The demonstrations that swept the Arab world during the so-called Arab Spring confirmed what literary scholars have assumed for a while now: literary vernacularism is a powerfully unique means for everyday expression, evidenced by demonstrators chanting lines from 'ammiyyah poetry at protests. Such realization highlights the paradox with which vernacular literature has been approached. On the one hand, vernacular literature is recognized as prevalent and powerful; but, on the other, it is scarcely studied in academia. Moreover, vernacular literature does not fit within folklore studies, and few literary critics have engaged with it as serious literature. Not only is vernacular literature inferior to fusha literature, the conventional wisdom seems to imply, it is merely local to its dialectical region, as opposed to the more universal reach of literature written in "standard" Arabic. The panel challenges both claims. The latter, in particular, is viewed by the panel as an argument for the vernacular: the inherent locality of this type of literature highlights the uniqueness of the vernacular (vis-à-vis fusha) in terms of authenticity, production and consumption.
The panel investigates the significance of this locality and, in addition, discusses how some of the panelists--themselves translators of vernacular literature--address the artistic and ethical challenges of translating this form into European languages. With the always shifting poles of 'ammiyyah and fusha in mind, this panel's participants explore the vernacular transactions that go on between different language registers in the Middle East as well as how we might approach the vernacular through translation. The papers look at the intersections of aesthetic and political concerns that emerge within the dialectic between written language standards and colloquial expression. We begin on the margins of the Arabic context, with the Iranian literary luminary Ahmad Shamlu's vernacular Persian translations of Langston Hughes's poetry. Shamlu deploys elements of the original content and form of Hughes's poems to wholly new political ends in the Shah's Iran. We then move west to Iraq to discuss the artistic and ethical challenges in translating Iraq's foremost vernacular poet, 'Aryan al-Sayyid Khalaf. The third paper addresses the wide variety of language registers put to use by contemporary Egyptian novelists, from a religiously-inspired Quranic diction to colloquial Arabic and even Arabized English. The last paper rounds out the wide geographical scope of the panel with an ethnographic analysis of Darija's role as a published language among Moroccan activists since the early 2000's.
In 1973, Iranian poet Ahmad Shamlu (d. 2000) published a collection of Persian translations of world poetry, Hamchun kuchah-i bi intiha (Like an Endless Alley). The collection begins with a short essay, also by Shamlu, titled “An Introduction to African-American Poetry,” which is followed by the translation into Persian of fifty-three (!) poems by Langston Hughes (d. 1967). Later on in 1986, Shamlu released a stand-alone volume containing twenty-two of the translations, titled Siyah hamchun a'maq-i Afriqa-yi khudam (Black Like the Depths of My Africa). In his translations, Shamlu makes a point of juxtaposing standard written Persian with the spoken vernacular. For instance, in “Taranah-yi sabkhunah” (“Ballad of the Landlord,” 1940), Shamlu mirrors Hughes’ use of the vernacular “Don’t you ‘member I told you about it / Way last week?” by using spoken Persian rather than the standard written variety: “agih yadat bashah haftah-yi pisham / inu bit guftam.” Even the title uses the vernacular “sabkhunah” for “landlord” instead of the written “sahibkhanah,” which only appears in the Persian translation at the end of the poem where we find in the English original a news headline: “MAN THREATENS LANDLORD.”
This paper explores Shamlu’s translations of Hughes’ poems as an instance of “vernacular transaction.” That is, I show how Shamlu’s choice to render certain of Hughes’ lines into a spoken Persian register enacts what Shamlu calls “bazsazi,” or the “reconstruction” of the original poem in the target language. In Shamlu’s translations we find an unusual textual transaction that seriously engages with the function of African-American vernacular language in Hughes’ poems. I thus highlight how the vernacular operates when carried across different cultural contexts and how Shamlu’s translations work to specific political ends in Iran under the Shah, in the 1970s, and again in 1986 after the Islamic Revolution.
