Arabic Translation

Skill in literary translation depends not just on a good knowledge of both the source and the target languages. It is essentially a creative endeavour, calling for literary sensitivity and cultural awareness.

Although most translators translate into their mother tongue, this is not an essential qualification. Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov in the past, and Ahdaf Soueif today, are examples of how people have adapted to the English language, caressing and fashioning it to a superlative degree. The advantage that a user of the target language has is that s/he has a vast treasury of language from which to draw in translating the finite number of words in a text. But this is a talent that can be acquired.

Arabic and English are very different languages, with different literary traditions. Literacy in Arabic has been near universal only in the last generation. Much literary expression has been produced within a more oral tradition. The outstanding literary forms have been poetry and the short story, both of which appeal to the ear as much as the eye. English literature has been far more bookish, and reading a private, rather than a collective, habit. There are shifts in this generalisation with the emergence of performance poetry, audio-books and public readings. But English tends, in general, to be terser than Arabic. This is a challenge to the translator, who is translating not just words but shifting a work from one literary tradition to another.

Translation theorists talk of the issue of whether to take the reader to the book or the book to the reader. Nabokov, in the Foreword to his translation from the Russian of Lermentov's A Hero of Our Time, argued for the reader to be taken to the book, by saying that 'we should dismiss, once and for all the conventional notion that a translation 'should read smoothly', and 'should not sound like a translation' (to quote would-be compliments, addressed to vague versions, by genteel reviewers who never have and never will read the original texts).' The whole point about literary translation is that the potential reader – especially of an Arabic text in translation – is not likely to read the original. That is why he/she is reading it in translation. I believe it is simply good manners to present the translated literary work in an acceptable, reader-friendly manner.

This issue is not restricted to translation. Two centuries ago, Walter Scott encountered similar problems in writing novels located in the Middle Ages. 'He that would please the modern world,' he wrote, introducing the work of another novelist, 'yet present the exact impression of a tale of the Middle Ages, will repeatedly find that he must, in spite of spite, sacrifice the last to the first object, and externally expose himself to the just censure of the rigid antiquary, because he must, to interest the readers of the present time, invest his characters with language and sentiments unknown to that period… this inconsistency is avoided by adopting the style of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers.'

This is critically the case when we are trying to capture a new readership (to 'please the modern world') for Arabic literature in translation. Translation theorists also talk of 'authoritative' texts where the creative flexibility may be more restricted. There are limited Arabic texts that can be seen as authoritative in this way. There have been 30 or 40 English renderings of the Holy Koran, a smaller number of translations of the Hadith. There have been in the last 300 years far more versions of A Thousand and One Nights. Of post-1945 literature there have been many English translations of some poetry – especially of Mahmud Darwish. Some of the plays of Tawfiq al-Hakim and one play by the Syrian Sa'dallah Wannus have been translated and published in more than one version, but I cannot think of any novel or short story that has been translated more than once.

It is enlightening to compare different translations of the same work, and it can be argued that a classic, an authoritative text, should be translated by every generation. The target language is always changing, and the reader with it. But the spread of Arabic literature in translation has not yet reached that stage. There are still lots of first translations to undertake.

There are special problems in translating Arabic literature (as there are for any other language). The written word is nearly always formal. There has been a big debate about the use of colloquial Arabic, especially in dialogue. Naguib Mahfouz always made his unlettered plebeian characters use an Arabic that was not far distant from the language of an Islamic preacher. Most writers now use the colloquial of the country where there characters are located. This runs the risk of a character in Baghdad not being understood by someone in Morocco (and vice versa). The use of local Arabics in dialogue indicates to the reader the level of education or sophistication of the character and adds a touch of authenticity. But how does the translator cope? It is easy another to introduce a more informal register in translating dialogue, but how does s/he get across a particular dialect. The use of a particular regional accent is not a convincing way of resolving the dilemma.

Read more... Denys Johnson-Davies

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