Hearing and saying what was said.

Frank, Richard M.

RICHARD M. FRANK THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA

Presidential Address, delivered at the 206th meeting of the American Oriental Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March 19, 1996

Several of the brethren were at me lately to say something, concerning language, the one concerning certain features of the work of the Arab grammarians and the other about translating, but I was, when they asked, occupied with quite other and for me more accustomed things and was basically disinclined to take up either of the general issues proposed. But even saying nay may go agley and end in schemes unlaid. So I will here talk about language - after a fashion, anyway - and about hearing and understanding and making sense of what one hears (or reads) and so too, or maybe primarily, about translating - I hope in a way that, even if it doesn't seem to make clear and unequivocal sense, may help us to think about some of the most fundamental features of a problem that many of us here have - or maybe ought to have, though not all of us in the same way. That depends on how you hear "have" - but that's a tale for you to tell.

So, my topic, in principle, concerns the problems - one problem, anyhow - of translation, specifically of translation from Arabic into a European language. Assuming the appropriate skill in the craft of composing reasonably wrought sentences in one's own language, that one writes clearly and uses words carefully, doesn't speak ambivalently by accident, the source of our problems and perplexities resides in the very nature of language itself. What I have to say, though very general in most respects, reflects the peculiar perspective of my own continuing struggles ([Greek Text Omitted] in several senses) in trying to deal with the classical tradition of Muslim systematic theology commonly dubbed kalam; and it is in terms of this, as an exemplary, even if in some respects peculiar, case, that I shall focus my remarks. Some of you, particularly those who deal chiefly with other forms of discourse, will find there are important issues and aspects of the general problem that I fail to mention, but time is limited, and my experience as well.

It will be useful, by way of introduction, to say something about how I came to where I am on the question. A long time ago when the world was young, following a general interest originally fostered at St. Johns College, Annapolis, I was, on and off, working at Muslim philosophical texts. Having its roots in Hellenistic thought, the Muslim philosophical tradition termed falsafa historically intersects the intellectual tradition of the Christian West. For scholars and historians whose interest is chiefly or entirely focused on Aristotelian and neo-Platonic philosophy in antiquity and the middle ages, the falasifa (those who cultivated falsafa) appear as participants in an ongoing philosophical dialogue in which certain basic questions and issues continued from antiquity, and continue yet, to be posed and discussed, often in much the same terms. The texts are in different languages - Greek, Arabic, Latin - but, in the historical continuities of the discourse, one finds, despite a number of differences and disagreements on important theoretical issues and several fundamental divergences, a more or less similar way of talking and similar or analogous meanings voiced about a core of basic themes. Within this restricted perspective, translations and analyses of the Arabic texts are presented, and for the most part quite appropriately, in the much same language as are those of the Greek or the medieval Latin texts. This, however, is to read the Arabic texts (some of them, at any rate, or certain parts of them) - to hear them and understand their meaning - within a historically and theoretically appropriate context, but one which is nonetheless abstracted from their native Muslim context.

My own engagement with the Muslim philosophical texts was focused almost entirely on their relation to the Greek tradition. At some point, however, I got off for a time onto a siding where I read several kalam works, the meaning of which I didn't get; I couldn't see where they were coming from or exactly whereto headed. One evening then, I expressed my difficulties and perplexities concerning kalam to a colleague (now deceased) from another university who said in response that in his view this stuff wasn't really meant to make sense. His reply was non-sense. That was plain to see. No major element of a major culture - of any culture, for that matter - is, on its own terms and in its own context, vacant of serious meaning, even if it may not appear so immediately to the learned observer who views it from a distance and at an oblique angle. And so I was set off down a path I am yet on: trying to make sense of the texts, to uncover their sense and to present it. Uncovering and presenting are here two different activities; you have first to get hold of what it is you would present, and for this reason we shall have first to say something about language and getting hold of another speaker's meanings. And we might note here that, in ordinary usage, the Arabic word kalam is originally a noun for speaking, and commonly means speech or talk or discussion and sometimes dispute; and the name for the master of kalam theology, mutakallim, is, in origin and ordinary usage, "one who speaks" - and in grammar designates the first person of the verb, the one to whose speaking the hearer listens.

