The hidden violence of retranslation: Mahfouz’s Awlād Ḥāratinā in English

ABSTRACT

This article examines the (re)translation into English of Naguib Mahfouz’s 1959 novel Awlād Ḥāratinā as a socially-situated activity. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of practice, it analyses retranslation as an intrusive, symbolically-violent act in relation to a text which itself triggered unfavourable reactions when it was published in Arabic and when it subsequently appeared in English (re)translation. Awlād Ḥāratinā stands out as one of the few allegorical fiction works written in Arabic, which offers a unique case for the study of retranslation. Through an analysis of the paratextual materials of the two available translations of Mahfouz’s novel (originally published in 1981 and 1996, respectively), this article identifies and critically examines the mechanisms of symbolic violence through which the translators, Philip Stewart and Peter Theroux, attempted to distinguish themselves and their works. The extent and intensity of the disputes between Stewart and Theroux also speak to this case study’s significance. The findings suggest that a Bourdieusian perspective can expand and enrich the understanding and theorising of retranslation. They also illustrate that retranslation is not an act of mere linguistic or stylistic improvement on previous efforts but is often an act of symbolic violence and a site for struggle through which differences between translatorial agents are created and maintained, primarily via the generation and leveraging of capital.

KEYWORDS:

• Retranslation
• symbolic violence
• paratexts
• Mahfouz
• Awlād Ḥāratinā
• Children of Gebalaawi
• Children of the Alley

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my colleagues Professor Loredana Polezzi, Professor Kate Griffiths, Dr Liz Wren-Owens, Dr Ahmed Elgindy, and my two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments at the different stages of this article’s writing. I am also grateful to Dr David Orrego-Carmona for offering me a place at the African Translation and Interpreting Studies Writing Workshop and for Professor Roberto A. Valdeón’s resulting mentorship. Lastly, I am very grateful and thankful to Philip Stewart and Peter Theroux, the two translators of Awlād Ḥāratinā, for responding to all my questions promptly and comprehensively.

Disclosure statement

The author confirms that there is no conflict of interest to declare for this publication. Additionally, no funding was received for this article. The article is original and has not been submitted or accepted for publication elsewhere.

Notes

1. For more on this point, see Hanna (2016, 131).

2. Bourdieu tends to use ‘symbolic power’ (‘le pouvoir symbolique’) and ‘symbolic violence’ (‘la violence symbolique’) interchangeably (Dębska 2015, 9).

3. Suhayl Idris, one of Dar Al-Adab’s founders, reveals in his memoirs that Mahfouz was paid ‘five thousand [Egyptian] pounds … as his author rights for the first edition of the novel’—the highest price ever paid for a novel in the Arab world at the time (Dar Al-Adab 2013).

4. In a personal correspondence, I asked Stewart the reason why The Massachusetts Review refused to publish his retort. He responded: ‘No idea! Editors are not obliged to publish retorts’.

5. All my personal correspondence with Philip Stewart and Peter Theroux, regarding their respective translations and each other’s translations, took place between December 2019 and January 2020.

6. https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2PZFWXWA1AIYS/.

7. I am grateful to Philip Stewart for sharing a pre-publication copy of his memoirs with me.

8. Interestingly, since Stewart’s translation, in all its editions, was only published in paperback, and since Stewart continuously asserted the original status of his translation, in a seemingly stark act of appropriation, the copyright page of Theroux’s paperback edition bears a striking difference to his hardcover edition in that the copyright year for the translation is changed from 1996 (hardcover) to 1959 (paperback). This is the same year that Mahfouz’s novel was published, insinuating to readers, calculatedly or inadvertently, that Theroux’s edition was produced earlier than Stewart’s, pushing Stewart’s ‘out of history’.

9. It is conjectured that Theroux’s use of this term to describe Stewart speaks to another layer of symbolic violence, exemplified in the inherent cultural-political relationships between the UK and the US—the respective countries of Stewart and Theroux—with some Arabic-speaking nations (cf. Zamir 2015, 142–144). Paratextual elements are used here as a means of channelling the conflicts of both translators’ nations over this geo-political region within the context of their personal conflict.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Abdel-Wahab Khalifa

Abdel-Wahab Khalifa is a Lecturer in Translation and Interpreting at Cardiff University. Prior to Cardiff, he lectured at Tanta University, with which he is still associated, and other universities in Egypt, Austria and the UK. He has also been working as a professional translator and interpreter for nearly ten years. Khalifa is the editor of Translators Have Their Say? Translation and the Power of Agency and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Translation. He is also the recipient of the 2019 Harry Ransom Center Fellowship in the Humanities and a member of the Executive Board of the Association for Translation Studies in Africa. Khalifa is currently working on a monograph on the socio-cultural determinants of translating modern Arabic fiction into English.