Nation and Translation in the Middle East (Special Issue of The Translator)

Type of Publication: Authored volume Author/Editor: Samah Selim (Editor), Universit de Provence, France Year of publication: 2009 Keywords: Place of Publication & Publisher: Manchester: St Jerome Publisher URL: http://www.stjerome.co.uk/page.php?id=529&doctype=StJBooks&section=1 ISBN/ISSN: ISBN: 978-1-905763-13-9 / ISBN 1-905763-13-1 Price and ordering information: 25 Sterling, inclusive of postage and packing

Publication blurb: In the Middle East, translation movements and the debates they have unleashed on language, culture and the politics and practices of identity have historically been tied to processes of state formation and administration, in the form of patronage, policy and publishing. Whether one considers the age of regional empires centred in Baghdad or Istanbul, or that of the modern nation-state from Egypt to Iran, this relationship points to the historical role of translation as a powerful and flexible tool of cultural politics. Nation and Translation in the Middle East focuses on this important aspect of translation in the region, with special emphasis on translation movements and the production of modernity in a historical context defined by European imperialism, enlightenment universalism, and globalization. While the papers assembled in this special issue of The Translator each address specific translation histories and practices in the Middle East, the broader questions they raise regarding the location and the historicity of translation offer a fruitful intervention into contemporary debates in translation studies on difference, fidelity and the ethics of translation. The volume opens with two essays that situate translation at the intersection of national canons, postcolonial cultural hegemonies and private market or activist-based initiatives in Egypt and Turkey. Other contributions discuss the utility of translation paradigms as a counterweight to the dominant orientalist historiography of modern print culture in the Arab World; the role of the translator as political agent and social reformer in twentieth-century Egypt; and the relationship between language, translation and the politics of identity in the multi-ethnic and multilingual Islamicate contexts of the Abbasid and Mughal Empires. The volume also includes a general bibliography on translation and the Middle East. Contents Nation and Translation in the Middle East: Histories, Canons, Hegemonies, pp. 1-13. Samah Selim, Universit de Provence, France This introductory paper argues for the importance of a sustained disciplinary engagement between Middle Eastern Studies and translation studies that would open up new ways of thinking about the epistemological foundations and the ethical effects of both fields in textual and worldly terms. While modern historiography and literary studies in and of the Middle East tend to be constructed around problematic and unequivocal models of transfer and translation (from West to East), the interest in the question of ethics in translation studies often neglects the specificity of other translation histories and practices that are shaped by colonial hegemonies in the region and are directly related to complex (and contested) processes of nation-building and identity formation. The paper considers a number of such histories and practices, from the late Mughal Empire to modern Egypt, and explores the implications for contemporary debates in translation studies on questions of difference and fidelity. Keywords. Area Studies, Difference, Fidelity, Imperialism, Humanism, Middle East, Nationalism, Orientalism, Renaissance.

