Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2016 July 5

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July 5

Returning hero motif

There are several tales and legends about various future returns of certain characters, such as king in the mountain, Rory who will save Ireland or two priests who disappeared into the walls during the fall of Constantinople and who will return once the city becomes Christian again. Is there a common name for such a motif / trope? Brandmeister^talk 07:50, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

tvtropes.org calls it King in the Mountain [1] with many examples.
Sleigh (talk) 08:27, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

Indeed, our king in the mountain article describes "a prominent motif" rather than one specific story and includes a list of examples. Alansplodge (talk) 11:21, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

"When Johnny Comes Marching Home" somewhat falls into this category. StuRat (talk) 20:17, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

an accurate and scientific translation of Quran

I don't know Arabic and I want to read Quran for the first time. I heard that most of the translations are biased. Could you please offer an accurate, scientific and neutral translation of Quran? 46.225.1.83 (talk) 09:30, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

I'm not sure that any translation of so contentious a work can ever be considered "neutral", which is ultimately a political term. Here is a 2005 article that might help you in "Assessing English Translations of the Qur'an". This is the Wikipedia article on English translations of the Quran; it lists dozens of versions in the 21st century alone, so I understand why you feel the need for guidance. The external links to that article may help you. One of the most recent translations, and one released by a mainstream American publisher, is The Study Quran; from a CNN article about it:

"I never advise a non-Muslim who wants to find out more about Islam to blindly grab the nearest copy of an English-language Quran they can find," Mehdi Hasan, a journalist for Al Jazeera, said during the panel discussion at Georgetown. Ten years in the making, "The Study Quran" is more than a rebuttal to terrorists, said Seyyed Hossein Nasr, an Iranian-born intellectual and the book's editor-in-chief. His aim was to produce an accurate, unbiased translation understandable to English-speaking Muslims, scholars and general readers.

But then, who is going to say that their aim is to produce an inaccurate, biased version? So ultimately, you will have to make up your own mind. Carbon Caryatid (talk) 16:30, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

Excellent summary, @Carbon Caryatid:, nothing to add to a very contentious subject indeed, but that I've updated English translations of the Quran to include basic details from the cited CNN ref on The Study Quran.

My favorite of four translations I've dipped into over the years, I must admit, as it explicitly deals with the very many complementary and conflicting commentaries over the last 1,400 years (perhaps uniquely, with both Shiite and Sunni traditions well represented) and has many additional helpful aids.

Very much in the line of the the trusty Harper Study Bible. Highly recommended and worthy of an article, if scholarly reviews are to be treated as reliable sources to the notability of this publication. -- Paulscrawl (talk) 22:53, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

I can get you a completely unbiased translation, but it may make translation mistakes, and its English isn't that good. For al-Baqara, go to [2]. Nyttend (talk) 01:22, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Actually, you can never guarantee that a Google Translation will be unbiased. It works primarily by corpus translation – comparing versions of the same document in different languages to work out how one language maps onto the other. If its corpus includes a biased translation of a text, it will blindly use it in future translations. Smurrayinchester 15:13, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

It might be helpful to read more than one translation at a time. There are websites that give several translations of the Qur'an alongside the Arabic, such as Alim.org, Qur'an Browser, Qur'an Online, and the most comprehensive one that I know of, Islam Awakened, which has 40 different translations, separated into generally accepted and controversial ones. There are surely many other websites that do this too. Nothing quite as extensive as some of the Bible websites that give different translations, but Islam Awakened might be the best place to look. Typically the websites have the translation by Marmaduke Pickthall, as well as Abdullah Yusuf Ali's The Holy Qur'an: Translation and Commentary, and maybe some others. If you see a translation called "Noble Qur'an", that's probably the Interpretation of the Meanings of the Noble Qur'an, which is very popular, but it's the "official" translation of the Saudi government and it's been criticized for being heavily biased towards Wahhabism.

Personally, I have Yusuf Ali's translation. It's probably the most widely read one, and probably the easiest to find if you want an actual physical book (or at least it used to be, before The Noble Qur'an was published). But it's also the one that was promoted by the Saudis before The Noble Qur'an, so it has problems too. Adam Bishop (talk) 10:33, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

I would also suggest to get an edition with an apparatus and scholarly comments - reading a text from a different culture that is many hundred years old is not trivial (heck, even reading a text from the contemporary US on hot-button issues like gun control or abortion leaves many Europeans scratching their heads). --Stephan Schulz (talk) 18:06, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

Regarding translation generally, it isn't really possible to have a 100% accurate 1-to-1 translation from any language to any other. Esch language has a slightly different nuance, grammatical construction, and cultural milieu. So all translations have a bias due to the translator, intentional or not. Mingmingla (talk) 01:23, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

Mikhail Tikhanov

Where can I find the complete list of works by Mikhail Tikhanov (1789-1862), the artist of Vasily Golovnin's circumnavigation aboard the Kamchatka? Here are the ones that I know of on commons:Category:Mikhail Tikhanov. His name is also spelled differently in different sources as well. There is one I am especially interested in finding depicting a Hawaiian girl with her pet dog in her hands.--KAVEBEAR (talk) 17:01, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

I've browsed Russian sources, this one says he made 43 watercolor paintings and 17 of his works were selected as illustrations for Golovnin's book. Per the same source, 2 of his works depict the Brazilian part of the expedition, 4 - the Peruvian part, 18 - the Aleutian and Alaskan part, 5 are from the Californian part, 5 from Mariana Islands, 3 from Manila, 4 from Hawaii, of which one is a portrait of Kamehameha I. Tikhanov appears to be quite underresearched even in Russia. Brandmeister^talk 08:00, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

More information can be found in this paper by Yu.S. Rutenko (also in Russian). In particular, it refers to a 1974 article by L.A. Shur (Л.А. Шур) published in Латинская Америка, No.5, pp.163–180, which might be also useful. A couple of his paintings are in Tretyakov Gallery, I will try to check their catalog a bit later. — Adavyd (talk) 15:53, 7 July 2016 (UTC)