Odzyskać siebie z Innego – Arabowie i islam we współczesnych arabskich przekładach literatury europejskiej

Abstract

When a work of European literature is translated into Arabic, the language of a predominantly Islamic culture, terms referring to Arabs as a people or Muslims as a religious community, the name of Muhammad as the Prophet of Islam, etcetera, cease to be foreign and exotic and become local and familiar. The present analysis of contemporary Arabic translations of Dante’s Divine comedy, Cervantes’ Don Quijote and Scott’s Ivanhoe shows that these elements are not always simply returned to their native culture if the original text represents them in a negative, Eurocentric way, which can even be considered blasphemous by Muslims if religious content is involved but are subject to more or less significant transformations that are ideologically motivated. Instead of straightforward restitution to the native culture, what takes place is a kind of annexation of texts which consists in replacing the negatively portrayed ‘Other’ by a positively, or at least neutrally, represented ‘We’. Such manipulations may be explicit, i.e. signalled in footnotes, or tacit. In some cases, anti-Islamic passages become even sympathetic towards Islam when translated into Arabic. In this way the authors of Arabic translations liberate the texts from the dominating Western perspective and adapt them to their own vision of the world. What seems to be manipulation and censorship from the ‘Western’ point of view may be perceived in an entirely different manner inside the Arabo-Islamic culture, for instance as correction of obvious factual errors.