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

or a cough to help her regain her composure. 13
    In their translation, the translators suggest both the particular situation of Amina, who comes from a traditional family and whose husband has confined her to the house, and the general costs that traditional life entails for women like her in terms of their isolation and segregation from the world outside. Amina is illiterate, and the modernization that was to be such a feature of twentieth-century Arab societies has not yet reached the Cairo middle classes, particularly not the female members of them. Taken as a whole, the
Cairo Trilogy
can be understood as a kind of ‘grand narrative’ that shows the passing of traditionalist conceptions of life, as well as of much of the patriarchal authority that sustained them.
    These considerations are certainly present in the original text, and the translators have preserved features of it like the
jinn
and the
suras
from the
Qur’an
without resorting to footnotes or paraphrased explanation. While the
jinn
may be familiar to western readers as the often malevolent beings described as ‘genies’ in translations of
The Arabian Nights
, the
suras
, or chapters, of the
Qur’an
may be less so.
Sura
112, for example, which consists of just four lines of text, is usually called ‘The Unity’ in English, since it deals with the oneness of God, while the opening prayer of the
Qur’an
is termed the
Fatiha
, which means the ‘opening’, or introduction, to the whole. Any translator of Arabic literature needs to strike a balance between references that western readers may reasonably be expected to know (such as to the
jinn
), those that they can infer (that a
sura
is a chapterof the
Qur’an
), and those that they may not know but that are not strictly necessary to appreciate the text. The ‘lattice-work screen’ that Amina peers through onto the street below is
mashrabiyya
, for example, a form of decorative turned wood that made it possible for women to see out of their houses without being seen in them. It will be familiar to anyone who knows the traditional areas of Cairo and other Arab cities.
    While the translators have made this novel available to English-speaking readers in such a way that the world it presents is neither unjustly naturalized nor exoticized, Arabic writing sometimes presents more difficult problems, as in the case of the Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih’s 1966 novel
Season of Migration to the North
, one of the most important written in Arabic in that turbulent decade. A paragraph from Denys Johnson-Davies’s translation reads:
    ‘You’re not only drunk but mad,’ said Mahjoub. ‘Mustafa Sa’eed is in fact the Prophet El-Khidr, suddenly making his appearance and as suddenly vanishing. The treasures that lie in this room are like those of King Solomon, brought here by genies, and you have the key to that treasure. Open, Sesame, and let’s distribute the gold and jewels to the people.’ Mahjoub was about to shout out and gather the people together had I not put my hand over his mouth. The next morning each of us woke up in his own house not knowing how he’d got there. 14
    There is no explanatory material included with the translation, presumably because the translator wants it to stand on its own without support. Nevertheless, in this case the decision to present the text ‘as it is’ may have come at the price of full comprehension on the reader’s part.
Season of Migration
recounts the stories of an anonymous narrator and an enigmatic older man, Mustafa Sa’eed, both of whom have returned to village life in the Sudan following extended periods abroad, during which they were studying for higherdegrees. Whereas the narrator at first believes that this experience has not changed him, and that he is as much at home in the village on his return as he was when he left, Mustafa Sa’eed appears to have had greater difficulty in integrating the two sides of his personality, that part of him that is