The Re-Presentation of Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre in Arabic Translation

Abstract

The first Arabic translation of Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre was published in 1963 under the title of معذبو الأرض muʿaḏabū alʾarḍ (literally, “the tortured of the earth”). This paper discusses the way Fanon is reintroduced to the Arab readership through the 2004 revised edition of the Arabic translation. As the 2004 edition was planned with reference to both the Arabic translation of 1963 and the latest French version of 2002, it re-presented Fanon in Arabic by redesigning the book through text revision and including and excluding the paratextual elements of prefaces and a postface. It also helped in updating and reintroducing the book, as well as in correcting many mistranslations. The essay examines how the textual and paratextual elements are dealt with, highlighting the changes introduced in the revision process and how all this contributed to reframing Fanon.

• Arabic
• Fanon
• Frantz
• Les Damnés de la terre
• postcolonial studies
• translation revision
• translation studies

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Mr Ali Baḥsoon and Dr ʿAbdulkādir Buzīda for their help in answering my questions about the 2004 edition of the Arabic translation. Thanks also go to Amal Megahid and Gihan Sofar for their help with collecting data. I am also grateful to Joseph Lumbard as well as anonymous reviewers who looked at an earlier version of the paper.

ORCID

Sattar Izwaini http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1656-4321

Notes

1 All translations from Arabic and French are mine.

2 ‘Iskandarūna is located in Northwest Syria, east of the Mediterranean, within the Turkish Hatay province. It was the centre of an affiliation problem between newly proclaimed Turkey and Syria in the wake of the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and the French occupation. In 1936 and as a result of demonstrations and riots all over Syria, the French authorities concluded a treaty with Syria. The treaty ensured all the cultural rights of Turks in the ʾIskandarūna, but Turkey wanted it as an independent state, to be included later in Turkey (Discover Syria Web Site).

3 An Algerian psychoanalyst who worked with Fanon in Algeria and Tunisia, and who wrote the book Frantz Fanon: Portrait.

4 An Algerian thinker and historian who joined the National Liberation Front (FLN) at a very young age and met Fanon during the Algerian War of Independence. He became an advisor to the first Algerian president after independence and a minister in the cabinet.

5 I contacted the principal publisher, ANEP, about this, but due to the time elapsed since the 2004 edition and a new administration, answers could not be provided.

6 The 2004 edition does not include Sartre’s preface and thus no action can be traced for this deletion.

7 For an interesting discussion of its etymology, see http://www.monsu.desiderio.free.fr/curiosites/arabe2.html

8 In ArabiCorpus (9 million words) برجوازية (bourgeoisie) collocates nine times only with فئة fiʾa (category), mostly from one source. In the Oxford Corpus of Arabic (146 million words) they do not collocate at all.

9 The Arabic words cited here have the exact same case ending as they have in the text.