IMPLICIT COMPARISONS

VISUALITY AND THE INTERLINEAR MANUSCRIPT PAGE

Ronit Ricci

History and Theory 64, no. 4 (20225)
“Philology Now” Theme Issue

A central question for European philology, informed by various agendas and ideologies, concerned comparison and the positing of hierarchies among languages. With this “traditional” question of philology in mind, but hoping to think in less traditional ways, this article asks how comparative understandings of Arabic and local languages of the Indonesian archipelago may have been reflected in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Islamic manuscripts that contain interlinear translations. These Islamic interlinear translations contain a text written in Arabic with a translation into Javanese or Malay appearing in between the lines of Arabic text. Such translations often follow a word-for-word model, striving to replicate the source down to the level of prepositions and word order even when the result is far from idiomatic. Many questions could be asked about the translation of doctrine, values, and stories through these bilingual manuscripts. However, although I have been trained to examine texts for their content and literary dimensions, I will attempt to put these dimensions aside momentarily in favor of considering “sensory translation.” Doing so, I explore what visual aspects (including script size, ink color, and writing angle) might tell us about the “implicit comparisons” between languages as reflected on the page.