Abstract
Differences in culture, language, and context alter the reading experience, meaning, and textual relations of modern Arabic literature in translation, which raises questions about the relationship between the Arabic and translated canon. Drawing on Lawrence Venuti, Pascale Casanova, and Abdelfattah Kilito, I explore translation as consecration, annexation, and decontextualization in order to illustrate the issues involved in Arabic–English literary travel and to move the scholarly debate on Arabic–English translation beyond questions of strategy and domestication. Through textual and paratextual analysis of the English translation of Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013/2018), I show how even a highly translatable modern Arabic text undergoes multiple semantic and symbolic shifts as it transfers into English. Bringing these findings together with observations on the wider Arabic literary translation environment, I argue that modern Arabic literature in translation is its own canon, deserving of independent study, whose hybridity can teach us much about the dynamics of cultural encounter, effects of literary capital, and the discursive and semantic disjunctions between English and Arabic culture and literature.
Highlights
Differences in culture, language, and context alter the reading experience, meaning, and textual relations of modern Arabic literature in translation, which raises questions about the relationship between the Arabic and translated canon
Even without significant rewriting and repackaging, matters of equivalence, nuance, and intertextuality mean that literary translation never produces an identical reading experience
In this article I look at translation as consecration, annexation, and decontextualization in order to highlight some of the issues involved in Arabic–English literary travel
Summary
Casanova (1999/2007) envisages the world literary field as intensely hierarchical on account of the unequal distribution of literary and linguistic capital between the national and regional literatures which constitute it. Casanova’s use of literary linguistic capital as a basis for understanding variations in the role and process of translation in different literary systems, and Kilito’s vision of linguistic encounter as combat, provide a framework with which to understand the peripheral place of Arabic in the world literary canon. Such a framework crucially shifts responsibility for the state of the field of Arabic literary translation away from individual texts and translators onto the socio-historical forces and agents that govern and shape it. Author’s own, does not appear at all — a fine example of Lawrence Venuti’s thesis on translator invisibility! The translation of Frankenstein in Baghdad markets itself less on its content, more on its target-culture champions and is heavily mediated; its passage into English involves a concerted effort of consecration
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