Before diving into the text, it is important to understand where this translation stands in the landscape of Islamic studies in Italy.
No work is without critique. Some Arabists have noted that Bausani’s obsessive pursuit of rhyme occasionally leads to semantic distortion. A word in Sura 108 (Al-Kawthar), for instance, might be stretched to fit a rhyme scheme, losing its precise nuance of “abundance.” Furthermore, his poetic approach sometimes obscures the legalistic, prosaic sections of the Quran (e.g., Sura 4 on inheritance), making them sound more lyrical than they actually are in the original.
Nevertheless, Bausani’s Il Corano remains a monument of European humanism. It proved that a non-Muslim scholar could produce a translation that is simultaneously faithful to the original Arabic, aesthetically courageous, and deeply respectful of Islamic piety. Later Italian translations (such as those by Ida Zilio-Grandi or Alberto Ventura) have updated the philology, but none have captured the raw, rhythmic urgency of Bausani’s vision. Bausani Il Corano.pdf
Despite its prestige, finding "Bausani Il Corano.pdf" is notoriously difficult. There are several reasons for this digital scarcity:
Given the legal gray areas surrounding the PDF, here are the best ways to access Bausani’s work: Before diving into the text, it is important
The physical copies of Bausani’s work, particularly the 1955 Sansoni first edition or the 2003 BUR edition, are long out of print or available only in specialized university libraries. Consequently, the digital search query Bausani Il Corano.pdf has exploded among three primary user groups:
The central thesis of Bausani’s introduction and his notes throughout Il Corano is the acknowledgment of the Quran’s structural inimitability (i‘jāz). Classical Islamic doctrine holds that the Quran is a miracle of language; its rhymed prose (saj‘), its abrupt syntactic shifts, and its phonetic density cannot be reproduced. Traditional Western translators—from Rodwell to Pickthall—often smoothed over these features to produce fluent, readable prose. Bausani, however, embraced the roughness. A word in Sura 108 ( Al-Kawthar ),
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 rhyme scheme 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.
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