Tree of Pearls, Queen of Egypt

Translator’s Note

ix Translator’s Note jurji zaydan is often compared to the great eighteenth-century novelist Sir Walter Scott. Like Scott, Zaydan wrote novels at a time when the novel itself was still a new genre in Arabic. Like Scott, he introduced the historical novel to Arab audiences, conceptualized as a political and didactic project but also as a medium of entertainment for a newly emerging middle class. Both authors were, moreover, highly popular in their day, and yet ultimately the comparison is a somewhat misleading one. In the English-speaking world, Scott has survived as an academic curiosity on university syllabi and the bookshelves of dedicated aficionados. Today he makes for difficult reading outside of these narrow, specialist circles and the dense, ornamental, and extraordinarily rich diglossic language of his fiction—consciously rooted in the rhythm and texture of medieval romance—no longer speaks to the broad audience for which it was originally intended; it has become quaint and irredeemably dated. Unlike Scott, Jurji Zaydan’s historical fiction remains as popular today as it was a century ago, both in the sense that it is still widely read across the Arabicspeaking world, and in that it remains firmly rooted in a popular space and sensibility. Zaydan’s novels never made it into the literary canon. They are not read at school or university, and had elicited no real scholarly interest until quite recently. Nevertheless, very few educated Arabs today have never heard of Zaydan ’s novels, and most will have devoured at least a couple as young adults. The novels have been regularly reprinted in Egypt over the past century, and numerous editions continue to appear in markets from Rabat to Damascus. Translations into a plethora of regional languages have been made across the decades: Persian, Urdu, Azeri, Turkish, and Uighur, to name a few. Part of this continuing popularity has to do with the continuing accessibility of Zaydan’s language. Zaydan was part of a literary project that consciously x | translator’s note broke with tradition and that undertook the radical renovation of both classical Arabic and its late medieval hybrid vernacular forms. Zaydan’s precise, streamlined , and lexically undemanding prose, along with his clever rationalization of the temporal schemas of popular romance and epic, deliberately targeted a new readership situated “in between” elite circles and the quasi-literate audiences of oral, vernacular narrative forms. His language and style were the basis of later literary realisms and are still readily accessible to readers today. Another important reason for this remarkable longevity has to do with pleasure : the kind of old-fashioned readerly pleasure born of the satisfying union of knowledge and entertainment. Taken together, the twenty-two novels make up a cycle: the story of worldly Islam from the conquests to the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Each of the novels represents a distinct adventure in this cycle—adventures that unfold in richly exotic locations scattered across a nonetheless familiar geography whose most famous monuments continue to exist today: from the martial tents of Bedouin Arabia to the palaces of imperial Baghdad, from the hallucinogenic secret grottoes of the Assassins in the mountains of Syria to the court of the Ayyubid Sultans in Cairo. Throughout all the novels, romance, intrigue, and above all politics make up the well-proven recipe that draws the reader into a distant world that continues to live in and through the present. In Arabic, Jurji Zaydan’s novels are what we would today call “page-turners,” with lively dialogue , fast-paced action, and short, cliffhanger chapters, but they are also minihistory lessons that directly reflect on the troubled contemporary moment of the Arab world. It is this sense of pleasure that I have tried to reproduce in the present translation for the English-language reader, and the choice of language register was a central part of this process. As mentioned above, Zaydan’s spare and efficient prose compellingly draws the reader into a world that is both distant and present, exotic and yet familiar; a medieval world, moreover, of princely courts and valorous warriors, that is already available to the modern English literary imagination in various articulations, from Scott’s crusader fictions onwards. The present translation deliberately draws upon the “archaic” rhythms and diction of Scott’s prose in order to activate this familiar/distant imaginative space for the Englishlanguage reader, while at the same time weaving into it the simple and decidedly modern texture of Zaydan’s Arabic phrase...