A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature (3 page)

The ways in which such choices determine the translation of non-western literatures and the images of such literatures formed by western readers as a result have been investigated in recent years. It is well known, for example, that the ‘boom’ in Latin American writing that swept western publishing in the 1960s and 1970s, propelling a previously little-known body of work to international fame, took place in part because that writing answered to the needs of the western marketplace. It sold. According to one assessment, by the early 1970s North American and European readers ‘knew what they wanted from Latin America: magical realism … the genre which presented the region’s realities in hyperbolic surrealist terms, the genre which portrayed the exoticizing image of Latin America that readers found intriguing and entertaining, [and the genre that represented] a wild regressive liberating escape from the humdrum of ordinary progressive overly civilized life.’
⁴
This added up to an image of Latin American writing among European and North American readers that was not necessarily one that readers from one of the many countries involved may have had of their own society’s literary production. But it was an image that was self-perpetuating as far as western readers were concerned, since it dictated the works that publishers were likely to consider for publication and the choices made by those translating them.

While sales considerations dictate commercial choices, there are also aesthetic considerations underlying them. Readers of translated works of foreign literature tend to respond best to works that fit in with their pre-existing tastes and interests. While it is not impossible for a work that lies outside these to be successfully translated, marketed and sold, in this way creating the taste by which it is to be read, in general the closer a work lies to the expectations and interests of
foreign readers the more likely it is to be translated and the greater the success it is likely to enjoy in the target market, whatever that work’s status may be in its country of origin. ‘Magical realism’ answered notably well to a demand in western societies for a particular image of Latin America and for a type of literature that seemed to convey it. As a result, for a time Latin American literature
was
magical realism, even if, in fact, there were other competing styles.

While literary writing in Arabic did not benefit from the boom conditions that put Latin American literature on the map in the 1960s and 1970s, the processes underlying the translation of modern Arabic literature into European languages can be understood in similar terms. Until the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz in 1988, for example, modern Arabic literature was perhaps a literature of only marginal international interest, something indicated not only by the statistics for published literary translations from the Arabic, but also by the choice of works translated and the way in which these were promoted.

Salih Altoma, for example, notes that between 1947 and 1967, only sixteen modern literary titles were translated from Arabic into English, this picking up to a further eighty-four between 1967 and 1988, possibly as a result of political tensions in the Middle East and certainly thanks to the efforts of a handful of translators and a few dedicated publishers. After 1988, however, this trickle became a flood.
⁵
Early translations tended to be of works that could either be easily assimilated to western interests or that portrayed the West in a flattering light. They gave little sense of the literary landscape as a whole, or the place of the translated writers within it, as is perhaps indicated by the failure of repeated attempts to secure the Nobel Prize for Literature for Taha Hussein, one of the most important of all Arab writers, before the latter’s death in 1973. It is a sobering thought that even as late as the 1990s, according to a recent biographer, one of
the best-known Arab authors among western readers was Gibran Kahlil Gibran, an expatriate Lebanese whose writings served a taste for the exotic and the ‘spiritual’ in a manner drawing on late nineteenth-century symbolism. ‘He came from the East,’ his biographer writes, ‘which was beginning to be equated with a more spiritual approach to life.’
⁶
But Gibran’s meaning in the Arab context is quite different from that he was given, or played up to, among his western readers. Whereas in the Arab world Gibran is seen as a historically significant, though still minor, figure in the development of modern Arabic poetry, among western readers he has sometimes been taken at his own estimation as a kind of ‘prophetic’ writer, one who articulates supposedly eternal themes.
⁷

