The critical edition, as the primary interface through which specialist textual critics shape the interpretations of historians and literary scholars, is an indispensable tool of philology and its successor disciplines. In this introductory essay to a special issue of Philological Encounters, we offer an approach to analyzing the role of the critical edition in the history and ongoing practice of scholarship on ancient texts, and explain the circumstances in the field of biblical studies from which this issue emerged. We argue that the niggling failures of critical editions can productively spark an infrastructural disposition in scholars who work with ancient texts-a renewed attentiveness to the labor, material affordances and constraints, technological capacities, and institutional structures oriented around the mediation of the past for the present. The Critical Edition in the Infrastructure of Philology illustrates the analytical value of such a disposition through a collection of compelling case studies.
This article explores J. N. Epstein's call for a critical edition of the Mishnah, delivered in his 1925 inaugural lecture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Framing textual criticism as a national imperative, Epstein envisioned "Talmudic Philology" as foundational to the rebirth of Jewish life in the Land of Israel. By examining Epstein's early academic trajectory, his role in Berlin's circles of Jewish intellectuals and scholars, and his collaborations with Hayim Nahman Bialik, the article reveals how Zionist ideology increasingly shaped his philological goals. Special attention is given to the conception of the Mishnah as a national text and to Epstein's understanding of it as having had a written Urtext, recoverable through critical methods. The study situates Epstein at the intersection of nationalism and philology, showing how his work responded to Christian scholarly challenges and aimed to build a Hebrew-language academic tradition rooted in the perceived needs of the Jewish people.
Before they hosted successive meetings of the Society for Biblical Literature, Denver and San Antonio were stops on the wild ride of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Tailgating papers from panels in those venues, this afterpiece scrolls jaggedly through other scenes of urban philological encounter, telescopinghorizons of critical editingbetween Christian late antiquity and western modernity, from the eve of the Reformation to the aftermath of World War II. There is a main text of travel, with minimal baggage of secondary reference. There is also, beginning a few pages in, an intermittent infratext that engages more directly with themes and issues from the SBL panels and offers links to related scholarship. Having run its course through cities and times, the travelogue dwells for a moment on the keywords of the hour ("infrastructure," "technology") and another of longer date ("criticism"), before seconding a contemporary critic's modest claim for the continuing utility of public works of philology such as these.
A New Testament apparatus criticus orders a vast material history within an array placed below a text that either prints a desired referent in the upper register or gestures toward that referent, conceptually. Relegating manuscripts to the role of data and extracting their variants, textual criticism masters past corruption while promising an ever-advancing present that never quite arrives. The apparatus therefore testifies not only to textual difference but also to extractive resource hoarding and the progress-at-any-cost epistemologies of modernity. Focusing on the International Greek New Testament Project's "new Tischendorf" and the expeditions it prompted, this essay tracks the direct involvement of government, corporate, and intelligence entrepreneurs in "saving the New Testament" or, more accurately, advancing the Cold War interests of, among others, the Library of Congress, the United States State Department, Gulf Oil, and institutions like the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis.
Riffing on the "radical philology" of Sean Gurd, this article challenges generalized accounts of the edition, and its entanglement in ideologies of print culture, as an object of representation that fixes the text, by analyzing the editio princeps of 3 Corinthians in its intellectual and technological context of production. As this article documents the controversy and new editions prompted by Wilkins's pamphlet, it argues that the ensuing textual multiplicity exemplifies key characteristics of the early-eighteenth-century Republic of Letters identified by Paul Dibon, Anne Goldgar, and others: a concern for communication, not only of new content but the manner in which that communication occurred. Rather than seeing the print edition as a fixing or stabilizing of text, this article shows how textual multiplicity is achieved through the edition's performance of communication.
