A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature Read Online Free Page A

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 Bibleand 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 thehouse, 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