Amina Boukail is an Associate Professor of comparative literature and Arabic medieval literature at the University of Jijel, Algeria. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Annaba (Algeria) in 2016. Her dissertation title was “Arabic’s elements in Hebrew andalusian literature.” Her research interests include Arabic medieval literature, Judeo-Arabic, Iberian studies, Algerian literature, minorities in Arabic world. 

In this talk, titled “Translating Maqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī in Medieval Hebrew: The Domestication of an Intractable Genre,” Amina Boukail explores how the Jewish writer Yehuda al-Ḥarizi rendered al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt into Hebrew in the late twelfth century. She examines the transformations that occurred in the translation process and discusses how al-Ḥarizi dealt with key challenges posed by the maqāma genre, including the translation of personal names, place names, and numerous Qurʾanic quotations. By tracing these strategies, the talk sheds light on how a medieval translator approached the texts of others and adapted a highly aesthetic and structurally complex Arabic genre to a different language and cultural context.