Bausani Il — Corano.pdf

It is important to remember that Bausani published his first edition in 1955, during a period of decolonization and intense Western reconsideration of the “Orient.” Italy, with its colonial past in Libya and the Horn of Africa, was grappling with its identity. Bausani’s translation was an act of intellectual decolonization. He rejected the Orientalist habit of dismissing Quranic repetitions as “monotonous” or its legal passages as “primitive.” Instead, he showed that the repetitive structure is a liturgical device: a verbal rhythm designed for recitation (tajwīd), not silent reading.

He also insisted on translating the Quranic Arabic not through Latin or Greek etymologies, but through their own semantic fields. For instance, he famously rendered Allāh as “the Divinity” (Il Divino) rather than the generic “God” (Dio), preserving a sense of the absolute, unique noun. Similarly, he translated islām dynamically as “abandonment to God” rather than the static “submission,” capturing the active, continuous struggle of the believer. Bausani Il Corano.pdf

To understand the value of "Bausani Il Corano.pdf" , one must first understand the man. Alessandro Bausani (1921–1988) was not merely a translator of Arabic; he was a titan of Islamic and Iranian studies. He held the chair of Arabic Language and Literature at the Sapienza University of Rome and later the chair of Islamology at the University of Naples "L'Orientale." It is important to remember that Bausani published

Unlike many translators of his era who relied on secondary Latin or French translations (such as those by Maracci or Savary), Bausani was a master of direct philological analysis. He was fluent in classical Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. Furthermore, he was a scholar of the Baháʼí faith and Islamic heterodoxy, which gave him a unique sensitivity to the esoteric and linguistic nuances of the Quran. He also insisted on translating the Quranic Arabic

His translation, published by Sansoni in Florence in 1955 under the title Il Corano: Traduzione commentata, was a revolutionary act of Italian literature. It was the first Italian translation to abandon the heavily biblical or archaic Italian used by previous translators and instead opt for a modern, scientific, yet poetic prose.

During Bausani’s era, many Western translations were produced by Christian missionaries or Orientalists with ideological agendas. Bausani, raised a Catholic but later a scholar of Bahá'í history, managed to produce a translation that is neither apologetic nor polemical. He presents the text as a historical-linguistic artifact, offering empathy toward the Muslim view of the text as revelation while maintaining critical scholarly distance.

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