Soon after Constantin Tischendorf (1815-74) publicized his "discovery" of the Codex Sinaiticus, notorious manuscript broker (and forger) Konstantinos Simonides stunned elite literary circles by announcing that Simonides himself had produced this biblical codex in his youth as a gift for the Russian tsar. Simonides claimed that his "Codex Simonideios" was illicitly being passed off as an ancient biblical codex after being mutilated and disfigured. I argue that this brief but explosive debate about manuscripts, forgeries, and "find" narratives produces a biblical text liable to revision and emendation, due to new discoveries or new methods, and so vulnerable to mischievous actors manipulating the possibilities of new discoveries and methods. The iterative process of attack and defense on display in this codicological debate has remained, in various guises, from collegial disagreement to scorched earth campaigns, an ideological component of critical biblical studies.
In 1782, Friedrich August Wolf published an edition of Plato's Symposium that scaffolded the Greek text with a scholarly apparatus in German not Latin. Wolf argued that this was necessary to make Plato more accessible for students. Yet his paratexts simultaneously made the labor of classical philology visible to readers by underscoring both Wolf's philological acumen and his expertise as a scholar. Wolf's Gastmahl is thus an anomaly in the context of his overwhelmingly Latinate oeuvre, containing works predominantly written either for peers or for students. Rather than simply explaining this incongruity, however, by adopting an infrastructural perspective this article achieves much more. For in revealing how this text functioned as a strategic act of self-promotion for Wolf and why it was successful as such, the article also illuminates the broader political, professional, and pedagogical infrastructures that influenced the development of (classical) philology in late-eighteenth-century Germany.
This article develops ajeeb an Urdu/Hindi term connoting wonder, strangeness, peculiarity, and, in contemporary contexts, queerness into an aesthetic category rooted in South Asian literary and cultural traditions. Tracing ajeeb from its classical Arabic and Persian senses of marvel through nineteenth-century Orientalist automata, twentieth-century modernist theories of the uncanny and defamiliarization, and into twenty-first-century viral social media, the study situates ajeeb as a culturally specific alternative to dominant Euro-American frameworks such as Freud's unheimliche and Shklovsky's ostranenie. Through close readings of Ismat Chughtai's "Lihaaf" and its afterlives, alongside the work of Pakistani social media figure Taher Shah, the article argues that ajeeb articulates untranslatable affective registers at once unsettling and affiliative that evade neat analogies in Western aesthetic discourse. In doing so, it offers a framework for analyzing strangeness, queerness, and cultural illegibility in South Asian art and media, and proposes ajeeb as a critical tool for global aesthetic theory.
This article discusses aspects of the life and work of the Egyptian editor and philosopher Abu al-`Ila Afifi (1897-1966). It does so with a particular focus on the relationship between his editions of classical works of tasawwuf and his broader project of formulating a counter-canon of "mystical philosophy" or "universal mysticism" amid world war, the establishment of the post-war and post-colonial international order, and the rise of Nasserist pan-Arabism. In analysing this relationship, I discuss his choice of texts, his editorial method, the institutional context of Egypt's public universities, and the various ways in which he inserted his authorial voice into his editions, turning them from texts previously reserved for the initiated into public and contemporary intellectual resources. I close with a discussion of the potential that lies in the study of modern editions of pre-colonial Arabic and Islamic literature for the study of modern Arabic thought.
The article analyzes a 2002 edition of Tuhfat al-murid 'ala Jawharat al-tawhid, a supercommentary written by Ibrahim al-Bajuri (d. 1860) on Ibrahim al-Lagani's (d. 1632) base text in Ash'ari theology. The edition was edited by the Muslim religious scholar and former grand mufti of Egypt, Ali Jum'a (b. 1952). The article shows that in Jum'a's edition tahqiq is a practice of selecting a text that has been widely available, reframing its importance in the introduction and footnotes, and making the text understandable to contemporary readers. In his selection and framing of the text, Jum'a situates al-Bajuri's hashiya against Salafi opponents, while his explicit audience for the edition consists of Muslim students. The article argues that Jum'a's tahqiq, which is both ideologically and pedagogically oriented, reflects his larger religiopolitical project of bolstering the authority and intellectual legacy of al-Azhar in the context of inter-Sunni rivalry in the late twentieth century.