Translation Policies in the Arab World: Representations, Discourses and Realities, pp. 15-35. Richard Jacquemond, Universit de Provence, France This article analyzes the translation policies set up in the Arab World since the end of the Second World War, focusing first on the modern Arab discourse on translation, mainly through the example of the 3rd Arab Human Development Report (2003). The Report, based on antiquated and incomplete data, deems the current Arabic translation movement strikingly weak and calls for an ambitious and integrated Arab strategy in the field of translation. The article goes on to analyze the programmes carried out by foreign cultural missions active in the region and then examines the indigenous programmes set up by Arab states and institutions. Focusing on the emergence of two discrete moments in local translation policy, the study demonstrates how these indigenous translation programmes were articulated around two complementary logics: a humanistic one, where the aim was to translate into Arabic the masterpieces of world literature and thought, and a developmentalist one that proposed to make the most recent scientific developments available to the Arab readership and to contribute to the modernization of the Arabic language. The article concludes with a brief reflection on the relative success of these programmes in light of their historical and discursive goals. Keywords. Arab Human Development Report, Arabic, Arabization, Cultural diplomacy, Egypt, Ideology, Postcolonialism, Translation policies. Translation, Presumed Innocent: Translation and Ideology in Turkey, pp. 37-64. ehnaz Tahir Gralar, Boazii University, Turkey In late Ottoman society, in the 19th century, translation was instrumental in the emergence of new literary genres such as the novel and western-style drama. It maintained its significance and influence in the early Republican period, starting in 1923. Apart from its literary significance, an interesting aspect of the trajectory followed by translation in Turkey concerns the way it has conspicuously allied itself with political and ideological agendas, such as westernization, Marxism and Islamism, to mention a few. This paper explores the ideological entanglements of translation in Turkey in the 20th century. It examines the discourse that emerged around translation at certain moments during that period and argues that translation served as a mirror, reflecting the literary and cultural lacks of the target system, as much as it was meant to import new forms and ideas which would eventually help Turkish society overcome its perceived deficiencies. The study also problematizes the ways in which the translators subject position has been suppressed, especially in the discourse of translators reflecting upon their own work, and concludes that this self-effacing attitude seems to have become part of the professional identity of the Turkish translator. Keywords. Humanism, Islamizing translations, Nationalism, Prosecution of translators, Translators invisibility, Turkish. Translating into the Empire: The Arabic Version of Kalila wa Dimna, pp. 65-86. Tarek Shamma, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain This paper examines the translation by Abdullah Ibn al-Muqaffa (720-757 AD) of the Pahlavi version of Kalila wa Dimna in the early Abbasid period (7501258 AD). Ibn al-Muqaffa contributed to the translation movement supported by al-Mansur, the second Abbasid caliph. The patronage of translation allowed the caliphs to expand their support base by integrating elements from the different cultures of the empire into one Islamic whole. That was the political context of the translation. Ibn al-Muqaffa, a recent convert of Persian descent, took part in an intellectual and literary movement which attempted to infuse Islamic culture with Persian elements. To introduce these influences in Islamic terms, the translation was decidedly domesticating. In analyzing the textual strategies that the translator employed, this paper calls for a reconsideration of the functions of domesticating translation, which in the case under study contributed to cultural diversity, contrary to arguments common in modern translation theory. It is further argued that attendant

notions of equivalence and faithfulness are conditioned by modern constructs of authorship and the nation state that do not hold for Arabic translation during that period, nor, probably, for premodern translation in general. Keywords. Abbasid Empire, Arabic, Astrology, Domestication, Equivalence, Faithfulness, Islam, Kalila wa Dimna, Persians. Translating Gender: zd Bilgrm on the Poetics of the Love Lyric and Cultural Synthesis, pp. 87-103. Sunil Sharma, Harvard University, USA This paper examines the figure of zd Bilgrm (d. 1785), who was the first Persian author to synthesize Persian, Arabic and Indian poetics, combining the purely theoretical interest of a scholar with a practising poets insight into local traditions. In his Arabic work, Subhat al-marjn fi thr Hindstn (Coral Rosary of Indian Antiquities, 1763-64) zd Bilgrm compared the rhetorics of Arabic and Sanskrit love poetry in order to effect a form of cultural accommodation that would not be devoid of aesthetic pleasure. A year later he Persianized the first two sections of his Arabic work. Ghizln-i Hind (Female Beloveds of India) challenges the scholarly view of a monolithic Islamic poetics by treating Arabic and Persian as independent literary cultures, albeit from an eighteenth-century Indo-Muslim point of view. Interestingly, zd Bilgrms work is located in between two major empires Mughal and British colonial both of which valued translation as an indispensable political tool. Is such a work then merely a literary aberration or does it point to a nascent national consciousness that is multicultural and multilingual? The paper explores these questions and suggests that the theoretical and creative aspects of Bilgramis project offer nonhierarchical traces of literary interface and knowledge exchange between cultures. Keywords. Arabic, Gender, ghazal, Hindi, masnavi, nayikabheda, Mughal Empire, Persian, Poetics. Print and Its Discontents: A Case for Pre-Print Journalism and Other Sundry Print Matters, pp. 105-138. Dana Sajdi, Boston College, USA This essay proposes to explore the historical movement of text from scribal media to print publication as a translation process in which the printed text is viewed, not as an entirely new cultural product but one that has enjoyed previous lives. The essay first undertakes a revision of the dominant discourses on print in the Middle East, which have generally offered a salvation narrative fraught with Orientalist assumptions connected to the sacredness of Arabic and the status of the Quran in Islamicate cultures. Likewise, the essay interrogates the historiography of print culture in Europe, which has exaggerated the impact of print and utilized it to create a divided and unequal temporality and geography between Europe and its others. The essay then offers a tentative attempt at a new cultural history which looks at continuities rather than ruptures in genres and practices before and after print, and in which the printing press plays the role of the habilitated and domesticated mediator/translator. To illustrate this, the essay takes the case of the modern Arabic newspaper and resituates it as a direct descendent of the early-modern scribal chronicle rather than as an entirely new innovation of the print age. Keywords. Arabic, Contemporary chronicles, Impact of print scholarship, Journalism, Khabar, Lithography, Maqala, Orientalism, Print, Scribal culture. Languages of Civilization: Nation, Translation and the Poetics of Race in Colonial Egypt, 139156. Samah Selim, Universit de Provence, France Civilization is a keyword that has been heavily implicated in relations of power and domination throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. This paper offers a case-study of one moment in the modern genesis of the term and of its translation into a colonial language. Though largely forgotten today by the social sciences, Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931) was one of the most important and popular social

