A COL MASTERCLASS with Shawkat M. Toorawa, Yale University
On Thursday (March 26th), students and faculty gathered in the COL library to see the College of Letters host translator and professor Shawkat M. Toorawa. Toorawa is a professor of comparative literature at Yale University who recently published the book, “The Devotional Qurʼan: Beloved Surahs and Verses.” with Yale University Press.
What’s a crucial piece of advice when translating? Toorawa noted that “words mean what they mean in their language, not yours.” As an example, he noted that croissant literally means crescent, in French, which obviously it doesn’t. Later, he dived into his theories behind translation. He said that words that only show up once in a corpus are hapax legomena and that those words are reserved for moments meant for awe or wonder. All of this led him to use the phrase “angels of havoc” instead of “angels of hell” in one Sura translation to show that the Quran is using a different and unique word in that one instance.
What are Toorawa’s favorite types of rhymes? Toorawa said that “the best rhymes are the ones you don’t notice.” He also said that he focused on rhyme more than most other translators/ before diving into if you translated words the same throughout the text (the question is still up for debate) and also how he once translated a prose Sura into a play to show the audience the genre work the Sura was doing. Toorawah called the Qur’an an impressive and sophisticated literary artifact, but when asked at the end if he would do a translation of the whole Qur’an, he said he was less interested in certain verses and didn’t think he’d do them justice.