Works of modern Arabic literature that were translated up to as late as the 1970s commonly either served documentary purposes, giving information on ‘manners and customs’ in the manner of European travel literature though with greater claims to authenticity, or answered to particular western agendas, such as the desire to see the Arab world as ‘backward’, enlightenment coming to it as a result of the impact of the West, or Arab women, in particular, as repressed, achieving freedom through their adoption of what were seen as western ideas of female emancipation. The French writer Richard Jacquemond, for example, comments that Taha Hussein’s autobiography,
The Days
, and Tawfiq al-Hakim’s novel
Diary of a Country Prosecutor
(discussed in
Chapter 2
), were translated into French in the 1930s, probably in part because both works draw a contrast between a ‘backward’ native society and the impact of enlightened European ideas. This contrast is also apparent in translated works by Arab women, both then and now, those that are the most often translated drawing a contrast ‘between the liberating values associated with the West that their authors defend and the sexual oppression of the ‘oriental male’ that they denounce’.
⁸
This has led to decades of controversy over the translation and promotion in
the West of works by Arab women, from those of Out el-Koloub (written in French), criticized in the 1930s by Taha Hussein, to those of Nawal al-Saadawi, Alifa Rifaat and others, discussed in
Chapter 6
.

Following Mahfouz’s award of the Nobel Prize, however, the translation of modern Arabic literature received a tremendous fillip, though this success was not without ironies of its own. Arabic literature was still expected to conform to a particular western image of it, and anything not doing so found a foreign market only with difficulty, or not at all. While Mahfouz was remarkable for having reinvented himself more than once over the course of a long career, many of his most accomplished novels, dating from the 1950s, are written according to the familiar canons of nineteenth-century realism. This means that much of his best work is not representative of the work of Arab writers from the 1970s to the present day. Yet, such features of Mahfouz’s career, and of the post-war development of modern Arabic literature more generally, were flattened out in the reception of the novels in the West. For many western readers, modern Arabic literature was understood to be simply rather like the earlier works of Naguib Mahfouz. Moreover, while Mahfouz is often read in the Arab world as an experimental, or even subversive writer, in western societies he has tended to be seen as a kind of latter-day Dickens, accomplished certainly, and containing lots of local ‘colour’, but easily assimilated as a kind of fluent foreign pupil of established European styles. Jacquemond, for example, comments that Mahfouz has commonly been received abroad as the ‘ethnographer of the “ordinary people of Cairo”, who have been frozen into the “brightly coloured” image that their “chronicler” has produced of them, like figures in an orientalist painting.’
⁹
Nothing could be further from the truth.

Taken together, these factors have tended to produce an image of modern Arab literature that is both old-fashioned and picturesque, even Mahfouz’s success with international readers having produced an
idea of the literature as a whole that is in many respects misleading. Who would have guessed from the reception of Mahfouz’s earlier novels that their author was also the author of experimental, ‘modernist’ thrillers? Or that the earlier novels are politically engaged? Or, indeed, that modern Arabic literature, at least from the 1960s on, has in large part consisted of writing that is quite unlike the earlier or later works of Mahfouz? (It has, of course, been even more unlike the works of Gibran.) Fortunately, the greater availability of translations today, and the greater transparency of the Arab world in the post-cold war period, has meant that many, though by no means all, of these preconceptions are disappearing.

Such issues have to do with the expectations that western readers may bring to literary texts translated from the Arabic and the kinds of text that may be offered to them. They also have to do with the limited options available to Arab writers wishing to build an international career and the few niches available to them in the international marketplace. Yet there are also other, perhaps more technical, issues to bear in mind when reading Arabic literature in translation, as in reading any translation, and these include the ways in which unfamiliar cultural and other references in the ‘source’ text are rendered in the ‘target language’ of the translation. How much is it necessary to know about the societies from which they come in order to enjoy these foreign texts? Such issues are complicated in the case of translation from Arabic by the diversity of the Arab world and by specific features of the Arabic language.

