Translation through Praxis (2 of 2)

Please read part 1 first!

Translation through Praxis (1 of 2)

3. Mind the Gap

If you own any cookbooks, you know instructions assume a degree of familiarity with basic processes. No recipe that says to “add the eggs” would bother to specify they need to be cracked and poured out of their shells for this purpose. No recipe details how to squeeze a lemon. Bread recipes may instruct you to knead the dough, but hardly ever explain what that entails.

In a similar way, these handbooks were written for people who were already familiar with the processes involved, and quite possibly some of them didn’t want to make it too accessible to outsiders – though others made an effort to put down as much information as possible. Whatever the case, most recipes are full of gaps as they leave some things unsaid. Particularly in a compendium, as the author understandably doesn’t see the need to repeat himself constantly and may frequently refer the reader to “see above”.

The merest hint

Towards the end of the Tuhaf there is a list of pigments and their substitutes. One of them is Minium, which is red lead and looks like this:

At §225 the author says: “The substitute for minium is pomegranate flowers” and leaves it at that. It was the first time I saw these flowers¹ mentioned to make colour, and there was no indication of how one was supposed to extract such an intense orange from them. At that point I didn’t know what I do now about extracting flower colours – in fact this was my starting point. I was only familiar with decocting, so I boiled the flowers and got an incredibly weak dye. If that was it, then the autor was easy to please!

Around the same time, I came across an entirely different recipe in the Umda, that instructed to put red gilliflower in a mortar with water, pound until blended, then strain. How I procured the flowers is another epic story, but the results yielded by this extraction method were an epiphany²:

Red gillyflower after blending and before straining.

Armed with this insight from a wholly different text, I returned to the pomegranate flowers which I extracted this way, with very little water. This time, the result was more than adequate!

Are you paying attention?

Here’s a verbatim translation of Tuhaf §17:

Take four parts of strained liquid from one of the cooked inks and one part sappanwood decoction. Add a little gum and it makes a glossy, clear red.

The “cooked inks” are a series of black tannine inks, earlier in the text (§1-5), made by boiling as opposed to other existing methods. The instructions seem clear, but unlikely: Can 4 parts of black ink mixed with just 1 part of red sappanwood dye actually make red? Really?

Of course they can’t, and a simple test makes this abundantly clear. But if we read it again more carefully, along with the cooked recipes in question, it becomes clear that “strained liquid” does not refer to the finished ink. What it actually means is “take four parts of strained gallnut decoction from one of the cooked inks”. And now it makes sense. I don’t have a sample to show but this is now about watering down an intense red dye with the inkmakers’ preferred solvent.

Skipping the origin story

Here is one recipe from a small collection of ink recipes included in an unrelated text³ which Dr. Lucia Raggetti examined and translated in her paper Cum Grano Salis⁴.

واما قلب العصفر يوخذ من قلب العصفر الرفيع البالغ في الجودة اول ما يخرج منه فيلقي عليه مثل ربعه خل خمر وماء رمان حامض ان وجد و يودع اناء و يلقي عليه من الصمغ العربي مسحوقاً و ينزع عنه كل يوم ما طلع فوقه من الماء الاصفر

She translated it thus:

As for the heart of the safflower, take an exquisite mature heart of safflower, in the peak of its first blossoming, pour on it one quarter of its amount of wine vinegar and sour pomegranate water—if it is available—prepare a vessel and pour in it some ground gum arabic; remove every day the yellow water that comes to its surface.

Now Dr. Raggetti’s work is very impressive, unlike pretty much everyone else who’s tackled these early texts and made them more obscure, and against whom I rail constantly. I really recommend her papers and reconstructions. But in this case, her translation suffered from a lack of familiarity with safflower, which in all fairness would only have come through single-minded commitment to this demanding dye, at least for a little while. When writing Inks & Paints of the Middle East I tried and failed more times than I can say before I started to understand safflower, and to this day I’m still extracting its dye, using different texts, to put it to different uses.

Which is why I can say with certainty that the translation above misses an important point: The “heart of the safflower” doesn’t refer to any part of the blossom, which in any case doesn’t literally have a heart, being thistle-like with only the thin petals useful for colour.

Carthamus tinctorius aka safflower blossom.

Dried safflower petals, the only part of the plant that yields colour.

Indeed if you tried to follow the instructions above, you’d get absolutely nowhere. “The heart of the safflower” is a metaphor⁵ for the red dye (carthamin) that is hidden in the blossom, locked within its petals (as opposed to the unwanted yellow dye that is “outer” and readily yielded by the petals). This recipe doesn’t start with the blossoms, but skips the entire extraction process⁶ and asks you to begin with the best red dye, freshly squeezed out. Only then does it make sense! Here’s how it translates when you spot that:

As for the inner dye of the safflower, take delicate safflower heart-dye of the finest quality, as soon as extracted, and add to it a quarter of its amount in wine vinegar, and sour pomegranate decoction if available. Deposit it in a vial and add powdered gum arabic. Remove the yellow liquid that rises to the surface daily.