At the time I began, studies concerning kalam - most of them, anyhow - were of little help, as they plainly did not get to the core sense and intention of the texts. The main source of the difficulty was simply that classical kalam does not conform to the general ways of the usual philosophical and theological thought most of us were brought up on, our household thinkers from Plato to Kant, to Hegel and Nietzsche and so forth. The approach to it, when not simply philological, was mostly out of ancient and medieval philosophy and in several notable cases with a heavy dose of neo-scholasticism. The notion that kalam ought somehow to conform to the pattern was fostered by the active presence of elements of the late hellenistic tradition in Islam and by the presence in kalam of a few key words that were also at home in the peripatetic tradition. People who read kalam texts in Arabic heard "familiar" words and expressions - such as jawhar and arad and wujad - words that, on the one side, were used in Arabic translations already in the ninth century to represent Greek words and expressions (most often indirectly via Syriac) and then later, in Latin translations of Arabic philosophical works, were rendered in most cases by the same Latin words which were employed in translating the same philosophical works directly from Greek, so that the Greek, the Arabic, and the Latin words were taken to be equivalent, as in one sense many, if not most of them, are/were in that particular context. But the lexical "equivalence" of words translated across cultural and historical gaps often obscures semantic distance and intentional difference, especially where they occur in contexts alien to that represented in the translation tradition. This would seem fairly obvious. But some scholars and historians heard them - or treated many of them anyhow - as essentially synonymous, and this had some rather serious consequences where kalam was concerned. So, kalam didn't make proper sense and was declared - and considered by many - to be mere "dialectic": a simply disputational exercise in defense of one or another doctrinal orthodoxy, not a serious theoretical reflection on basic questions of metaphysics and theology. The assumption (not always explicit) that the mutakallimun were not only intellectually, but also religiously, a rather plebeian lot, was simply not questioned. Moving in a quite tidy circle, the adherents of this view had the testimony - a trifle tendentious withal - of the Muslim peripatetics, al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, who were at pains to depict themselves as belonging to an intellectually superior cast.

Anyhow, the chief difficulties scholars had in trying to deal with kalam arose primarily because, in setting out to understand the classical texts, they were led by language unawares, that is, by tacit assumptions about words and their meanings and by their various backgrounds in the history of philosophy, down the wrong path. They wanted to make sense of the texts, but what they fashioned of what the mutakallimun said wouldn't - couldn't - conform to their own notions of how serious thinkers who use this vocabulary talk and what they should say. It was as if the words and many of their combinations had become somehow misshapen - had got a bad connection with the meanings, the concepts they were supposed to express. Part of the difficulty, to be sure, was that the classical kalam texts available in print were few, most of them, in fact, mere handbooks composed under the assumption that their readers knew the basic formalities and contextual assumptions or had teachers who would give them adequate instruction - but these were long dead and buried. Then too, the study of kalam was, in some cases, pursued by folks who were hunting for its "sources" before they understood what was being said. But no collection of sources will, by themselves, yield the meaning of serious thinkers, all of whom work, as they must, out of the diverse collections of discourse, past and present, that make up their intellectual inheritance. This is not to say sources aren't a worthwhile historical endeavor. Often they are highly entertaining and in many cases are downright useful for serious historical understanding. But elements taken from the sources are not, in their derived presence in the discourse of those who employ them, the same as they once were in other, earlier contexts. Often they can no longer rightly recall the meaning they once offered in their native habitat.

The problem is that in order to understand one has to be still and listen - has to listen carefully in order to get what another (the mutakallim) is saying, and this can be difficult, as when eavesdropping on a conversation at an adjacent table. We miss some words and are too easily distracted by the presence of the talk of the fellows around us - by the active discussion now going on or by the recollection of past talk.