thinkers of the Third Republic in France. He was a seminal theoretician of race and a tireless antirevolutionary polemicist who elaborated a form of historical social Darwinism in which progress was defined in and through increasing social and civilizational inequality. Le Bon greatly influenced the new social thought of the Nahdah period in Egypt especially in its liberal and secular currents through the many translations that were made of his works between 1909 and 1922. His main translator was Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul: founding member of The Ummah Party, jurist implicated in the infamous Dinshaway affair and an important intellectual of the period in his own right. Zaghlul exemplifies the section of liberal and colonial elites who sought to reform and modernize Egypt according to the natural laws that govern human societies in order to lead the country to independence. This paper examines Zaghluls Arabic translation of one of Le Bons most important works, Les Lois psychologiques de lvolution des peuples (The Psychological Laws of the Evolution of Peoples, 1894/1913), in order to explore the ambiguous role played by new concepts of race, nation and civilization in the secular, reformist social thought of the Nahdah in Egypt. Keywords. 19th century, Civilization, Colonial elites, Degeneration, Democracy, Egypt, France, Nahdah, Nation, Race. Othello in the Egyptian Vernacular: Negotiating the Doxic in Drama Translation and Identity Formation, pp. 157-178. Sameh F. Hanna, The University of Salford, UK Throughout the cultural history of modern Egypt, language has been a site for constructing and contesting different versions of national identity. While Classical Arabic (fusha) has been widely recognized by many as the legitimate expression of an Arab-Islamic identity that Egypt partakes of, there have been attempts by Egyptian intellectuals to forge and promote a unique Egyptian identity distinct from the Arab-Islamic geo-political and socio-cultural sphere. Egyptian vernacular Arabic (ammiyya) has been mainly deployed as the distinctive mark of this identity. While recognizing that the two categories of fusha and ammiyya and the arbitrary divide between them are epistemological constructs that have been sustained and promoted by a number of institutional and discursive practices, including a linguistic discourse couched in a modernist understanding of reality, this article seeks to pinpoint the social/cultural economy of these two constructs in the field of drama translation in Egypt. It then examines a translation of Othello produced by Moustapha Safouan in 1998, in which he negotiates Egyptian identity through a strategic use of ammiyya. The discussion of language and cultural practices in Egypt and Safouans translation draws on Pierre Bourdieus concept of doxa. Keywords. Bourdieu, Classical Arabic, Doxa, Egypt, Egyptian Arabic, Identity formation, Khalil Mutran, Moustapha Safouan, Othello.