29 March - 4 April 2001
Issue No.527
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 29 March - 4 April 2001 Issue No.527 |
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Plain Talk
I have some good news for our writers. After five years of the interruption of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, it has been revived in association with the Arts Council of England. The prize of 10,000 sterling pounds aims at encouraging readers and publishers to look beyond the fiction of the English-speaking world. According to statistics translations account for 3% of books published in Britain, as compared with 30% and more in other European states.
This year a committee of leading writers and critics, including Patricia Duncker, Elaine Feinstein, Amanda Hopkinson and Grace Kempste selected a short list of six books from Italy, Germany, France and -- here is the surprise -- Egypt.
Among the two French novels is Michael Houellebecq's Atomised, a novel which caused quite a furor in France when it was first published. "Through the lives of a pair of half brothers, and excursions into social satire and science fiction," Atomised, as mentioned in an article in The Independent, "depicts the rootless tribe of hedonists and nihilists in France whose pursuit for pleasure leads to despair."
The novel was praised by one writer as "a novel which hunts big game while others settle for shooting rabbits," while a member of the Committee denounced it as "undoubtedly obscene." The other short-listed French novel is Mark Dugain's The Officers Ward, a portrait of a group of disfigured WWI war casualties, and which has already gleaned several awards in France.
The two short-listed Italian novels are The Alphonse Courrier Affair and The Missing Head of Damascento Monteiro. Then there is the German novel Hans Ulrich Treichel's Lost which depicts a family's tragi-comic search in the years of Germany's postwar economic miracle for a lost son.
The Egyptian novel short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize is May Telmissany's Dunyazad, translated by Roger Allen, a leading Arabist and head of the Department of Oriental Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. The novel, as described by the article in The Independent, "sets the tragedy of its heroine... in Cairo's fast changing society... Here against a subtly sketched backdrop of insecure, middle class Cairo, the narrator mourns the prenatal death of her first daughter... Here is a deep, universal grief, etched with energy and tenderness onto a sharply local setting."
It gave a real pleasure to see in The Independent the cover of the Saqi Books-published English translation of May Telmissany's Dunyazad among those of the other short-listed five novels. Telmissany is quite well known in Egypt, but the translation of her novel poses an important question: how are books selected for translations? There is no doubt that translation is a personal thing. The selection of a book for translation depends, to a great extent, on the taste of either the publishing house or the translator.
Another question is how can we interest translators and foreign publishers in publishing modern Egyptian literature? I know that the American University Press is doing a wonderful job in this field, but how about other British and American publishers. At one time the International PEN used to publish a small magazine, Selected Works, which provided synopses of newly published works in languages other than English and French. I managed to publish in its issues synopses of some of Egypt's leading works and, indeed, a number of them were taken up by foreign publishers.
Now the PEN has stopped this publication, but, perhaps, our State Publishing House can start issuing a similar magazine. It is certainly worth thinking of.
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