In order to say some things I shall try to say about the source of problems I have with my own - and have occasionally with others' - attempts to deal with the language and texts of kalam (and recall, the word means "speaking"), I shall play, in part, on a famous statement which Heidegger makes in his Letter on Humanism (and which he repeats in several places in subsequent writings). I shall try to avoid fancy language and to use plain English. I do not pretend to represent exactly how he took it or what it does or should mean properly within the larger context of his philosophy. I wish simply to follow the path of a remarkably suggestive saying in a way that might be helpful in what I am trying to say. He says, "die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins; in ihrer Behausung wohnt der Mensch": language is being's house; man is lodged in its domicile.

What this says - on one basic level, anyhow - is that our human world is given us through speech, not language in general or just any language, but the living speech we use and understand in talking to one another about our shared world, as individually we may, following our individual histories. If you have read Langland and Shakespeare and Burns and Yeats - not to mention Homer and Plato - your sense of language and of the world will be different than if you have not. The same is analogously true with respect to one's knowledge, use, and understanding of Arabic, be he an Arab or an orientalist (and that's not a pejorative). This is an important factor in how various scholars hear (and sometimes fail to hear) what is said in the texts, how they take them and interpret them and why - having different senses of, being differently attuned to, the one or the other language or to the both of them and to the topic - often they disagree over meanings and renderings. As human beings we have been defined as talking animals, [Greek Text Omitted]. (As the phrase was originally coined [Greek Text Omitted] means capable of rational speech, but taken literally that might be understood to imply that some of our leading politicians belong to another species.) It is through and in historically shared language that the world of our human existence, in which we live and have our being, is there, is there to take hold of, to have and to know. And we have nowhere else to live - no other way to be.

We have our world - are ourselves and know ourselves as beings in a world - through speech. It articulates for us the presence, the elements, and characteristics of things - of earth and sky, mortals and gods. It supplies meanings and the potential of meaningfulness and also the potential of meaninglessness, of something's having meaning - some meaning - and of having no meaning, in the manifold of phenomena, both material and human, conventional, institutional, social, scientific and intellectual in which we live and grasp as such the coherent and the logical, and the illogical and the paradoxical. That is, we have others and things and events, and with them have, as well, our own feelings, impressions, thoughts, as in themselves presentable to mind and bring them out to consider and think about or to share with others, by virtue of language. (And this in a couple of ways, but that we don't have to go into.) In thinking and speaking we have and share a world with others of our household. And there's no getting out of the house - one house or another. In the ever ongoing talk and activity, to be sure, things are constantly being rearranged, and at times major remodelling or some kind of serious renovation results. New concepts and new ways of talking and thinking catch on and become important items of the household, but all this is within the house. That's history. Without language - without having meanings and thoughts present in articulate expression - we can't have sense and non-sense as such, can't make sense or commit nonsense. We can't even have the inexpressible as such, cannot have it in the sense of having it present to mind as something to recognize and reflect on, save as something presents itself in its recalcitrance to articulate presentation.

Too, we use language to talk about language - to put it out there and so have it as an "object" - to look at it as a fundamental feature of our existence or as a tool or a human activity in our world. But to think about language we have to present it in language. We talk about things that, in one way or another, are there, present to us - the presence or absence of things within a shared world. You can't get behind or beyond language. And that's why philosophers and linguists can't get a complete hold on it, try as they will to tie it down with lines of discourse and of formalities, carefully conceived - sometimes even insightfully - while some, inclined to logic, retreat into a kind of mathematical formalization, another room, still under the same roof, where a few may choose to join the latter-day Platonists who hold colloquy there in a comer of their own. Wittgenstein's talk of language games is itself a parlor game. There's just no leaving the house - not alive, anyway, since we can't stop being what we are: [Greek Text Omitted]. We can go visit the people in another house, but any thoughtful conversation must take place within the one or the other. It might be said that some non-rational states - mysticism, for example - take place out of doors. The potential implications of that might be interesting to pursue, but I would here note simply that however the metaphor might be read out, the mystic starts from within the familial house and returns there in the morning; the path he follows starts indoors, where the way is proposed and the direction and the local landmarks are indicated, and later, back in the house, the adventure is represented and reflected on in speech, even if in terms whose truth ([Greek Text Omitted], in Heidegger's sense) may be paradoxical.

In sentences, words present meanings. When I can't find "the right word" or expression, I have my meaning in one sense; otherwise I shouldn't know that I don't have the right word - but I don't really have it in hand, so to speak. Or, to put it another way, I haven't managed to domesticate it; I can't call it up - bring my meaning out into the light so I can look at it and see if it really is what I thought I was aiming at, can't share it with another to see if it makes sense concerning the thing we are talking about. Words and sentences spoken don't have, that is, don't contain, meanings to grasp which you have, as it were, but to glance at the label, open the box and there they are. (I can mistake what you mean sometimes even though you speak as clearly as possible in the most ordinary words about familiar things.) They are pointings at meanings - what in Arabic are called isharat - and that's a loaded word. They say, "That over there! - Can't you see what I mean?" Dried, disarticulated and mounted in a dictionary, words appear as many faceted pointers - like urchins sometimes. But with spoken or written speech, you have to be able, so to speak, to follow the pointing - sometimes, maybe, only a vague sort of gesture - so as to pick out of the common background or field what exactly (or inexactly) is aimed at - the objective as intended. Together in sentences they point at what the speaker means. If he uses "the wrong word," the pointing is correctly intended but misdirected; the intention is right but the pointing is left. Pointings that are simplistic, confused, or erroneous may not appear so to the hearer who has not himself a clear view of what is aimed at (a boon for politicians and trial lawyers). And sometimes what the speaker intends is to mislead and the pointing is so contrived. Live words and sentences, whether spoken or written, now or long ago, offer their meaning about a once, if not now, historically shared world and are not to be treated as some sort of aimless "text." As one study concluded, if Derrida is right, then he isn't saying anything. (I should add here, in parentheses, that we have "intention" - as a name both for concepts and for mental constructs, as well as for purpose as what one aims to do - out of Arabic through Latin.) In our ordinary intercourse what is said is normally easy to follow and one generally gets the point right away, but with serious philosophical discourse, it is sometimes difficult if not nigh impossible for one who hasn't acquired the habit - as it is with that of modem physics, and for the same reason. ("Esoteric" is equivocal.)

What is offered - called attention to - in philosophical and theological discourse are thoughts, views, ideas, and theories, the meanings of propositions, perplexities and paradoxes about Being and beings. Here the matter of seeing what is meant and getting the point is not simple. Even in your own language - with familiars of a shared house - one must have had a long series of conversations, going often over the same material, in order to get a solid grasp on what is said by an individual who is truly a thinker - who has thought seriously and with genuine insight about some complex issue or question, even though you may have yourself thought about it and talked with others about it.

Now, the possibility of having a serious conversation between houses - not about the odds on the local team in the world cup, but about basic philosophical or theological questions - proves sometimes to be a particularly difficult and contorted problem. The conversation must be in the language of the host. If the houses are adjacent or in the same general neighborhood, particularly where there have been occasional intermarriages, communication on such topics may not be all that hard. Basic concerns tend to be similar or analogous. If, on the other hand, they are remote from one another, nestled or pitched in quite different landscapes, communication and shared understanding are almost sure to prove problematic. If the visitor has a good knowledge of the host's language - which means his having a reasonably thorough acquaintance with the host's tradition, particularly on the subject about which they would converse, they can communicate and may likely gain some insights, each of them from the other. But even then serious difficulties inevitably arise if the visitor wishes to express to the host certain concepts or insights of his own which are alien to the world of the host. Words fail him, as the ones he wants are not available in the language they are speaking; his meanings are foreign to the world they share. If they try to talk about primary issues and theories of the visitor's philosophical tradition or religious tradition - and this always in the host's language - communication will at times fail as meanings are caught and turned about in eddies on the linguistic surface of the divergent currents of the meanings beneath.

In houses that are truly at a distance from one another, the very essence of speaking, not some metahistorical essence of language - an abstraction of metalinguistic speculation - but the reality of what is there, actually present in real speaking, is different in fundamental respects. Each articulates the presence of a different world - articulates and identifies things its own way - outlines, colors, nuances and associates things - the appearance and presence and interrelationships, actual and imagined, of beings and events, natural and human, in a unique way. Their presence and significance - how they are there and may be pointed to, brought to mind, thought and understood - in short, how they are, is significantly different at a profoundly human level than in other houses in remote locations. Coyote of the Southwest appears as Raven on the western coast of Canada, and in New Zealand occasionally as Maui.

