In our increasingly globalized world, the importance of understanding other languages and means of communication cannot be understated. Communication is the gateway to collaboration and growth, and nobody knows this more than Maurice Pomerantz, Program Head of Arab Crossroads and Associate Professor of Literature at NYUAD.

“Ultimately I was taken in by the beauty of the Arabic language far more than the study of history or religion or even culture … language, for me, was the great window,” explained Pomerantz, who studied Classics as an undergraduate before moving on to specialize in History. However, that path soon changed thanks to his “wonderful advisor” Wadad Al-Qadi.

“She told me one day in class that I was very literary, and at the time I think I might have taken it as an insult,” he chuckled. The irony that his current field of study is translating and analyzing texts for the Library of Arabic Literature is clearly not lost on him.

The opportunity to live in Abu Dhabi and contribute to such a library was a dream for him and may have been an unthinkable enterprise even a decade ago. When Pomerantz was completing his graduate degree at the University of Chicago, there was only one other person of a similar age studying classical Arabic literature in the entire country: Dr. Bilal Orfali.

Even though interest in Arabic and Islamic studies increased following the Sept. 11 attacks, he believed that the focus remained in the spheres of history and religion. "I never thought that I would be able to work on a project which valued a lot of the things that I value and put them at the forefront of what it was to do work in our field,” Pomerantz recalled, explaining his perception of the constraints at the time.

Fortunately, Pomerantz had plenty of opportunities to travel to many Arabic speaking countries such as Egypt, Yemen and Lebanon. It was in Beirut that he started working on one of the most famous texts in the Arabic literary canon with Dr. Orfali. The text is a series of short stories known as the maqama, and what started as an attempt to create a new translation ended with Pomerantz and Orfali discovering a never-before-seen story in one of the original manuscripts.

Those unfamiliar with the work of translators may ask: how do you ‘lose’ and subsequently ‘discover’ text on a manuscript that has been carefully preserved over centuries? To start, texts are not typically stored as a complete version; instead, fragments are spread across major libraries around the world, and systems to request and receive images of these manuscripts have only started to get easier over the past decade. “Before it used to be like twenty [manuscripts per compact disc], but now on a hard drive you can get thousands of manuscripts,” Pomerantz described.

Additionally, before the sudden uptick in interest in Arabic literature, rather than having multiple versions of the same texts, only one or two translations, which were often outdated, were used without question. For instance, in the case of the maqama, Pomerantz and Orfali were motivated to create a new translation because the most popular one was intended to be taught as a school textbook, so the editor had removed all of the vulgar language.

Overreliance on one translation of a text can cause stagnation because scholars can only get a variety of interpretations and perspectives on a text when multiple meanings of the words are exposed. For example, look at what happened when Emily Wilson became the first woman to translate the Odyssey — the first line singing Odysseus’ praises became: “Tell me about a complicated man”.

Orfali and Pomerantz’s discovery of the lost text was like solving a particularly tricky jigsaw puzzle. “In a kind of frantic night we pieced together that the scribe had actually copied the leaves of this manuscript out of order, and the maqama made sense except it sort of broke in the middle,” Pomerantz revealed. ”The real panic was whether we were going to find the other half, and we did, and we put it together.”

According to Pomerantz, the main takeaway from their work is the importance of looking back at old manuscripts, even for the most famous texts in the canon, because you never know what sections or interpretations may have been forgotten or even still be waiting to be found. “The discovery of the lost maqama” may have been the highlight of his career by his own admission, but Pomerantz has received esteem and recognition for many other works. His doctoral thesis, “Licit Magic,” about the 10th century belletrist al-Sahib ibn Abbad received an award from Iran’s Ministry of Culture.

Another book Pomerantz worked on has just been released. The Philosopher Responds is a two volume translation of one philosopher’s questions about the world, and another philosopher attempting to answer them. Pomerantz was one of a team of six people who translated and edited the text, which is another example of how uniquely essential collaboration with others has become to Arabic Studies. It isn’t especially common for scholars to work together within the humanities, but Pomerantz gives his colleagues great credit for the work he has produced.

“I’ve learned a lot from the texts themselves but I also learn a lot from listening to the other opinions of my partner in all this,” Pomerantz praised. ”Everything gets better in the end and I’m really proud of that.”

In a field as diverse and rapidly expanding as Arabic Studies, it is no longer enough for a scholar to be immersed in just one field. Translators are not just linguists: they must also be historians, philosophers and skilled writers in their own right.

“The challenge of the scholar is actually wearing multiple hats and that is not easy — it’s hard enough to wear one,” Pomerantz quipped. But the results of the hard work done in translating and contextualizing centuries-old texts are more than worth it to him.

“[These writers] were masters of the word. They knew how to draw in people. They knew how to create worlds through words and our job is...on the one hand to not get in their way, but at the same time help that spirit come to modern readers, because if you are a reader of this literature...you cannot but see its beauty,” Pomerantz extolled. “So that, I think, is really what scholars need to do to grow a field: to be passionate and keep producing work that is compelling.”