{"title":"A Portrait of the Mehmandar: Accompanying Hajji Baba, of Ispahan, to England","authors":"Alina Pelea","doi":"10.2478/ABCSJ-2019-0004","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract There are few professions and professionals to be constantly perceived as ambivalent. But for interpreting and interpreters, this seems to be the norm, rather than the exception. On the one hand, there has always been a sense of fascination for these extraordinary people who speak so many languages and have such a wide knowledge of the world. On the other, they have inspired reluctance, distrust or even fear. While literary works sometimes reflect one or the other perception, James Justinian Morier’s The Adventures of Hajji Baba, of Ispahan, in England (1828) reflects both and provides us with an insight into the nature and circumstances of the situation. By following the attitude towards the mehmandar throughout the novel, the present paper considers a set of memes that seem to be still valid today. The reasons this is so relate to features inherent in the profession, the privilege of understanding both sides ‘of the coin’, the power tamper with information, the risk of misunderstanding, etc.","PeriodicalId":37404,"journal":{"name":"American, British and Canadian Studies","volume":"15 1","pages":"36 - 51"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1000,"publicationDate":"2019-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"American, British and Canadian Studies","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.2478/ABCSJ-2019-0004","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISM","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract There are few professions and professionals to be constantly perceived as ambivalent. But for interpreting and interpreters, this seems to be the norm, rather than the exception. On the one hand, there has always been a sense of fascination for these extraordinary people who speak so many languages and have such a wide knowledge of the world. On the other, they have inspired reluctance, distrust or even fear. While literary works sometimes reflect one or the other perception, James Justinian Morier’s The Adventures of Hajji Baba, of Ispahan, in England (1828) reflects both and provides us with an insight into the nature and circumstances of the situation. By following the attitude towards the mehmandar throughout the novel, the present paper considers a set of memes that seem to be still valid today. The reasons this is so relate to features inherent in the profession, the privilege of understanding both sides ‘of the coin’, the power tamper with information, the risk of misunderstanding, etc.
期刊介绍:
Founded in 1999, American, British and Canadian Studies, the journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania, is currently published by Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu. Re-launched in refashioned, biannual format, American, British and Canadian Studies is an international, peer-reviewed journal that sets out to explore disciplinary developments in Anglophone Studies in the changing environment forged by the intersections of culture, technology and electronic information. Our primary goal is to bring together in productive dialogue scholars conducting advanced research in the theoretical humanities. As well as offering innovative approaches to influential crosscurrents in contemporary thinking, the journal seeks to contribute fresh angles to the academic subject of English and promote shape-changing research across conventional boundaries. By virtue of its dynamic and varied profile and of the intercultural dialogue that it caters for, ABC Studies aims to fill a gap in the Romanian academic arena, and function as the first publication to approach Anglophone studies in a multi-disciplinary perspective. Within the proposed range of diversity, our major scope is to provide close examinations and lucid analyses of the role and future of the academic institutions at the cutting edge of high-tech. With this end in view, we especially invite contributions in the fields of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Area Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Language and Linguistics, Multimedia and Digital Arts, Translation Studies and related subjects. With its wide subject range, American, British and Canadian Studies aims to become one of the academic community’s premium scholarly resources.