When we come to consider the theology of kalam the distance between the houses is, as it were, increased by a factor at least of two. It is located in a different state, so to speak, different for most of us here, that is, though not for our Muslim colleagues. Moreover, the house has undergone various modifications over the last millennium. The wing which once contained the elegant apartments of the mutakallimun and their fellows fell out of fashion and ultimately into disrepair, and was then remodelled and enlarged, in part with hellenistic motifs. As a result of all this, there came to be a kind of historical discontinuity in the conversations that took place there. Already in the twelfth century, for example, Fakhruddin al-Razi would misconstrue some basic sentences of his predecessors in the tenth and eleventh. He failed to hear the formal propositions they enunciated. Records of the earlier talk of the mutakallimun - those that were retained - were almost all of them relegated to the attic, as the historical account of them was consigned to a few handbooks. And these handbooks, heavily influenced as they were by the Muslim peripatetic tradition as elaborated by Avicenna, contributed in a major way to the misleading presuppositions with which scholars approached the study of classical kalam. (Important among these was, for example, al-Jurjani's Sharh al-Mawaqif, a work composed at the very end of the fourteenth century and of which a number of editions were published in Istanbul in the nineteenth century and one, commonly used by European scholars, in Egypt in the first decade of this century.)

In dealing with the classical kalam texts, we (and this includes our Muslim colleagues) are, thus, listening to - or, if you want to be formal about it, poring over the verbatim records of - extended parts of a once ongoing conversation that took place in Arabic about a millennium ago. Because of the historical discontinuities, basic elements of the lexicon and the analytic of their formal implications are not given, assumed, or suggested in much of the later usage. The formalized school talk of the mutakallimun is there materially, inscribed on the pages of the texts, but we find nothing ready to hand that offers clear and unambivalent access to the precise meaning of the technical terms and what was strictly intended by their uses in various contexts. You need the language - which includes the literary prose and some poetry too - if you are to have a feel for how and in what directions words and expressions and sentences may point or wave or gesture (just as you certainly can't read Plato if you can't read Sophocles and Thucydides). Remarkably free of the influences of the (in some cases etymologically far-fetched) terminology which originates in the translation literature, the highly nuanced language of the classical kalam was developed in an ongoing process of autonomous discourse in Arabic. Consequently, for words and expressions whose exact meaning is obscure or unclear, one cannot, as often with the falsafa, turn to another literature and language for clues, but must look to the literary usage represented in medieval lexica and frequently to the formal usage in works on law or grammar. The latter prove to be of particular help, though not always unambivalently.

What you have to do is to listen, to pay attention in the hope of hearing - of coming to understand - what is said. The aim is, in a sense, to come to see things their way - not to "get inside the minds" of individuals, but to participate in a way of seeing things - to see how, living in that suite of that house, things really do - or at least can, or might - appear that way and be thought about, talked about that way. Whatever we want to do with the texts - whatever feature, region, or aspect of their thought we wish to grasp and display, to understand and to make available to our colleagues and others - we have first to understand what they are saying, what they mean by what they say. The saying and meaning are here present, not past, as you attempt to enter the conversation - to become conversant with them. Such understanding, however, is by nature swayed by the inertial moment of your listening for the sense of their speaking. As you know the language of the texts, you hear things said - hear a lot of things - and, just as you do naturally - and must do - in listening to your own fellows in your own house, you are led by what you already know and suppose about the topic and the way one talks about it and, often as well, about the speaker and the way he thinks. Inevitably you have - cannot but have - assumptions, some explicit and others unthematically assumed and unexamined, whereby to anticipate where the speaking of the text is going. You have to look in the direction it seems to be pointing. This is the very condition of your understanding the text at all, though it may (and often does) have undesired consequences (of which one too often becomes aware sometime after the study has appeared). Though indispensable, especially at the outset, the guidance available in one's original sense of the questions and issues is not everywhere reliable, whatever may be its appearance of universal validity. It furnishes, rather, suggestions and leads that must be nuanced, corrected, and modified if we will learn to follow the ways of their discourse. And as we progress, awareness of differences and discontinuities between languages changes, becomes sharper and more nuanced and accordingly also our sense of the problems of translating from the one language to the other.