There was a time when it was standard practice when translating literature from Arabic into English to do so in an antiquated style, as if the intention was to cast an air of mystery or exoticism over the text. Nineteenth-century translations of classical works of Arabic literature, such as Burton’s version of
The Arabian Nights
, are famous for this style, ‘a sort of composite mock-Gothic, combining elements from Middle English, the Authorised Version of the Bible
and Jacobean drama,’ in the words of one commentator,
¹⁰
though in an era when ‘modern’ poetry could still be written in the medieval idiom of Tennyson it was perhaps considered natural to render foreign material in the language of Fitzgerald’s
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
(supposedly a ‘translation’ from Persian).
¹¹
However, ‘antiquing’ of this sort has sometimes also been considered appropriate even for works of modern Arabic literature, with the result that characters speaking the modern language have been given a spurious ‘medieval’ or ‘exotic’ feel. Perhaps this is what Said had in mind when he criticized a tendency among European writers to supply ‘orientals with a [picturesque] mentality, a genealogy, an atmosphere’ that placed them firmly in the past. Early twentieth-century Arab poets come out sounding like minor nineteenth-century romantics or eighteenth-century clergymen, for example, in A. J. Arberry’s versions of them, still among the few available.
¹²
Moreover, in the case of translating Arabic general problems of translation are heightened by the existence of a ‘gap’ between the languages that is as much cultural as linguistic. It is unfortunately true that an informed reading of Arabic literature calls for some knowledge of Arab culture and societies. Fortunately, however, this knowledge can be acquired precisely through reading works of literature.

The first chapter of the English translation of Mahfouz’s novel
Palace Walk
, the first of the novels making up the
Cairo Trilogy
, for example, includes the following paragraph reproducing the thoughts of Amina, wife of Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, who is a member of Cairo’s early twentieth-century middle class:

She had been terrified of the night when she had first lived in this house. She knew far more about the world of the jinn than that of mankind and remained convinced that she was not alone in the big house. There were demons who could not be lured away from these spacious, empty old rooms for long. Perhaps they had sought refuge there before she herself had been brought to the
house, even before she saw the light of day. She frequently heard their whispers. Time and again she was awakened by their warm breath. When she was left alone, her only defence was reciting the opening prayer of the Qur’an and sura one hundred and twelve from it, about the absolute supremacy of God, or rushing to the lattice-work screen at the window to peer anxiously through it at the lights of the carts and the coffeehouses, listening carefully for a laugh or a cough to help her regain her composure.
¹³

In their translation, the translators suggest both the particular situation of Amina, who comes from a traditional family and whose husband has confined her to the house, and the general costs that traditional life entails for women like her in terms of their isolation and segregation from the world outside. Amina is illiterate, and the modernization that was to be such a feature of twentieth-century Arab societies has not yet reached the Cairo middle classes, particularly not the female members of them. Taken as a whole, the
Cairo Trilogy
can be understood as a kind of ‘grand narrative’ that shows the passing of traditionalist conceptions of life, as well as of much of the patriarchal authority that sustained them.

These considerations are certainly present in the original text, and the translators have preserved features of it like the
jinn
and the
suras
from the
Qur’an
without resorting to footnotes or paraphrased explanation. While the
jinn
may be familiar to western readers as the often malevolent beings described as ‘genies’ in translations of
The Arabian Nights
, the
suras
, or chapters, of the
Qur’an
may be less so.
Sura
112, for example, which consists of just four lines of text, is usually called ‘The Unity’ in English, since it deals with the oneness of God, while the opening prayer of the
Qur’an
is termed the
Fatiha
, which means the ‘opening’, or introduction, to the whole. Any translator of Arabic literature needs to strike a balance between references that western readers may reasonably be expected to know (such as to the
jinn
), those that they can infer (that a
sura
is a chapter
of the
Qur’an
), and those that they may not know but that are not strictly necessary to appreciate the text. The ‘lattice-work screen’ that Amina peers through onto the street below is
mashrabiyya
, for example, a form of decorative turned wood that made it possible for women to see out of their houses without being seen in them. It will be familiar to anyone who knows the traditional areas of Cairo and other Arab cities.