Bourdieu in Translation Studies: The Socio-Cultural Dynamics

of Shakespeare Translation in Egypt, by Sameh Hanna

(New York: Routledge, 2016) 232 pages.

Reviewed by Nahrain al-Mousawi

Inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s theories on the sociology of cultural

production, Sameh Hanna’s Bourdieu in Translation Studies: The
Socio-Cultural Dynamics of Shakespeare Translation in Egypt
analyses the history of Arabic translations of the Shakespeare
tragedies Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear and Othello as products of
sociocultural dynamics. This study furthers the field of translation
studies, which since the 1990s has begun to view translations as
politicized and historicized discourses, rather than ‘non-biased
[media] of communication’ (2). While arguing that other literary
fields have not fully absorbed the lessons that translation studies can
teach, Hanna’s study seeks both to complicate those lessons and to
demonstrate their relevance for analysing modern Arab (or indeed
any) inter/cultural production. Arab Shakespeare translation is just a
case study, but it is one with which this book engages deeply.
The challenge of disciplinary boundaries motivates Hanna to
interrogate traditional translation studies and thus offer new
approaches and critiques, which consider translation a socially
situated phenomenon – sociologies of translation that have come to
be known as the ‘social turn’. Hanna explains why this turn in
translation studies and its interdisciplinary orientation can be
productively explored using Bourdieu’s sociology of cultural
production, and the way it seeks to contextualize language:

Bourdieu’s sociological model is compatible with the basic tenets of

cultural studies approaches to translation: ‘interdisciplinarity’ and an
emphasis on macro-level cultural categories rather than micro-level
linguistic structures. In terms of the latter, for instance, Bourdieu critiques
linguistic approaches which fail to see language as embedded in socio-
cultural spaces. (4)
© Critical Survey and Berghahn Books 2016 Volume 28, Number 3, 2016: 187–191
doi: 10.3167/cs.2016.280314 ISSN 0011–1570 (Print), ISSN 1752–2293 (Online)
188 Critical Survey, Volume 28, Number 3

Moreover, Hanna’s attraction to Bourdieu’s theories of language is

also rooted in the latter’s interdisciplinarity: Bourdieu claims ‘one
cannot fully understand language without placing linguistic practices
within the full universe of compossible practices: eating and drinking
habits, cultural consumptions, taste in matter of arts, sports, dress,
furniture, etc’ (quoted in Hanna, p.4). As a linguistic practice,
translation sits at the intersection of ‘interdiscipline’, a variety of
fields of power that determine its parameters.
Hanna’s critical readings of theoretical work are textured and
probing. He provides intriguing readings of the ways Egyptian
translators assert their political positions through both paratexts and
translations – which range from ‘close translation’, attempting fidelity
to reproduction of the text with minimal alteration, to ‘re-actualization’
and ‘imitation’, which involve more radical adaptation, such as
transposing texts to the ‘Arab milieu’ and sometimes even rewriting
them. He examines, for example, the use of colloquial Egyptian rather
than Classical Arabic, and the use of paratexts to indicate political
positions in relation to British rule in the 1910s. Hanna notes:

On the cover [Figure 1] of the third edition of his translation of Julius

Caesar (1912/1928), Muḥammad Ḥamdī provides an explanatory subtitle
for the play which goes as follows: ‘[this riwāya] represents the eruption

Figure 1
 Book Review of Bourdieu in Translation Studies 189

of nationalistic pride among the nations aspiring to democracy’ (my

translation, emphasis added). Opposite to an introductory brief note on
Shakespeare’s style of characterization, we have a picture under which is
written ‘William Shakespeare, the democratic English poet and riwā’ī
(playwright)’. (34)

Hanna goes on to explain how Ḥamdī’s position on British rule in

Egypt shaped both his reframing of Shakespeare’s own position and
his portrayal of Caesar in the translation:

Muḥammad Ḥamdī’s position-taking was non-conformist in the sense of

being subversive of the British rule of Egypt, represented at the time by a
British High Commissioner. The call for democracy, straightforwardly
stated in the explanatory subtitle of the translation and insinuated by
characterizing Shakespeare as the ‘democratic poet and riwā’ī’, is asserted
in the way Caesar is portrayed in translation and the afterword written by
Muḥammad Kāmil Silīm Bek, where an implicit connection can be
identified between Caesar and the British High Commissioner. (34)