What’s happening here is that the petals have been fully processed, a long operation, and the red dye has finally been squeezed out. At this point, the recipe says, add the acids and let it rest in a container. This causes the red pigment to precipitate and drop to the bottom of the vial, separating from a yellowish liquid. This is discarded daily, until the pure red pigment, already mixed with gum arabic binder, is ready to be used in Qur’anic illumination.

Lost in Transcription

Another tricky challenge: Hardly any of the manuscripts I and others work from are from the hand of the author. Most are copies, or copies of copies, or God knows how many rungs down in the chain of copies. Some copies are close enough to the time of the author that the copyist understood the text, others are centuries later and the copyist clearly did not understand the text. All of them, inevitably, make mistakes, whether a simple typo or a serious misunderstanding. And we simply don’t have enough surviving texts and data to be able to figure out the original, unless the text itself offers sufficient clues.

Which is it?

Take this recipe from Zina §32, for instance: “To write on papyrus so the writing is invisible: Take the blood of a pigeon and mix it with midād. Write what you wish and it won’t be visible when dry, till dissolved again.”

It pops up again in Tuhaf §71, where it says the exact opposite: “If you wish to write something on papyrus, so the writing is not visible until it's dry, take the blood of a pigeon and mix it with midad. Write what you wish and it won’t be visible until it's dry.”

Which is it?? To begin with, “the blood of a pigeon” may very well be the name of some resin or other substance, just like “pigeon poop” in the previous post was no such thing. But I haven’t found such a substance yet and I’m simply not going to try it with real blood, not that I can make any sense out of how a mixture of blood and carbon ink would work as described. Can any educated guess be made if even the ingredients sound unlikely? I would hazard to say yes, and that the Zina version is the proper one, for the simple reason that there’s absolutely no point in invisible ink that’s only invisible when wet. How would you even get the letter to the recipient? All invisible inks need to be so when dry and at room temperature, and it’s for the intended recipient to perform whatever operation (hydrating, heating, etc) will make it visible again.

Dangerous nonsense

The following headaches were brought to my attention by Jeremy Bechelli, who was writing a book examining ink recipes across different Picatrix translations⁷. This is the Latin title of Ghāyat al-Hakīm, the Arabic magical text that was translated into Latin to become a hit in Renaissance Europe. There are many copies of the (lost) original book, both in Arabic and in Latin, so reconstructing the original is a major endeavour that still occupies scholars. Fortunately, we’re only concerned with a short section describing magical inks, one ink per decan with many doing double duty or more⁸. But the existing translations don’t agree with each other, and often don’t agree with me. Here are variations Jeremy shared for the first decan of Aries:

Attrell and Porreca translation (from Latin):

Colour: red. Equal parts of green gall, gum, and orpiment. Grind separately, mix together, combine with egg whites when ready to use.

Greer and Warnock translation (from Latin):

Colour: red. One part each of green gall, gum, and orpiment. Pulverize separately, mix together. Write or paint using egg white as the medium.

Atallah and Kiesels translation (from Arabic):

Colour: yellow. Green gall, gum, and copperas, each ground individually. Combine one portion each of gall and gum with half portion of copperas, mix with egg white and hazelnut. Put in a jar and seal. Beat when needed.

Oh boy. Oh my word. I have highlighted the most egregious nonsense. The translations from Latin are basically identical and the presence of (highly toxic) orpiment is to be blamed on the original Latin copyist, who was clearly clueless, because this is a straightforward ḥibr recipe. I don’t want to take up too much space here to deconstruct each aspect, as you can find those (including a discussion of the supposed colour of the ink) already detailed here with photos. But the translation from Arabic above is especially mediocre, lacking any insight into process. Compare with mine below:

The ink for its first decan is ruddy, and its recipe is to finely grind green gallnut then gum and vitriol, each separately, the gallnut being one part and the gum and vitriol half a part each. Then gather in egg white, roll into hazelnut-sized balls and store in a jar. When needed, pound and dissolve.

Here’s one more set of variations from Jeremy’s finds, for the third decan of Leo:

Attrell and Porreca (from Latin):

Colour: Pomegranate red. Cinnabar washed many times. Soften the powders, mix with green gall in water, add a small amount of gum and lac tree resin.

Greer and Warnock (from Latin):

Colour: Red (like apples or pomegranates). Cinnabar washed many times. Soften the dust well, mix with green gall in water, add a small amount of gum arabic and lac.

Atallah and Kiesels (from Arabic):

Colour: Pomegranate red. Wash pomegranate glue several times to refine it, mix with green gall water and let sit for an hour. Add some glue and gum, beat all the mixture together.

The expression “soften the powders” is simply amazing and again the Latin copyist is to blame. In Arabic, the verb نعم, adjective ناعم refer to softness but also describe the finest of powders. Even today, “soft rice” on packagin means “rice flour”. This idiom was captured in the translation, where it should probably have been rendered as “powder very finely”. As for the translators from Arabic, they continue to astound. “Pomegranate glue” indeed!Here’s my translation, which is detailed with photos here:

[The ink for] the third face is pomegranate-red. For this, pomegranate-hued cinnabar is repeatedly washed of its separated sulphurs, then it is brayed with decoction of green gallnut. Let it rest an hour, then add a little gum and some lac; bray and draw with it.

