbinière-Harwood. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1990. Brossard, Nicole. Personal Interview. With Beverley Curran and Mitoko Hirabayashi, Montreal, April 1996. Chamberlain, Lori. "Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation." Reinventing Translation. Lawrence Venuti, Ed. 57-73. Godard, Barbara. "Translating (With) the Speculum." Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction 4 (2) 1991: 85-121. Greenblatt, Stephen. "Racial Memory and Literary History." PMLA 116 (1), January 2001: 48-63. Heaney, Seamus. "The Redress of Poetry." The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures. London, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995. 1-16. Jenik, Adriene. Mauve Desert: A CD-ROM Translation. Los Angeles: Shifting Horizon Productions, 1997. Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient. Toronto: Vintage Books, 1993. Stewart, Susan. Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation. London, New York: Routledge, 1995.