[Sca-cooks] Fadalat Translation

Suey lordhunt at gmail.com
Sun Sep 9 14:40:11 PDT 2007


Lilinah wrote that:
> Bear wrote:
>   
>> In this case, we are dealing with modern Spanish translation of an archaic
>> Arabic text that, in turn, is being translated into modern English.  Without
>> a Latinized alphabet transcript of the original (or a copy of the original
>> and access to a good Arabic linguist), we have no way to evaluate the
>> precision of either translation, so any "medievalization" of the recipes is
>> an affectation which may cause problems for future researchers.
>>     
>
>   
I totally agree with you Bear.
> IIRC, there's a scan of the original (or at least part of it - the 
> rest available on request) on Cariadoc's website.
>
> I'm taking Arabic this fall (clearly a better course than i took last 
> fall) and i hope to dip into the text of the Fadalat (well, i'd love 
> to translate the whole thing, which is rather long, so a little at a 
> time)
>   
    This is small part of Fernando de la Granja Santamaria's doctoral 
thesis. He traveled extensively to Morocco when he could not find the 
translation for words into Castellan for the entire manuscript. I think 
we are dreaming if we consider general Arabic classes to understand 
medieval Murcian Hispano Arabic from Middle Ages. My daughter speaks 
elementary Arabic but when she reached a level whereby she had to go to 
select a specific region to perfect that branch of the language or 
dialect she gave up and went to Guatemala where there are only 500 
dialects of indigenous and Castellan derivatives of those languages. 
(She is fluent in five languages or whatever cause of where we and she 
has lived.)
    Under the circumstances I think we have live with what we have. 
Unless someone like Charles Perry comes along to correct or debate the 
Granja's Spanish translation.
    Too Stefan pointed out to me personally that some of us are cooks 
and others are mechanical agents trying to communicate to you the cooks 
what is written. Now being a 'mechanical agent' myself trying to 
transmit the words I find myself depending on you if you are a cook to 
translate the recipe at hand into something eatable. As you can see I 
have no clue about that deviled egg recipe while others are acceptable 
when I attempt them.
    Blancmange is another perfect example. My dear neighbor took my 
translation from Sent Sovi with chicken and converted it into something 
delicious to serve 110 people for a banquet while I am incapable of 
making it for four people as she will not tell me what the added touch is.
Suey



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