Events

CSI Monday Majlis: James E. Montgomery

A Future, Remembered - The Poet-Prophet Al-Mutanabbi

Register please on this link: https://Universityofexeter.zoom.us/meeting/register/mUwZSgnkQ3mQLiOxe2qCnw

Event details

Abstract

Abstract:

This talk will begin forty-four years ago in 1982, the fateful year in which I first met Imruʾ al-Qays, Abū Nuwās, and al-Jāḥiẓ. I will offer an account of some choices I declined to make, and explore the series of the professional mis/adventures, culs de sac, and U-turns that ensued. An overview of my involvement in the Library of Arabic Literature will lead to an exposition of a possible end of career project I am contemplating—a translation of the diwan of Abū l-Ṭayyib al-Mutanabbī. I will explain why I am hesitant to embrace such a venture by surveying the many, not insignificant challenges such a project might involve.

Bio:

James E. Montgomery FBA is Sir Thomas Adams’s Professor of Arabic and Fellow of Trinity Hall at the University of Cambridge. He has won the British-Kuwait Friendship Society Award for The Vagaries of the Qaṣīdah (1997), been shortlisted twice for a Sheikh-Zayed Book Award for Al-Jāḥiẓ: In Praise of Books (2013), won a Sheikh Hamad Award for his translation with Sophia Vasalou of Miskawayh and al-Tawḥīdī’s The Philosopher Responds (2019),  been longlisted for the National Translation Award, American Literary Translators Association for ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād, War Songs (2019), longlisted for a Sheikh Zayed Prize for his Dīwān ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād: A Literary Historical Study and also for his latest book, the edition and translation of Abū Nuwās, A Demon Spirit: Classical Arabic Hunting Poems (2024). He also edited and translated with Michael Fishbein Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s Kalīlah and Dimnah:Fables of Virtue and Vice (2022).

https://www.ames.cam.ac.uk/people/professor-james-montgomery