NYRB: "[Arthur] Arberry's most lasting contribution [to Koranic translation] was his idea of the Qur'an as a performative text, a script for recitation, which asked translators to use their ears as well as their dictionaries"
"This is also the approach of Michael Sells, another scholar and translator of pre-Islamic and mystical poetry, whose Approaching the Qur'an (1999) is an influential refinement of Arberry's inisights"
"Like Arberry, Sells highlights the believer's 'oral encounter' with the Qur'an: a continuous experience of hearing, memorizing, and voicing the words [...] Sells characterizes the early revelations as 'hymnic,' with a sweeping lyricism and intricate sound patterning brought out by reading aloud"
NYRB cautiouns us that "[I]t is very hard to convey the oral features of Arabic, or any other language, in an English text" though praises Sells for being "a skilled and generous listener" and acknowledges that his translations are "acoustically adventuresome"