Bausani Il Corano.pdf ✦

In his extensive introductory essay (often published separately as L’Islam or included in the front matter of Il Corano ), Bausani frames the Quran as the verbal incarnation of the Divine Logos in an Islamic key. He compares its function to that of Christ in Christianity: just as Christ is the eternal Word made flesh, the Quran is the eternal Word made book. This analogy, while not orthodox for either religion, opened a comparative space for Western readers to approach the Quran with a form of “secular reverence.” Bausani taught his audience to listen to the text, not just analyze it.

The persistence of the search query is a testament to the enduring power of great translation. In an age of machine learning and AI translations, users are still hunting for a 70-year-old paper artifact because Bausani succeeded in a nearly impossible task: he made the Quran sound like Italian, but feel like Arabic. Bausani Il Corano.pdf

Reading the Quran is not like reading a novel. Here is how to approach Bausani’s translation effectively: The persistence of the search query is a

He argued that the Quran’s power lies precisely in what Western critics might call its “non-literary” qualities: the sudden ruptures of narrative, the oscillation between the majestic plural of God and the intimate singular, the hypnotic repetition of rhymes. In his translation, Bausani famously attempted to preserve the of the original Arabic, even at the cost of Italian syntax. For example, where another translator might write “By the sun and its brightness,” Bausani would twist the Italian to end with a stressed vowel sound that mimics the Arabic wāw or nūn . This choice was controversial; critics accused him of producing an unnatural, forced Italian. Yet, this very “unnaturalness” becomes a theological statement: the language of revelation is not meant to sound like a newspaper. Here is how to approach Bausani’s translation effectively: