The Arab translator as hero

Abstract

The article examines fiction where the protagonist is an Arab translator to explore the significance of centralizing the role of the translator and what theoretical implications about translation can be extracted from such works. The image of the translator varies in these works from that of a tragic hero, a romantic hero, an ironic hero, a collaborating hero, a comic hero, and an impotent hero. Whereas all these works discuss translation and what it implies for cultural exchange and encounters, the emphasis is on fidelity versus creative license in the process of translation. These concepts invariably relate to power since fidelity is governed by a prior text where the translator is captive to wording while in creative rendering the translator is on equal footing with the author and may accomplish a text parallel to the source. The underlying power dimension and the failure of translators in these works point obliquely to the anxiety of intellectuals in the face of authority.

Keywords:

• fictional turn
• translator fiction
• J.L. Borges
• L. Aboulela
• M.I. al-Sagr
• I. Kachachi
• F. Haddad
• A. Mamdouh

Notes

1. The translator, Anthony Kerrigan, took it upon himself to remove one of the Muhammads in the name given by Borges. Borges opens the short story by giving the full name of the protagonist: ‘Abulgualid Muhammád Ibn-Ahmad ibn-Muhammád ibn-Rushd’. In the translation of the same story by James E. Irby the full name is given as in Borges (1964), without anglicizing the spelling of the hispanized ‘Abulgualid’ and turning it into ‘Abu al-Walid’. I think the anglicization of the transliterated name is the right thing for a translator to do, but the omission of one of the Muhammáds is unfortunate (even though the second Muhammád is an addition by Borges; it is not mentioned in the standard references to Ibn Rushd). The repetition creates a poetic strangeness, justified by the subject matter and the ambience it attempts to create. Borges himself said, in a Columbia University translation seminar:

Following the original Arabic word order, he [Burton] called his book The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. Now there he created something not to be found in the original, since to anyone who knows Arabic the phrase isn’t at all strange; it’s the normal way of saying it. But in English it sounds very strange, and there is a certain beauty attained, in this case, through literal translation. (Giovanni, Halpern, and MacShane 1973: 104)

2. What is in the spelling of a name? It seems everything that matters is in the spelling of a name. In an article by Pascale Ghazaleh (1998), she comments on the debates of Middle Eastern historians and the discussion revolving around transliteration of the name of Mohamed Ali (and thus his identity):

Should it be written Muhammad Ali, as Arabists would prefer? Or would Mehmet Ali (as pronounced in Turkish) be more reflective of the fact that the Pasha and his entourage belonged … to the ‘Ottoman-Egyptian elite’? In Lefevere and Bassnett (1990) “Introduction” to their book, they mention a similar anecdote in Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe. Proust’s grandmother expressed utter displeasure in a new translation of the Arabian Nights, in which the earlier rendering of ‘Caliph”’ was mutilated beyond recognition in the new version, rendered as ‘Khalifat’ (1–2).

3. Anthropologists have discussed the difficulty of translating terms and terminology embedded in one culture, yet absent in another. Evans-Pritchard (1965, 13) concludes that there can only be partial overlap of meaning in translating key concepts in the culture of the Other. More recently, Vincent Crapanzano and Talal Asad (1988) have addressed the issue of deformation of significance in the process of linguistic transfers. Crapanzano (1992) compares the ethnographer to the translator who ‘must render the foreign familiar and preserve its very foreignness at one and the same time’ (qtd. in ‘Cultural Translation’, 67).

4. There is foreshadowing here of the finale of the short story, when Borges speaks qua Borges in the last paragraph about his failure in representing Ibn Rushd: ‘I sensed that Averroes, striving to imagine a drama without ever having suspected what a theater was, was no more absurd than I, who strove to imagine Averroes with no material other than some fragments from Renan, Lane, and Asín Palacios’ (‘Averroes’ Search’, trans. Kerrigan, 110). Thus just as Averroes found affinities with Zuhair, so Borges finds affinities with Averroes – at least in their common failure in presenting the Other.

5. For a review of the novel, see Ferial J. Ghazoul (2001), ‘Halal Fiction’.

6. Northrop Frye (1957, 186) asserts: ‘The romance is nearest of all literary forms to the wish-fulfillment dream … In every age the ruling social or intellectual class tends to project its ideals in some form of romance, where the virtuous heroes and beautiful heroines represent the ideals’.

7. All translations from this novel are mine. I had translated relevant passages before the publication of Paul Starkey’s translation in 2010.

8. The unnamed narrator of Betool Khedairi’s (2001) novel, A Sky So Close, ends up becoming a translator to solve her double identity. She is a child of an Iraqi father and a British mother who becomes a daily witness to intimate parental tensions due to cultural conflicts. Having spent the 1970s in Iraq, she moves to England in the 1980s to nurse her mother, who is dying from cancer. It is a Bildungsroman, a novel of formation in which the child, attached to her father and Iraqi children of her age, resents her mother’s imposition of English norms; but as she grows older and takes care of her mother in a London hospital, she is reconciled with her and fathoms her mother’s psychological and emotional needs as an expatriate in Iraq. She grows into an understanding of both parents and, perhaps as an index of her grasp of a two-sided situation, she opts to take up the profession of translator, where duality can coexist. This professional orientation comes at the end of the novel, but it undoes the split that the protagonist endured. Here we find the translator as a figure of unity in diversity, a Janus figure that can bridge the two shores without sacrificing the specificity of each – a ‘bird’ that can fly above and see both worlds.

9. In African literature, and particularly in The Fortunes of Wangrin, the modern classic by Amadou Hampaté Bâ (1999),, the translator is presented as a collaborator with the colonialists. See also Raymond Mopoho’s (2005) article on the image of the native translator in French colonial Africa, ‘Perception et autoportrait de l’interprète indigène en Afrique coloniale française’.

10. Reviewers of the book, such as Mohammed Berrada (2007), found in Alif (who decides to stay in Iraq) a symbol of Iraq ‘as space, memory, and steadfastness’ (my translation). Hélène Cixous, referring to Alia Mamdouh’s (2007) work, sees in it a passion for the homeland, Iraq, which she calls ‘Désirak’ (Chanda, n.pag.).

11. In an article dated 23 November 2011 anticipating the departure of American forces from occupied Iraq, Al-Hayat daily reported that translators in Iraq are despised and considered ‘traitors, spies, and collaborators’ – hence their fear following American withdrawal (‘Alaf al-mutarjimin’ 21). This might be contrasted with the annual celebration of the Day of the Translator by the Association of Arab Translators (founded in 30 January 2002 in Beirut) under the heading of the role of the translator in progress and development, as reported in Al-Hayat, ‘Mas’uliyyat al-mutarjim al-‘arabi’ (21).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ferial J. Ghazoul

Ferial J. Ghazoul is professor of English and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo and the Editor of Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics. She has published extensively on medieval comparative literature, postcolonial studies, and women’s writing. She is an award-winning translator of modern Arabic poetry.