mediterranean literature 315
Mediterranean multilingualism and its literary consequencesThe Mediterranean’s long history of ethno-religious diversity and complex patterns of
cultural contact, circulation, and majority-minority interactions (Catlos, this volume)
made it a multilingual zone characterized by a kaleidoscopic array of combinations.
Scriptural languages—Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, but also Armenian, Coptic,
or Syriac—served the spiritual needs of believers who were not necessarily native
speakers of those tongues. Religious minorities used these sacred scripts to transcribe
the dominant languages that not uncommonly served as their everyday vernaculars.
This practice resulted in combinations—Judeo–Arabic (Arabic written in Hebrew
script), Judeo–Spanish (also called Sephardic or Ladino, Iberian romance-based
dialects written in Hebrew script) or aljamiado (Iberian romance dialects written
in Arabic script)—that remain puzzling curiosities to modern eyes but were in
fact unexceptional in the multilingual, multi-confessional landscape of the medieval
Mediterranean. Affairs of state were not uncommonly conducted in a language differ-
ent from that of the ruling elite; this was especially true in the eastern Mediterranean,
where in antiquity Aramaic had served as the official language of the Achaemenid
empire and in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Anatolia, the Seljuk sultanate of Rum
adopted Persian and Arabic (not Turkish) for internal administration, Greek for exter-
nal correspondence with Christian powers, and Persian as its literary language. In fact,
when it came to literary composition, the choice of language was often determined by
cultural prestige and generic precedent. In the thirteenth century, Alfonso X the Wise,
the king who launched a concerted program to elevate the status of written Castilian
by commissioning numerous translations from the Arabic, nevertheless chose Galician
as the lyric language for his Cantigas de Santa Maria. (Lyric, as we shall see in a
moment, was a privileged site for linguistic flexibility; in the early thirteenth century,
the troubadour Raimbaut de Vaqueiras thematized Mediterranean multilingualism in
“Eras quan vey verdeyar,” his famous descort featuring one stanza each in Provençal,
French, Genoese, Gascon, and Iberian, and a tornada combining all five.) In the sec-
ond half of the same century, Italians from Brunetto Latini to Marco Polo who wanted
to express themselves in the vernacular rather than Latin routinely (in the generation
before Dante) used Old French or Franco–Italian.
In such an environment, the “national literature” paradigm, needless to say, dis-
torts or conceals as much as it reveals. In the monolingual, diachronic, and frequently
teleological frame within which literary studies are typically organized, texts are read
(implicitly or explicitly) as links in a national literary tradition—set in relationship to
earlier or later texts composed in the same language.^2 When history is factored in, it is
most commonly the history of the modern nation-state or cultural area with which
the language is associated, even when such geographical or cultural boundaries are
anachronistic for the particular texts in question. Modern literary canons, constructed
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tend to privilege texts like the Song of
Roland or the Poem of the Cid—originally composed in the (future) national language
and susceptible of being read as witnesses to a national history or evidence of an
emerging national consciousness.
A corollary to this emphasis on the linguistically specific is the neglect or dismissal
of texts in translation. In modern literary studies, translations are typically regarded as
secondary: written off as derivative when adhering to the “original” text and rejected