I think that the best way to handle the preposition في is to turn it into a colon.

You can go extremely literal on this one by referring to these women as "cloistered," "draped," or "veiled," but I think such a treatment would miss the point. Zeinab's point in referring to these women as ربات الخدور was partly honorific and partly to create a rhyming effect.

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Note added at 2003-10-22 05:08:58 (GMT) Post-grading
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Rhymes, whether in prose or poetry, require special care. The title of this book is a case in point. The author wrote a biographical encyclopedia of women, organized in a chronological or generational sequence. The author could have entitled her book \"A Chronological Encyclopedia of Women Biographies,\" but, following the practice of her generation, she couched the very same meaning in a fancy rhyming title. To do so, she used a combination of techniques:

1. Using the rhetorical device of kenning, she referred to women by a distinguishing attribute, RABBAT AL-KHUDOOR (\"dwellers of the private quarters\"). That is neither fresh nor clever. It is just a cliche that suited her traditionalist style of writing.

2. To create the rhyming effect, she plastered on another stock phrase, commonly used as a book title, namely Al-Durr Al-Manthoor (\"Scattered Pearls\").

Confronted with this extravagance, the translator sees the text as a counterpoint of meanings:

- A basic layer, roughly translated \"A Chronological Encyclopedia of Women Biographies.\"

- A superficial (or literal) layer, roughly translated \"Scattered Pearls of Generations of Dwellers of Private Quarters.\"

- A rhyming effect

Ideally, the translator would want to convey all of these together in a phrase that carries a fairly transparent meaning and sounds tolerably natural in English. Being only human, a translator is forced to be selective. Translation, in other words, is an art of compromise. That is one reason no two translation are ever the same. As artists of compromise, our priorities are different.

For instance, one translator may choose to favor the rhyme:

Scattered Pearls on the Generations of Cloistered Girls.

Here pearls and girls rhyme, but an essential part of the meaning is lost. The author is referring to women or ladies, not girls. Not good enough.

Another translator may favor the kenning device without the rhyme:

Scattered Pearls of Generations of Dwellers of the Private Quarters.

This sounds downright ridiculous because the kenning has lost its literary value in the target language. For one thing, \"Dwellers of the Private Quarters\" has none of its original cognitive value. In the tradition served by the English language, sequestering in private quarters is not an immediately recognizable characteristic of women. One can try to hold on to the original meaning by forcing the word \"women\" into the phrase, as in \"secluded women.\" But that is cheating. The whole idea of kenning is not to name the item, but only to describe it. To quote Al-Munabbi:

ومن يصفك فقد سماك للعرب

Secondly, one reason the Arabic reader is willing to tolerate such a tired phrase as RABBAT AL-KHUDOOR is that it is couched in a rhyme. By using “secluded women,” the English title loses the rhyme, so part of the justification of the kenning device is gone.

My approach was to:

1. Give priority to the basic meaning, namely a generational encyclopedia of women, without using these very same words. Everything else is dispensable.

2. Retain as much of the rhetorical content as possible without jeopardizing the basic meaning. For instance, \"Scattered Pearls\" can be retained, especially since it corresponds to the part of the title that is often used as an abbreviation of the whole title.

3. Utilize modern English punctuation to structure the translation into proper English style. In this case, the colon serves to create a sense of expectation after the unusual phrase \"Scattered Pearls.\"

There is nothing perfect about this approach. Translation is not about perfection. It is about judicious compromise.

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Note added at 2003-10-22 05:10:42 (GMT) Post-grading
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The above notes are in response to Ahmed\'s comment below. I should have labeled my notes appropriately at the top.