There is no sure rule whose methodical application can assure understanding. At any stage of trying to learn your way around in the texts, you either hear what is said or you don't; you hear something of it aright or get it amiss, near or far, often mistaking a confused, though learnedly articulate, impression for a clear grasp of what actually is meant. In the dialogue with the text, the Socratic need to know what you don't know retains its full force. Asking the right questions - bringing assumptions (yours and theirs) out for examination - depends entirely on a dialectic of attentive listening, since unlike a living interlocutor, the texts can't talk back and set your interpretation directly aside as wayward or clean off the track. You have to be on the lookout for clarifications or hints of corrections, which may come only obliquely, often in unexpected places.

Generally, one does in fact come to an understanding of certain elements or aspects of the texts which form the focus of his research, an understanding that, with diligence and some luck (and Jadd, the Arabian brother of Tyche, was a popular, though minor divinity in the Nabatean pantheon) reaches a level of genuine insight into some or much of what the authors of the texts meant by what they said, though perhaps not always at the level which was first imagined, since, continuing to work one always gets further insight. A truly "complete" grasp of what they meant would be a squared circle; understanding lies always at some point on an asymptote.

It is only when one is able to represent the meaning and sense of the texts in question (or a given text or some part or element of a text or set of texts) with proportionate accuracy, that he might be able to produce a plausibly satisfactory translation, whether of the part or the whole. Such a representation - an account of what they say and mean - has to be set out in something like our philosophical language, that is, in appropriate twentieth-century European terms, whether those in which we analyze and discuss the thought of ancient or medieval authors or perhaps those of modern or contemporary thinkers. Our dialogue with the texts is a present inquiry concerning what was constructed in the past. It is only in these terms that we can critically examine and determine what exactly we mean - how we understand what they say. If you read enough of the Arabic texts you come at a point, often, to know what, in a given context, the author will say next - what basically the next phrase or sentence must be - but to know why this is what he must say, you have to have grasped his meanings as the way things really do (did) manifest themselves in that apartment of that house.

It remains, in any case, that you have and present to yourself your grasp of their meaning in a language which is a peculiar and fluctuating mix of your own with the Arabic that belongs to the texts, as you express what you have in order to scrutinize it and test it against the texts and then turn it over again in a series of reformulations in English words and phrases that, unable to strip themselves clean of their various native associations, stand often uncomfortably for Arabic words and expressions. As a private matter between you and the texts this may seem reasonably satisfactory, but back now in your own house, you have to make what you understand of the texts presentable to your fellows. So it is that the problem of language becomes acute when you turn to publish - to make your understanding public for your own household. What you strive for is to talk in such a way that if the writers whose work you study shared your language, they would say maybe, "yeah, that's it; you've got it," or more likely something like "I might not (or wouldn't) have put it exactly that way, but that's basically what I meant." In some places, however, because of intervening time and another angle of vision, the response might be rather, "yes, what I said does seem to point that way - maybe does, in fact - but had this occurred to me, I should have qualified what I said, and maybe altered some assertions, so as to preclude the inference you draw," or even something like "that's interesting; what I said was aiming in that direction, though I didn't see it so clearly!" In the latter case your sense and presentation of the text is on the mark; in the former, valid on one level, but errant nonetheless. Such discrimination, alas, is a matter for scholarly debate, where the consensus of experts may shift with time and place. (Of course, he might say, "man, you ain't been payin' attention, have you!")