Finally, as these Persian translations of Hughes’s poetry have not received much attention in Anglophone scholarship, the paper also covers some as-yet-unaddressed aspects of their translation history, including Shamlu’s failure to mention the role his co-translator, Hasan Fayyad, played in the process. I have been in touch with Fayyad to clarify several questions in this regard, and the paper will include new information about his collaboration with Shamlu to translate Hughes’s work into Persian.
Radical politics played a decisive role in shaping qasidat al-shi'r al-sha'bi and in transforming al-shi'r al-sha'bi from its occasional composition to an established form of poetry. The interaction with radical politics shifted the horizon of expectations for the form and widened the range of its interpretation. In addition, it became a serious contender as a cultural expressive form in mid-20th c. Baghdadi ideological arena. In fine,the key development in this art form emerged from the clash between radical opposition and state control.
Beginning in the early 2000s, the Kingdom of Morocco witnessed a surge of texts published in colloquial Moroccan Arabic, or Darija. The texts were highly eclectic, ranging from news magazines to translations of Rainer Maria Rilke, and they used a wide variety of scripts and orthographic conventions. Equally eclectic were their authors and publishers, ranging from psychoanalysts and linguists, to journalists and painters. Yet a common thread ran through these diverse publications: their producers all espoused a similar desire to promote Darija as a language of literacy and of literature, with a broader ambition for ordinary Moroccans to recognize Darija--not classical Arabic (Fusha)--as their “mother tongue.”
While the idea of a mother tongue may seem natural to many, scholars have argued that mother tongues do not simply exist as such. Rather, they are made. This paper attempts to build on these arguments through an investigation of the particular case of Darija activism in contemporary Morocco. In contrast to the historical bent that characterizes much of the literature on mother tongues, the case of Darija activism provides a unique opportunity to ethnographically examine the labor that goes into making a mother tongue precisely because the project of vernacular standardization in Morocco is ongoing and has yet to fully succeed.
In this paper, I draw on interviews with a diverse set of language activists (writers, translators, and publishers) in Rabat, Morocco. My interview data shows a strong insistence by activists that Moroccans have an intrinsic connection to Darija. Yet this insistence, I argue, belies the difficulties that the activists themselves experience when adopting Darija as a language of reading and writing. In contrast to activists’ belief that mother tongue texts powerfully confront readers with “linguistic reality,” I argue that reading and writing in the language that one speaks is less a “trigger” than a practice of self-cultivation through which readers develop the capacity for reexperiencing their spoken language as their “mother tongue”--and for reimagining themselves as properly “modern” linguistic subjects.
The representation of the “Arab Spring” and its aftermath in fiction has been a challenge for both writers of fiction and scholars of literature on at least two accounts. First, due to the fluidity of the events, still continually unfolding, re-conceptualized and analyzed, and second, because of the multiple and diverse perspectives that most authors aim to represent, successfully or unsuccessfully. Language has been at the heart of this challenge. Transcending the established inhibition against the use of vernacular for fear of losing a larger pan-Arab readership, Egyptian writers have availed their narrative language of multiple linguistic registers that range from the Classical, bordering on and engaging with Quranic Arabic, to the colloquial of the semi-educated and the English-littered colloquial of the Egyptian upper class. Writers have also not only represented but satirized and refuted the governmental discourse where language often obfuscates the demarcations between the revolutionary and the counter-revolutionary. Such deployment of linguistic registers has certainly enhanced the authenticity and complexity of the fictional representation of the events of the “Arab Spring,” where the participants’ linguistic diversity has been a fundamental component, of their ideological and epistemological pluralism. Through an analysis of a selection of novels, including Rabie’s Ottared, 2015 (short listed for the Arabic Booker, 2016), Fishere’s Bab al-Khuruj, 2017, and Faisal’s Baligh, 2017, this paper explores such pluralism and reflects on the challenges as well as the importance of according a text’s linguistic register its due attention by writers, translators and literary scholars alike.
