translating osama

The New Yorker site has finally been updated again, and among the new offerings is an account of Duke professor Bruce Lawrence's efforts to translate and compile a volume of Osama bin Laden's public statements. Lawrence says of bin Laden that "he may be the world's worst terrorist, but he's also one of the best prose writers in Arabic," and explains the practical difficulties that face the translator--both in obtaining undistorted copies of the texts, and in disentangling the multiple registers and layered allusions of the prose.

He even detects a dark sense of humor in bin Laden's writings: “In one of the translations, he talks about Uncle Sam. In Arabic, Uncle Sam is 'Amm Sam'— it rhymes, you see. The Arabic word samm means poison, and an uncle, in Arabic, is supposed to be someone you can trust.”

The book is being published by Verso (good for them; a more mainstream publisher would probably be afraid to touch it) and should be out this autumn. I'm eager to read it--not for shock value, but because I'm deeply curious to see an effective rendering of the rhetoric bin Laden deploys, and to see how it compares to the work of other radical political Islamists.