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Abstract
Through the example of the Arabic translations of Pierre Bourdieu, this article analyses the conditions of the introduction and reception of a sociological thought of French origin in the contemporary Arab intellectual field and, more generally, those of the international circulation of ideas in a postcolonial context. The diachronic analysis reveals the interpenetration of logics of import and export, the differences between intellectual and academic national traditions in various Arab countries, as well as the difficult conditions through which modern works of social sciences are published and circulated in the Arab world. Hence, the general economy of these translations is characterized as selective, didactic and militant, while a foreignizing and at times literalist translational norm – notwithstanding the diversity of the translators’ terminological choices, given the absence of a normative framework – dominates their poetics. The author concludes with an analysis of the Arab translator’s habitus, characterized by a specific “suffering of position”. A bibliography of Bourdieu’s Arab translations is provided.
Notes
1. This is a revised and updated version of an article initially published in French: Jacquemond, Richard. 2010. ‘Les traductions arabes de Pierre Bourdieu.’ Arabica 57(5–6): 559–588. This English version is published with the authorisation of the French version’s publisher, Brill (Leiden).
2. These early translations are mentioned in Bourdieu’s general bibliography (Delsaut and Rivière Citation2002). However, this bibliography does not mention the majority of Bourdieu’s translations into Arabic because they were published without the knowledge and/or authorisation of the author and/or his original publisher.
3. Full references to Bourdieu’s Arabic translations and their French (and English in some cases) originals are provided in a separate bibliography at the end of this article.
4. I borrow this distinction between logic of importation and logic of exportation from Gisèle Sapiro (Sapiro Citation2002).
5. See Ibrahim Fathi’s portrait by Hala Halim: ‘Curbstone Critic’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 5–11 September 2002, online at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2002/602/profile.htm (last accessed 28 May 2015).
6. He explained his reluctance to take a position on the Palestinian question in an interview with Catherine Lévy, Farouk Mardam-Bey and Elias Sanbar: 2000. ‘Un sociologue dans le monde’. Revue d’études palestiniennes 74/22: 3–13.
7. Raisons pratiques was not retranslated because the first version was not satisfactory (having compared them, it seems to me that the first one is better), but because the actors involved in the second translation (the Syrian publisher and translator as well as the French cultural officers and the original publisher in France) simply ignored that the job had already been done – a common situation in Arab publishing nowadays. Another sign of this bad circulation of books between the different Arab national markets can be found in the choice of the title As’ilat ‘ilm al-ijtimâ’ (Questions of sociology) by the Moroccan publisher of Réponses (Casablanca 1997), as this title had already been taken two years before for the Egyptian translation of Questions de sociologie.
8. ʿAli Salim. 1999. al-Bina‘ ’ala Byir Burdyu: susyulujya l-haql al-siyasi (Building on Pierre Bourdieu: Sociology of the Political Field), Beirut: Dar al-nidal; ʿAbd al-Jalil al-Azadi. 2003. Byar Burdyu, al-fata l-mutaʿaddid al-midyaf (Pierre Bourdieu, The Multiple and Hospitable Young Man). Marrakech: Manshurat al-multaqa.
9. ‘Ali Harb. 2001. Asnam al-nazariyya wa-atyaf al-hurriyya: naqd Burdyu wa-Shumski (Idols of Theory, Ghosts of Freedom: A Critique of Bourdieu and Chomsky). Beirut-Casablanca: al- Markaz al-thaqafi al-’arabi.
10. For Egypt, see Ibda‘, November 2002, and Adab wa-naqd, 217 (2003).
11. For example, conferences in Alexandria (‘Le sens du jeu. Rencontres autour de Pierre Bourdieu’, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, 25–27 June 2002) and Algiers (‘De l’expérience algérienne de Pierre Bourdieu à la diffusion internationale de son modèle’, Centre national de recherches préhistoriques, anthropologiques et historiques, 27–29 May 2006).
12. Given the quality of the AOT’s editorial work, one can only regret that it selected two books that had already been translated in Arabic rather than some of his major works, such as La distinction and Le sens pratique, still unavailable in Arabic.
13. Although indirect translations are frequent in the Arabic book market, it is not so common with regard to French authors (French and English being the most common foreign languages in the Arab world, it is more frequent that indirect translations use French as an intermediary language). However, another French contemporary thinker has been frequently translated from English versions, namely Jacques Derrida, whose influence was much bigger in the Anglo-Saxon intellectual field than in its French counterpart.
14. In this count and in the following chart, the three volumes of the Arabic version of La misère du monde are treated as a single piece.
15. François Cusset has written an excellent case study of ‘travelling theories’ (Cusset Citation2008).
16. P. Bourdieu, A. al-Gur (trad.) et M. Bududu (rév.), As’ilat ‘ilm al-ijtima’, p. 53.
17. P. Bourdieu and Loïc J.D. Wacquant, Réponses, p. 58.
18. P. Bourdieu, Questions de sociologie, p. 133.
19. P. Bourdieu, I. Fathi (trad.), As’ilat ‘ilm al-ijtima’, p. 150.
20. The Syrian publisher asked for some cuts, which were chosen by Bourdieu and represented some 200 pages out of the close to 1000 of the original. The three translators worked separately, without any coordination (interview with Randa Ba’th, co-translator of the book, Damascus, April 1006).
21. On these questions, see UNDP (Citation2003).
22. See Quran, xlviii, 29.
23. See for example Bourdieu, Questions de sociologie, pp. 134–135.
24. Interview with N. Jahil, Beirut, April 2006 (see ‘Abd Al-Rahman Citation2000).
25. Interview with I. Fathi, Cairo, May 2006.
26. ‘The intention in taking up a word from tradition and reactivating it – diametrically opposed to the strategy of trying to associate one’s name to a neologism or, on the model of the natural sciences, with an “effect”, even a minor one – is inspired by the conviction that work on concepts may also be cumulative’ (Bourdieu Citation1996, 180)
27. Ibrahim Fathi’s introduction to his translation of Les Règles de l’art can be read as a first attempt at realising this project. See also, in the same direction, Thâ’ir Dîb, “Mihnat al-tarjama fi l-thaqâfa al-‘arabiyya” (The translation’s trial in Arabic culture), Al-Adâb, July-August 1999, p. 81–89.
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Richard Jacquemond
Richard Jacquemond graduated in Law and Sociology before studying Arabic both in France and in Egypt. He is currently Professor of Modern Arabic language and literature at Aix-Marseille University. He is the author of Conscience of the Nation. Writers, State and Society in Modern Egypt (Cairo: AUC Press, 2008) and has translated some 20 books from Arabic into French, most of them modern Egyptian fiction.