96 Dawood and his translation of the Koran

Dawood the translator of the Penguin edition claims that ‘The Koran is not only one of the greatest books of prophetic literature but also a literary masterpiece of surpassing excellence’. Not bad for a text that according Wilders is akin Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The writer for the publisher writes on the back flap that ‘Mr Dawood has produced a translation which retains the beauty of the original.’ and adds the mysterious remark about Dawood’s effort ‘altering the traditional arrangement to increase the understanding and pleasure for the uninitiated’. In his introduction Dawood explains: the original ‘recitings’ were at one time or another written down by listeners in Kufic script on paper, pot shards, stones and even palm leaves. Only later the whole lot was collected but without a chronological sequence. Dawood also warns that some passages are either ‘obscure’ or multi interpretable and he had not tried to explain them. So far so good. In my edition it says nothing about the translator himself. I resorted yet again to Wikipedia. N.J. Dawood (1927-2014) was a Jewish Arabist from Bagdad who came to England in 1945. After the success of his translation of ‘Tales from the Thousand and One Nights’ as Penguin nr 1001 he was invited to do the Koran. It became his life’s work. Although the first edition was published in 1956 he kept revising it for the rest of his life, incorporating new philological findings and notions. For instance when the gender specific ‘man’ was generally changed in ‘mankind’ he took that on board too. My edition is the second revised edition of 1966. His last revised edition was from 6 months before his death in 2014.