This article considers multiple trajectories in the intellectual history of the Tamil tropological concept akupeyar ("becoming-noun," metonym). It shows how akupeyar has been defined and theorized differently in Tamil grammar, where it names a kind of semantic ambiguity, and the Anglo-American study of culture, where it is invoked as a uniquely Tamil mode of signification or master trope. The article proposes that Tamil literary commentary is a missing chapter in the history of this concept. Gathering and analyzing a number of concrete uses of the term in Parimelalakar's Tamil literary commentary on the Tirukkural, the article recuperates akupeyar as a term of semiotic analysis within Tamil rhetoric and thus expands its theoretical potential.
This special issue is a collective response to the provocation, "what would a South Asian dictionary of untranslatables look like?" We take as inspiration philosophical lexicon projects of the past two decades in particular the Vocabulaire europ & eacute;en des philosophies (2004) and its English translation, the Dictionary of Untranslatables (2015) projects whose framework and area of interest are primarily Europe. Taking South Asia as an alternative site of theorization, we playfully repurpose the philological methods (linked intimately with Orientalism) that have long rendered South Asia knowable paradoxically as unhistorical, unphilosophical, and untranslatable. We take a similarly reflexive approach to the category of "South Asia," highlighting its constitutive occlusions and its history in the Euro-American academy. We accordingly extend three lines of questioning: what happens to untranslatability when it is conceptualized in South Asian texts and contexts? What does the category of "South Asia" look like when viewed through the lens of language and translation? And, given that "untranslatables" projects such as ours often evoke the lexicon form, how does theorizing South Asian untranslatability bear upon lexicographical thought? Wresting untranslatability away from nativist evocations of the concept, this issue ultimately tests the translatability of untranslatability.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the emergence and standardization of Hindi as a modern language in/for India, and heated debates between literati about whether Hindi poetry should be written in Braj (a three-century-old literary language of erotic elite poetry) or Khari Boli (a dialect spoken around Delhi and the language of modern Hindi prose). This article studies a famous untranslatable from South Asian aesthetics, śṛṅgāra (erotic love, adornment), through which we are able to trace not only debates about the place of eroticism in Indian literary culture at a moment of nascent nationhood, but also the radical transformation in the conception of language and literary language as such. I suggest that śṛṅgāra was illegible in the debates about poetic language in the late nineteenth century but became a bitterly contested term in Hindi literary debates between 1900 and 1930. In the process, not only did intellectuals re-interpret śṛṅgāra semantically (e.g., as a ‘natural’ reproductive urge), but they also re-evaluated eroticism and adornment as worthy literary values. Braj, saturated with śṛṅgāra and literariness, was discarded as antiquated—a merely ‘literary language’ utterly inadequate both to the production of modern literature and the variegated functions of a modern national language.
While the Sanskrit word rasa is best known today as a concept in aesthetics, where at a general level it refers to the ideal emotional effect of an artwork, it also has a range of other senses, including “liquid,” “essence,” “emotion,” and “desire.” Such senses are intimately related to the aesthetic sense, but they risk being overlooked when rasa is considered primarily as an aesthetic concept. This article considers the nonaesthetic dimension of rasa by examining how the word is used in the celebrated play Uttararāmacarita , or Rama’s Last Act , by Bhavabhūti (eighth century). Although rasa takes on many different senses in this play, nearly all of them pertain to a thing’s essence, understood as its most potent or pleasure-giving aspect. In the case of humans, rasa turns out to be a special kind of emotion that bears knowledge about what is valuable. The article concludes with a discussion of what it means to call rasa an untranslatable.