Misleading zeal

I’ll finish with a really interesting and rather striking example: a recipe from the Tuhaf, for “laying down gold leaf when gilding”. It’s not a size, but a kind of golden ink suitable for painting over metals before applying gold leaf (this would make small gaps in the precious metal invisible, and therefore save the expense of a second layer). It also works on paper, where it sparkles slightly.

The problem with this ink was that the two surviving copies of the Tuhaf presented something of a dilemma. Here it is, with X for the problem ingredient:

Take one part rock salt, one part Yemeni alum and half a part yellow Iraqi vitriol. Cook in X in a pot of red copper, with a little barley, on low heat. When the barley is cooked, take off the fire. (Tuhaf §56)

In one of the manuscripts X is ما السما “sky water, water from the sky” and in the other it’s ما السماق “sumac water, sumac decoction”. The difference is a single, final ق letter. Did one scribe omit this letter, or did the other zealously add it where it shouldn’t be? My initial reaction was that I had never seen or heard the expression “sky water” anywhere, it didn’t seem to be a Spanish expression turned Arabic by the Andalusian author, and while it could be intended to mean “either rainwater, or dew, or similar”, it just sounded odd. On the other hand “sumac water” was an established ingredient often encountered in recipes.

In this, I was thinking along the very same erroneous lines that made scribe 2 add that ق where it had no business. Because if you really look at what the recipe is intended for, and at the list of ingredients, you can see sumac decoction should not be there. “Yellow Iraqi vitriol” is simply a hydrated form of ferrous sulphate. And sumac is high in tannins. Put the two together, as I had a chance to demonstrate at a talk, and you’ll instantly get a deep black reaction, not the golden liquid that was expected. And this I assume was the point of “sky water”: water not contaminated by anything (organic or mineral) that could affect the result.

Post-scriptum: When you just need to go with it

Occasionally, no amount of reasoning can illuminate a turn of phrase, and you just have to render it faithfully (as opposed to twist it into some kind of sense) and hope to come across an explanation at some point. I have two such examples in mind.

1. In a Tuhaf passage describing the different grades of gum arabic, we find:

   وأجوده الأبيض الصافي الذي خلقته كخلقة الدود

   “The best of them is the clear white; its appearance is worm-like…”

   This really puzzled me. But it so happens the gum arabic I buy isn’t the clarified type sold in art shops: I get raw food-grade gum arabic from Indian shops, where it’s sold by the kilogram. And one day while pouring out an amount, I had a surprise and a revelation.

It appears gum can drip down from branches into these worm-shaped “stalagmites” that are unusually pure because they’re not in contact with anything as they harden. As simple as that.

2. The other puzzling passage was from a Picatrix ink:

   يؤخذ العفص ويرضّ ويخرج ما في جوفه من سواد
   “Take gallnuts and crush them, removing the blackness within…”
   I had always gathered gallnuts locally in the UK (after all they do grow on trees), and in my experience they were just solid wood with a space in the centre where the wasp was growing. I’d never seen anything that corresponded to this description. Until eventually, for a workshop, I ordered the period-accurate gallnuts from the Middle East, and when I cracked one this happened:

Within the woody part, there was a black ball of slightly different material, like a harder shell that formed directly around the pupa. This blew my mind! Experimentation has shown that it’s extra rich in tannin, which is why most ink recipes don’t mention it—it’s meant to be crushed with the rest to get all the tannins available for a nice black ink. But this particular ink was meant to be “golden yellow” (more realistically, light brown), and for this it needed removing. You can see this ink detailed here.

In both cases, simply interacting with the material made these passages clear!

Time to wrap up, but I hope you enjoyed this lengthy excursion into technical translation challenges.

1. They have their own name, which it would be a pity not to use: “balaustines”.

2. In fact it has become something of a signature, and I describe it in Wild Inks & Paints where I use it for all delicate flower hues.

3. MS Beirut AUB, Khoury 248, pp. 188–194

4. Raggetti, Lucia. “Cum Grano Salis. Some Arabic Ink Recipes in Their Historical and Literary Context.” Journal of Islamic manuscripts 7.3 (2016): 294–338. Web.

5. While writing this I was informed it’s also a standard expression used in distilling, to denote the best and most wanted product of the operation.

6. I’ve written about it in detail before. The red cannot be extracted without an alkali and the lack of mention of any such substance is a clue that red is not being extracted here, and safflower is not useful for any other purpose. Other Arabic texts of the period do describe the complete process, and it is the same as described by every other culture that has used this dye, because there simply is no other way. Only the sources of the alkali and acid vary.

7. Written in Stars: The Celestial Inks of the Astrological Decans (tentative title) by Jeremy Bechelli Ph.D., due to come out in Autumn 2025.

8. I shared my complete translations, including reasoning process, in a series of 4 substack posts:

Inks for Magic & Talismans, part 1

Inks for Magic & Talismans, part 2

Inks for Magic & Talismans, part 3

Inks for Magic & Talismans, part 4