Now, we're not talking here about particular cultural institutions or customs, but about what is, theoretically at least, absolutely universal - about "being as being," to use Aristotle's phrase. The difficulty - sometimes nigh impossibility - of translating poetry is a commonplace in discussions of differences of languages. The translation of formal philosophical language presents its own, unique difficulties the characteristic basis of which is essentially the inverse of those encountered in the case of poetry. (Some, Plato or Heidegger, for example, may at times seem to be playing both games simultaneously!) In formal philosophical language, that is, the key expressions, instead of being given almost free rein of suggestion and association, are carefully circumscribed in the range of their meanings as they are, even when endowed with a certain equivocy, bound to the presentation of well-worked concepts that are distinguished and ordered one to another within the contexts of particular topics. Matters of great moment often depend on a cord woven of split hairs. But how to represent this when, though certain fundamental concerns may in some way be alike or analogous at root, branch and fruit - concept and construct - are different, and the formal philosophical lexicon of the one language is, by nature so to speak - by the way it grew and took shape, as the house faced east or west - significantly different from that of the other?

Severally, out of their various histories, the words, sets of words, and expressions available to us for our analysis and translation of the Arabic texts evoke contexts and suggest meanings and complex associations of meanings in modern and contemporary works and in translations and studies of philosophical and theological texts of various epochs and traditions. This is the basis of their potential for conveying the sense of the text we would employ them to represent. But therein lies the rub, for what meanings, appropriate or inappropriate, vague or precise, they may offer to the particular scholar and translator, on the one hand, and to his reader, on the other, depends in each case inevitably on the scope and depth of the individual's knowledge of their varied histories and, alas, on his habits with respect to their use. In dealing with ancient or medieval language - with language no longer commonly spoken - we can never become wholly free of the drift of historically present speech and thought; it is constituent of our being.

Herein lie hazards aplenty, foreseeable in general but nonetheless unavoidable. Where, for the lexicon of certain topics, many terms may be well represented by words that in context are sufficiently equivalent to convey the sense of the text quite accurately, in other, primary and fundamental questions, certain basic terms have no proper equivalents, even allowing for a certain fluidity and equivocy on both sides. How ill some equivalents, proposed and employed, actually fit the Arabic terms they are supposed to represent is easily obscured for the scholar who uses them. Sometimes the Arabic terms stand foremost in his mind in such a way that he may neglect thoroughly to scrutinize those he employs to represent them. And sometimes the contextually secondary connotations and implicitly associated concepts and constructs of the words employed in analysis and translation prejudice his reading and interpretation of the texts. The supposed equivalents, somewhat vaguely employed, appear to be quite satisfactory, if not exact and precise, unless and until some new question arises and, as the text is more closely studied, assumptions previously not brought explicitly to mind are discovered to be false and the absence of genuine equivalents becomes ever more evident.

Where the task is to give an account of what the Arabic text says and means, one has the freedom to elaborate explanations with restrictions and qualifications concerning terms and theoretical assertions, but in translation, alas, he is bound to representing these sentences with their key terms there in place as given. And the translation should make sense - make the sense of the text conceptually clear and formally coherent to those of the translator's household who have the habit of dealing with the same or basically analogous issues and problems as those treated in the particular text but do not know the language of the text and its tradition. Claims to "literal translation" are fanciful or naive, as such a thing, rigorously undertaken, tends as it must to be a kind of code for the Arabic "plain text" in its original form - something not needed by those who can read the original and, for those who cannot, awkward in expression, abstruse and obscure and pregnant with semantic confusion.

Had we behind us a relatively long scholarly history of the study of kalam with accompanying translations of the most important texts and analyses of their thought, we might argue yet about how this or that element of their formal lexicon or some particular sentence was to be understood and rendered, but given a more or less established convention of how most of the technical terms and expressions were to be translated and of how their translation equivalents should be understood, the problem of translating would chiefly involve refinements and adjustments in dealing with one or another particular term or concept. But that is to speak of a world - a history - that isn't: the established presence of a shared context and of a common vocabulary proper to it. Many of the most important texts have not even been published, much less translated, while, for others, such editions as we have are defective at best. And some fundamental aspects of major questions dealt with in the texts have been studied only superficially and a few not at all. In any attempt to translate, questions and problems abound, and on various levels. Each of us must play it by ear and do what he can, revise, and go on. One's efforts cannot prove completely satisfactory to all his colleagues and readers, nor always to himself indeed, as he and they view it subsequently in the perspective of further study and shifting concerns. Such by nature is the oeco-logy of historical science.