This article offers a critical and philological re-reading of Freud’s references to the South Asian term yoga in Civilization and its Discontents . Situating this reading within the orientalist and colonial epistemologies of their time, I argue that Freud’s usage participates in the “violence of translation.” In doing so, I also open a space for a resistant reading of this critical and influential passage of psychoanalytic literature. Through a close re-translation and analysis of Freud’s references to yoga , the article reframes yoga and psychoanalysis not as doctrinal rivals, but as representatives of traditions and lineages that yoke together textual study, spiritual exercises, and subjective transformation. In doing so, it proposes a new “yogic” paradigm for both psychoanalytic and philological interpretation.
Jālī : “poetry in stone;” a figure of partial seeing; a code for reflection. Etymologically bivalent, jālī derived from Sanskrit is both net and net-work, embroidery and the thing embroidered. From Arabic via Persian, jāʿlī is a fabrication, a forgery, the counterfeit. I use this figure of the jālī to consider the translatability/untranslatability of the category of the aesthetic more generally. In the expansionist model of the global modern, like replicates like. The jālī indexes a series of different organizing principles for “the beautiful”—perforation, partiality, pattern, and repetition. It also suggests beauty at a remove—not the jālī itself but the web of light it creates. In contrast to clarity, transparency, and revelation—the realism of the modern nude in the Western tradition for example, reflective of in nuda veritas (the naked truth), here the most delicate, refined, indeed aesthetic quality of an object/artwork would be both its partiality and its translucency. The jālī as a figure for the aesthetic also contains within it the vexed category of the spiritual and mystical (to mystify, and transitively, to obscure), and the problem of occlusion, evasion, deceit.
This essay examines the term mārggakār as a site of semantic and political instability within early modern and colonial Kerala. Positioned at the intersection of caste hierarchy, Christian conversion, and colonial governance, mārggakār exemplifies the condition of the untranslatable as conceptualized by Emily Apter, resisting assimilation into missionary lexicons and colonial bureaucracies. The essay traces the term’s shifting meanings across three registers: Hermann Gundert’s Malayalam–English Dictionary (1871), which encodes caste within religious categories; Raju K. Vasu’s Malayalam novel Polappatham (2021), where mārggakār marks the complex figure of Thomas, a Pulaya convert; and eighteenth-century petitions from the Dutch East India Company archive, which document the legal precarity of low-caste Christians. Through these diverse sources, the essay argues that mārggakār functions not merely as a linguistic artifact, but as a conceptual prism through which to view the contradictions of translation, subalternity, and colonial rule. The term’s instability illuminates how language mediates, and often obscures, structures of power, and marginality.
As royal seal, poetic signature, textile print, numismatic image, or sectarian forehead marking, the chhāp in Hindi and Urdu bears witness to a physical act of impressing or marking by which an object is stamped with significance. Yet the chhāp is also the copy, duplicate, or imitation. This essay draws out implications of the untranslatable concept chhāp for anticaste thought and for theories of signification by way of its usage in early modern devotional or bhakti poetry, a composition of the medieval Delhi poet Amir Khusrau, and the reflections of a police official on caste epithets in present-day Uttar Pradesh. Together, the poets and the cop reveal chhāp to be a crucial element in the implicit semiotic theory of the north Indian vernacular, an alternative to the anglophone index that is better attuned to relations of force and vulnerability to counterfeit.
This article brings close critical attention to bear upon the phrase shoḳhī-e taḥrīr in the first line of the first ghazal of Mirzā Ġhālib’s Urdu Dīvān. It argues that shoḳhī— typically translated as “coquetry,” “caprice,” or “mischief”—is constituted by a peculiar heightening of the semantic uncertainty that causes poetry to resist and motivate interpretation and translation. The article shows that the reform of classical Urdu poetics in late-colonial India (that all but destroyed its object of reform) was, in a vital way, a response to the unease caused by poetry’s semantic caprice. Far from being exceptional, the article further argues, this response was an example of a cross-traditional interpretive anxiety that is a measure of how fundamental shoḳhī is to poetry, and a clue to how shoḳhī helps conceptualize untranslatability in poetry.
