Gayatri Spivak calls translation “the most intimate act of reading,” one which compels the translator to “surrender” to the foreign text and open herself to its words, its silences, and its intricate play of rhetorical meanings. This paper proposes that a language, too, when confronted with other languages foreign to itself, may engage in acts of intimate translational surrender. Drawing upon close readings of two Egyptian novels, "‘Usfur min al-sharq" (1938) by Tawfiq al-Hakim and "Qindil umm hashim" (1944) by Yahya Haqqi, this paper suggests that Arabic fusha performs such an act vis à vis French and English in these texts by serving as the language of dialogue between the Egyptian male narrators and their European female lovers, in scenes that take place in Europe and where it can be assumed that the characters would, in reality, be speaking to each other not in Arabic, but in the European language of the country they are in. Although at moments like these French and English, their foreignness masked in the literary fusha familiar to Egyptian readers of the time, would seem to be surrendering to Arabic, this paper seeks to demonstrate -- through analysis of the grammatical and semantic features of the Arabic deployed in the novels -- that the influence of the European languages persists in destabilizing the language of the texts: in “translating” lines of dialogue from their (always already absent) original French and English versions, Arabic surrenders to, and becomes intimately marked by, these languages’ alien cadences. From this starting point, other questions arise with fruitful implications for new ways of understanding the modes of Arabic–European cultural exchange at work during the colonial era. At a time in Egypt’s modern history when national identity and language were of paramount importance to intellectuals like al-Hakim and Haqqi, what possibilities for the Arabic language might they have seen in its intimate engagement with the language of the European “other,” and in the illusion of parity between languages that translation offers? Can we detect in the language of the two novels an anxiety that its intimacy with the language of the other may invite its own silencing? How can we move beyond the notion of literature as resistance toward a more nuanced view of how colonial Egyptian literature addressed itself to the colonizer, as Shaden Tageldin has urged we must?