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Al-Ahram Weekly 3 - 9 February 2000 Issue No. 467 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 3 - 9 February 2000 Issue No. 467
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Special Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Hall of mirrors
By Mursi Saad El-Din
When, in the course of the 32nd Cairo International Book Fair, the AUC Press organised a seminar to discuss the issue of translating modern Arabic literature into English, I was delighted to receive an invitation. The panel of speakers, moreover, was particularly diverse, including eminent representatives of the various professions to which the issue of translation pertains: Abdel-Moneim Teliema (professor of Arabic Literature), Fatma Moussa (professor of English Literature), Anthony Calderbank (professor of Arabic Studies at AUC), and Miral El-Tahawi, the young novelist whose recent novel Al-Khibaa' (The Tent) was translated into English by Calderbank, and myself.
It opened with an introductory speech by Mark Linz, head of AUC Press, in which he welcomed all present, explaining that the press was celebrating its 40th year. He also underlined its role in presenting modern Arabic literature to English readers: Naguib Mahfouz tops the list with 20 of his novels translated into English through AUC Press. Yet out of 60,000 English-language translations of books from the whole world, modern Arabic literature claims a fraction of merely one per cent. Linz concluded on the hopeful note that the role of AUC Press in this field will help significantly increase this percentage by developing and enlarging the field.
Aleya Sorour introduced the speakers; it fell to my shoulders, alas, to start the conversation off. Translation is of course more of an issue in this age of globalisation, but one would hardly have deemed it important enough to be the subject of two International PEN Club forums, held in Rome in 1961 and, more recently, in New York. Evidently, and regardless of globalising trends, it has been considered an issue of prime importance throughout the world for some time now. In Egypt alone quite a number of seminars and conferences were held, and while it is true that the main questions of translation have been well-known and widely discussed for a very long time indeed, a seminar like this one helps relocate them in the contemporary context.
All translation presupposes choice, because it is impossible to translate any major literature in its entirety. The choice is determined partly by the personal taste of the translator or the publisher and often by commercial considerations. A translated novel is hard pressed to compete commercially with works written originally in the target language, in this case English. A translation is handicapped from the start by the strangeness of its content, the literary style which can never have the flavour of that of an original work and, on top of all this, its sheer cost.
While translations in Western countries are governed by personal and commercial conditions, in Egypt translations have become part and parcel of the official cultural policy. It all started with the move towards translating works from Arabic into English and French through the Higher Council of Arts and Literature back in the 1960s, a task that is now undertaken by the General Egyptian Book Organisation (GEBO). AUC Press is now the only other institution committed to an ongoing policy of translating modern Arabic literature and thus propagating works not only by Naguib Mahfouz but by many other writers as well.
In her speech Moussa concentrated on Naguib Mahfouz and her own experience of translating him. She said she had followed the course of the move towards making translation a large-scale endeavour from its earliest phases, translating Mahfouz's Miramar -- a novel that was published in book form in 1967, after being serialised in Al-Ahram in the autumn of 1966. The novel, in her opinion, offered bold insights into the workings of the regime and the various institutions through which it exercised its powers, notably the Socialist Union. It revealed the truth about totalitarianism long before it became known (after the 1967 defeat); yet somehow Mahfouz got away with what he had written.
Moussa went on to express the opinion that rendering the text accurately and producing a readable piece of literature are equally important. What served Russian literature in the West so well, she argued, was the fact that it was translated by creative writers; the same should go for the translation of Arabic literature. Moussa closed with a eulogy paying tribute to Denys Johnson-Davies, the main figure in the field of translating modern Egyptian literature into English.
Night and day, writers and readers mingle in some shapeless hotchpotch of intellectual and cultural activity: readings, screenings, even whirling dervishes have found their place in the 32nd Cairo International Book Fair
photos: Moussa Mahmoud
Teliema supplied the seminar with a strong academic component. He started by saying that Arabic literature has been available to Western audiences since the 10th century. Europe knew it through Latin translations, The Discourse of Ibn Abbas and Risalet Al-Ghofran by Abul Alaa Al-Mi'arri being among the earliest examples. There is even evidence that Dante's Divine Comedy was significantly influenced by Al-Mi'arri. The 11th century saw the translation of Arabic love poems in Sicily and Andalusia which made a significant impact on the Troubadours.
In the 12th century the teachings of the Arab-Spanish philosopher Averroes were circulated in European universities including the University of Padua, for at that time no academic degree was awarded to anyone who hadn't examined his work. When printing was introduced by Guttenburg in the 14th century a number of Arabic texts in translation were published, including The Koran, Ibn Rushd, Ibn Khaldun as well as some pre-Islamic poetry. In 1850 the first book on Arabic literature was published by a German orientalist; then came the work of Brockelman, and a number of Arabs like Gorgi Zeidan, Ahmed Hassan Al-Zayat and Shawki Deif.
At the present time, Teliema concludes, interest in Arabic literature is still picking up momentum. Having spent 10 years in Japan he saw the development of interest in Arabic literature: The Koran, Ibn Khaldun and the Arabian Nights were translated into Japanese and now there are an astounding number of Japanese Arabic experts. In 1992 the Arabian Nights appeared in Japanese in 20 volumes. Teliema was involved with the translation, which finally won an Imperial prize.
Teliema nonetheless believes that there have been obstacles in the way of translating Arabic literature, one of which is the post-colonial situation which inevitably results in an Arab-Western intellectual exchange whose main components are political and economic. Yet these obstacles have been partly removed: Egyptian works have been published both in Paris and Vienna; and the Barcelona meeting held in December 1995 was attended by 12 Arab countries which signed a cultural manifesto.
In a meeting between President Mubarak and President Mitterrand, the latter said: "Mr President, I have behind me 55 countries, you have behind you 56; if we work together in the field of culture we shall achieve a great deal." Already there is an ongoing project for translation into French of 100 Egyptian books and into Arabic of the same number of French texts.
El-Tahawi talked mainly about her own experience, first in seeing her novel translated, an unusual surprise. She discussed her experience of various international and Mediterranean seminars in which Arabic literature was completely absent while African literature was represented. A plan to involve a certain African publisher in the translation of Arabic literature, she said, never materialised. El-Tahawi lamented the fact that it was Francophone Arab writers from North Africa who contributed most to these seminars, even though they neither read nor wrote in Arabic. She concluded by expressing her gratitude to AUC Press, without which her novel would not have been available in English.
Anthony Calderbank, who concentrated on the practical side of the problems of Arabic-English translation, spoke last. The nature of language, he said, makes translating an ultimately frustrating endeavour. Each word or phrase in Arabic has its physical form and its peculiar connotation, and these can never be duplicated with complete accuracy in English. The paradox of language is that it expresses universal characteristics best in its most local registers. He mentioned a number of these difficulties, for instance in translating a simple phrase like al-hamdulilla. Translating from colloquial Arabic, too, poses its own problems, which Calderbank encountered while translating El-Tahawi's Tents.
What can be deduced from the seminar is that, in the words of J.G. Weightman -- a leading translator and theorist on this art -- translation "is a long, slow process of compromise, like ceaselessly reflecting objects in a distorting mirror with the hope, each time, that the reflection will be accurate, although one knows that this is impossible".
