Invader Fictions: National Literature after Translation

Abstract

This chapter discusses how translation has affected literature. When we assess criticism of translated literature as part of the larger national conversation about the novel's purpose, the formation of the national literary canon comes to resemble a process of negotiating the foreignness that lies within it and not solely a process of casting the foreign out. In doing so, we ascribe historicity to the formation of national literary history itself, reformulating not just the position of Arabic in an imagined world literary canon but also the modern Arabic literary canon. Translation helped to shape a category of national literature that belonged in turn to a comparative process. Reading the history of the novel in translation forces us to recast national literary histories, to read the nation in translation. To locate foreign literature within national literary history at the moment of its formation is only possible if one uncovers the impact that translations had on “original” writing, discourses and institutions of modernity, and reading practices. Understanding that history challenges us to read novels' depiction of even national environments or characters in the comparative critical context in which they were written and to see “national realism” as a mode that was canonized through comparative and translational methodologies and as perhaps the culmination of a history of translation.