UC Santa Cruz

The Currant is framed as a “found manuscript,” one particular instantiation in a text network “originating” in the Aljamiado manuscript tradition. Aljamiado was a 16th and 17th century textual code whereby a romance language was transliterated into Arabic script, practiced as a covert gesture by persecuted Muslims, or Moriscos, in Inquisition-era Spain. Many Aljamiado manuscripts were miscellanies – “memory palaces,” the literary critic Rosa Menocal calls them, encrypting the most essential Qur’anic prayers, tales, and poems – a textual response to the necessity of cultural preservation and to the loss of the ability to speak Arabic, but not to write it. The Currant, in keeping, is a multigeneric work of translation, poetry, prayers, and stories, written in a mixture of English, Spanish, Arabic and Aljamiado – in order to honor this multicultural and multilinguistic practice – pointing toward a lost culture that honored religious pluralism and that celebrated cultural exchange, in counter-distinction to our present nation-based empires of cultural homogeneity, division and intolerance.

In order to achieve this unlikely synthesis of poetic invention and historically specific translation I have: A) employed homophonic translation (to English) procedures to arbitrarily chosen sections of a 2009 Bronte Edition Spanish edition of the Qur’an; B) fed those same translations to Google Translate back and forth between several languages; C) studied extant Aljamiado manuscripts from the archive of the Biblioteca de Castilla-La Mancha in Toledo, Spain, as models for the organization of The Currant; C) learned rudimentary Arabic in order to translate sections of my work into Aljamiado; D) written novel poems patterned off the muwashshahat, a genre of bilingual poetry written in Arabic/Aljamiado by medieval Arabs courtesans; E) included all of my scholarly notes and drafts throughout my research process as product.

The Currant was conceived as an intervention to the traditional and cynical maxim “tradutore, tradittore” (“translator, traitor”); rather than assume betrayal of the source text and culture by effecting what is “lost” in translation, The Currant erects a memory palace inhabited by who has been lost in translation, resulting in a new encounter with the “found” text.