ABSTRACT
This special issue of The Translator emerged from a workshop held in Berlin in 2006 under the aegis of Europe in the Middle East; the Middle East in Europe (EUME), a research programme of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and the Wissenschaftskolleg of Berlin.1 The workshop was conceived as a response to the disciplinary and institutional isolation of Middle Eastern literatures, both locally and globally. In Europe, the literatures of the region have been
largely confined to specialized Area Studies or Oriental Studies departments, with little or no contact with departments of comparative literature and the prestigious circuits of literary theory and cultural studies generated by these departments. In the Middle East, students and scholars are often deprived of effective participation in the debates surrounding dominant trends in Western literary theory as well as new developments in the various fields of Near East ern literature, due to lack of material access to texts and international circuits of scholarly exchange. Moreover, in both cases, narrowly circumscribed notions of national literature and the hermeneutic traditions they engender have tended to structure the analytic tools and intellectual paradigms through which literary texts and literary histories are studied and deployed in both the institutional and the discursive sense. A major result of this situation has been the suppres sion of large swathes of textual and cultural knowledge within and between the major Middle Eastern literary traditions, but also between these traditions at large and the major European traditions that are typically understood to be self-contained and stable fields of disciplinary knowledge. The broad aim of the workshop was precisely to foster these types of crossings through the optic of local translation histories as one way of situating the literatures of the Middle East within a comparativist framework that sees texts and traditions as porous and mobile historical and formal structures.
