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Al-Ahram Weekly 13 - 19 April 2000 Issue No. 477 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 13 - 19 April 2000 Issue No. 477
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Books Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The Moor in Mansoura
By Nehad Selaiha
In the autumn of 1962 I watched my first Arabic Othello at the old Opera House in Ataba Square. Khalil Mutran's recondite classical Arabic translation was an ideal medium for veteran classical actor Hamdi Gheith, who played the Moor, and gave him ample opportunity to flex his declamatory muscles. What has remained of this experience, after so many years, is an impression of heroic bombast and grandiloquent pathos. The final scene was the emotional peak of Gheith's performance: he began his "Soft you" speech in a low, rumbling voice which gradually rose in a menacing crescendo to a frenzied pitch in the words "and smote him thus" which accompanied the act of stabbing himself. A moment of deadly silence followed this verbal hurricane, then suddenly, Gheith flung his majestic corporeal mass on the floor and sent it hurtling down the steps leading from Desdemona's bed at the back, stopping just at the moment it seemed about to roll onto the laps of the audience in the first row.
Hussein Abdel-Qadir (a lecturer in psychology with a long history in the Egyptian theatre), who had played Cassio in the 1962 production, was among the company on the rickety bus which trundled us to Mansoura last week to watch Othello in colloquial Arabic. He introduced me to the translator, Mustafa Safwan, an eminent Egyptian psychoanalyst resident in Paris. At 79, he had more energy and mental agility than most of us and impressed us with his vast knowledge of Arabic, French and English literature. The conversation inevitably centred on the perennial and passionately controversial issue of colloquial versus classical Arabic. Safwan is a fervent champion of the former and a fierce opponent of the supremacy of the latter, describing it as a class-related form of oppression. Like Mustafa Musharafa, the Egyptian scientist who wrote a whole novel in colloquial Arabic in the twenties, the vast contingent of Arab dramatists and dramaturges who have fought over decades to crown it on the stage, and the many poets, including Bairam El-Tonsi, Salah Jahin and Fouad Hadad, who have honed it into an admirable vehicle for poetic expression, Safwan insists on writing in colloquial Arabic and regards the linguistic dichotomy in Arab societies as a highly destructive form of cultural schizophrenia and a tool of political and social hegemony.
As a life-long member of the left (whose father, though an Azharite sheikh, founded the first Egyptian socialist party in 1923 and was rewarded with a long spell in jail) Safwan's linguistic views have firm ideological underpinnings. He makes them amply clear in both his introduction to the text of his translation (published by the Anglo Bookshop) where he quotes from Dante's unfinished Latin treatise, De vulgari eloquentia, to support his argument, and his translator's note in the programme of the Mansoura production -- both written in colloquial Arabic. In the latter he succinctly says: "A people who do not respect the language they speak and consider it unfit for literature and education can never have self-respect, a say in the shaping of their destiny, or the power to make their rulers heed their will." Though colloquial Arabic has become an accepted medium for contemporary realistic drama, and is sporadically used in translations of foreign texts, including three Shakespearean comedies (Mohamed Enani's The Merry Wives of Windsor, Samir Sarhan's As You Like It and A Midsummer Night's Dream -- all performed in the eighties and all attacked for "degrading" the texts to the level of "street language") it has been almost completely banned in the area of tragedy -- almost, because in the early eighties, No'man Ashour, the father of Egyptian realistic drama, published a translation of Othello in colloquial Arabic in the Theatre Magazine. It was never performed and was generally dismissed as a mere whim, forgivable in a great author, and hopefully never to be repeated.
Safwan was not aware of Ashour's venture before embarking on his own, and though his translation is more accurate than Ashour's, and renders the original almost word for word, it does not feel, perhaps for this very reason, quite at home in the medium it uses. The words are colloquial, but the structure and idiom strike one as somewhat alien. This was particularly noticeable in Othello's speeches and poetic flights, and he was by far the character who suffered most in this transaction. Iago, uniformly prosaic and obscene, fared better; yet he too, as well as all the characters, used images, expressions, modes of swearing and syntactical constructions no colloquial Arabic-speaker (of whatever degree of education) would use. This is perhaps inevitable in any translation into colloquial Arabic (a volatile medium deeply enmeshed in contemporary social experience and everyday life) of a text which lies outside the boundaries of realism. And may be this is the cost Safwan has to pay for wanting to expand, renew, and enrich his chosen medium. In performance, however, one hardly had time to ponder such problems and incongruities; they were soon forgotten in the bustling spectacle on stage. The audience loved it, even though George Abyad, whose bombastic Othello frequently graced the boards between the wars, was frantically spinning in his grave.
