Melanie Magidow

I requested this from the library after seeing someone on Litsy mention it. I liked the opportunity to read an epic tale from a culture I haven’t read much from, and it was great to have an epic tale from a culture I don’t read much from, and a story of a warrior woman to boot. I did find the language sometimes shifted between a more elevated epic language and a less formal register (like someone addressing their mother as “Mom”). I know no Arabic so I don’t know if these are words show more that pose particular translation challenges in English or what. Regardless, these are just odd hiccups rather than a consistent theme, so I would still recommend this book. show less

Despite the title, in the Epic of the Commander Dhat al-Himma Melanie Magidow translates only part of this medieval Arabic epic—perhaps unsurprisingly, given that the original stretches to some 5,000 pages in print. She focuses on an early part of the epic, in which the eponymous heroine is abducted by a neighbouring tribe while still a girl and grows to become a renowned warrior.

As I don't read Arabic, I can't comment specifically on Magidow's translation choices, though her prose is show more crisp and should be accessible to undergraduates at any level of study. However, I found myself a little bemused by some of her methodological choices as explained in the introduction. It's one thing to produce a rather loose translation in order to better capture the spirit of the original. It's another to say that you've altered the translation—in ways that can't be observed by most of the edition's readers—because you disagree with the worldview of the epic's first tellers. The process of translation inevitably involves choices, but this seemed an odd and not particularly defensible one to me. show less