The periodization of drama translation in twentieth-century Egypt

opens up a fascinating vantage on translation debates between drama
critics. While early in the century (after an initial period of totally
free, commercial adaptation) Shakespeare translations were prized for
fidelity to the original text with as little intervention as possible, the
latter part of the century saw more focus on whether translations and
adaptations were speakable on stage. This happened because the
theatre field developed a new professionalism due to the emergence
of a (state-supported) theatre infrastructure and an increase in theatre
production. The debates between drama critics revolved around the
quality of translation for theatre, as opposed to other media and
platforms. Hanna cites Jalāl al-‘Ashrī’s 1964 critique of ‘Abd al-
Raḥman Badawī’s drama translations as an example of a critic re-
establishing the parameters of theatre translation, working to
distinguish it from other fields of translation:

[Translating for the theatre] is not a matter of mastering the two languages
… source and target. It is first and foremost a matter of real interest in the
art of theatre, and an authentic responsiveness to the language that this art
dictates … this language which permits what is not permissible in other
languages, such as sacrificing a word that is more correct in linguistic
terms in favour of another that is more appropriate in terms of mise en
scène, and using a variety that is as close as possible to the language of
speech. This cannot be achieved without a ‘feel for acting’ which is
190 Critical Survey, Volume 28, Number 3

acquired only by those who experienced the language of theatre and

actually practised it. There are numerous translations which look sound
when read on paper, but which are totally inappropriate for the stage. (51)

Hanna also traces an earlier break: the emergence of the field of

drama and drama translation in Egypt within the Nahḍa (renaissance)
movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drama was
caught between the attempt to define (and dismiss) it in terms derived
from local popular entertainment (by the historian al-Jabartī) and the
effort to identify it with what was perceived to be a more prestigious
(and Western) form of high-art performance (by French-trained
Nahḍa intellectual al-Ṭahṭāwī, for one). What is most compelling is
that in this period the rise of literary translation, in general, and drama
translation, in particular, was tied to consumer demand. The increase
of print and newspapers created a market demand for literary
translation in Egypt. Then the rise of troupes and agents determined
the demand for more drama translation, leading to a number of foreign
plays commissioned by theatre troupes that were not even
commercially oriented.
Hanna deftly describes the emergence of Western-style theatre in
Egypt, and the translation debates surrounding radical adaptation of
Western theatre to a local context. The book could have dedicated
more space to the details of these debates, such as the controversies
surrounding the translation of Hamlet, with less rigid dependence on
Bourdieu’s concepts. While the discussion of adaptations and
additions – Hanna’s own research – is the most unique and intriguing
part of the book, the transition from discussing theory to analysing
Arabic Shakespeare translations is abrupt; a more explicit connection
is warranted between translation studies theory and the specific topic
of translation of Shakespeare in Arabic (not merely translation in
general), at the outset.
Especially at the beginning of the text, Hanna often delves for
pages into theoretical concepts without explaining actual ways these
apply to drama translation in Egypt, and thus without allowing the
theory to serve his arguments in order to make the theoretical
framework really his. For instance, the discussion of the definition of
social and cultural capital could have been condensed, and the use of
academic certification to gain social prestige for translations could
have sufficed as one self-evident example of social capital in the
Egyptian literary context.
 Book Review of Bourdieu in Translation Studies191

Nevertheless, Hanna’s research on drama translations in nineteenth-

and twentieth-century Egypt supports the notion of translation as a
socially regulated activity and in turn contributes to developing a
theoretical framework for a sociology of translation. Drama translation
criticism occupied the debates of various intellectuals in Egypt at the
time, touching upon issues of social values (the respectability of
‘theatre’ vs. popular local entertainment), literary translation and
criticism (as distinguished from drama criticism) and political
positioning (through radical reinterpretation of plays). Drawing on
methodologies from sociology and integrating them into translation
studies, the book in fact reveals what is not often recognized –
translation’s impact in various disciplines and public spheres.

Nahrain Al-Mousawi is Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant

Professor of Modern Arabic Literature and Culture at Washington
University in St Louis, Missouri. In 2015–2016 she was a postdoctoral
fellow in the Europe in the Middle East-Middle East in Europe
program at Forum Transregionale Studien and the Berlin Graduate
School of Muslim Cultures and Societies at Freie Universtät. She
holds a PhD in comparative literature from UCLA and an MA in
Middle East Studies from the University of Texas, Austin. Her
research has focused on Arab-African migrant literature.
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