In his book, The Scandals of Translation, Lawrence Venuti (2006) vociferously argued that “translation is stigmatized as a form of writing, discouraged by copyright law, depreciated by the academy, exploited by publishers and corporations, governments and religious organizations.” This statement unequivocally sums up the status of the field of translation studies and the stigma that has been attached to the discipline, whereby its practices have been largely dogged by failure and suspicion and considered “second class activity.” Regardless of the amount of work performed by translators, the act of translating is under-acknowledged and viewed as purely instrumental by critics, with a mission resting on conveying the original text. However, many scholars of translation have debunked this myth, sharing the value of the field of translation beyond the often-cited remark of its sole capacity to transmit texts linguistically. Moreover, the issue of fidelity has sparked many debates about the translator’s faithfulness to the source text and how narratives in the original text appear in the target text. Walter Benjamin (2000) argued that “it is evident that no translation, however good it may be, can have any significance as regards the original.” Herein lies the distinction Benjamin made between the ‘original’ and its ‘translation,’ wherein translation is an expressive form through which the original text secures an afterlife—an afterlife that can only be experienced through the new form that emerges from the new text. In this panel, we examine the problematics of Arabic literary translation, and the issues implicated in the process of translation. Paper one entitled “Translating Race in Arabic Narratives” looks at translations of race in Arthur Wormhoudt’s Diwan Antara Ibn Shaddan, Richard Burton’s One Thousand and one Nights and Ella Elliot’s translation of Idriss Ali’s Nubian novel Poor. This essay argues that verbal analogies of race and blackness in these texts are often utilized within the context of white supremacy. Second paper entitled “Problematics of Translating the Vernacular Zajal” addresses the problematics and ethics of translating the vernacular Zajal through centralizing the foreignness of this oral poetic form. Finally, the last paper entitled “Syrian Civil War and Poetry: Translating the Untranslatable” examines problematics of Arabic literary translation of Wafai Laila’s and Akram Alkatreb’s war poetry, focusing on how war, loss, displacement, and grief, among other, have inevitably affected the subjectivities of these two Syrian poets and been conceptualized in their artistic productions, in particular their poetry.
Disciplines
Literature
Participants
Dr. Touria Khannous
-- Presenter
Ms. Rima Sadek
-- Presenter
Dr. Jonas M. Elbousty
-- Organizer, Presenter, Chair
In his very well-known essay “The Task of Translator,” an introduction to a translation of The Tableaux Parisiens of Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin regarded translation as a work of art that should be fully appreciated. The task of the translation should not be viewed within a narrow prism whereby translation is an instrument conveying information from the source text to the target text. Rather, it is a process that adds originality and gives new life to the source text. Benjamin contended that “a real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully.” Benjamin, in his theorization of translation, addressed the main critiques staged against translation, and in his defense of the translator, he wrote that “the task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original.” Similarly, Damrosch, in his book How to Read World Literature, reiterated the same idea when he stated that “When it is read intelligently, an excellent translation can be seen as an expansive transformation of the original, a concrete manifestation of cultural exchange, and a new stage in a work’s life as it moves from its first home out into the world.” These views of literary translation bespeak the creativity involved in the art of translation. The paper examines the English translation of Wafai Laila’s and Akram Alkatreb’s war poetry, focusing on how war, loss, displacement, and grief, among other, have inevitably affected the subjectivities of these two Syrian poets and been conceptualized in their artistic productions, in particular their poetry.
This paper will examine translations of race in Arthur Wormhoudt’s Diwan Antara Ibn Shaddan, Richard Burton’s One Thousand and one Nights and Ella Elliot’s translation of Idriss Ali’s Nubian novel Poor. I will look at what is lost when Wormhoudt, Burton and Elliott used Western words of race in their translations. While exploring examples of these limitations, the paper will argue that the translators used verbal analogies of race and blackness in these texts within the context of white supremacy and the Western biological view of race, which they projected into the Arabic texts, often doing disservice to these narratives. Such transnational analogies ignore the embedded nature of race, ethnicity, status and hierarchy and how they vary from one Arab region to another and mutate according to other social factors. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s essay “The Phenomenology of Whiteness,” (2007) in which she states that whiteness is “an orientation that puts certain things within reach” (p. 126), I will argue that what “Abiad” (white) might have meant to Arabs is, in Ahmed’s words, a “likeness” with fellow members of society because of the “proximity of shared residence” (p. 124). In pre-Islamic Arabia, for instance, skin color was relative, and there was a variety of terms used in the context of describing skin complexion that were mostly used to differentiate what was familiar from what was “other.” My paper will provide close readings of selected passages from these texts to show how the translations conducted by Wormhoudt, Burton and Elliot ignored these factors when translating race in Arabic narratives.
The concept of translation problematics has gone through radical changes from asking the primordial question, “how should one translate?” to the recent more engaging one, “how can translation address political and cultural hierarchies to make the world a better place through translation?” In the classic sense of the term, translation refers to the set of accepted standards by which the translation process should take place such as, the translation should be a faithful rendition of the original, the translation should read as fluently as the original does, the translator should not add or subtract without notice. In other words, translation is preserving sameness across languages. However, how can one preserve sameness when translating Zajal?
Zajal is a traditional form of oral strophic poetry declaimed in a colloquial dialect. It is semi-improvised, semi-sung and is often performed if the format of a bedate between Zajjaleen (poets who improvise the Zajal). Zajal is best known in the Lebanese variety of the Levantine dialect. The Arabic language has two registers, the formal and the vernacular. The vast majority of the translated literature from Arabic is from the formal, even though it is the native tongue of no one, but the general wisdom goes that the formal language is more appropriate to writing literature. The vernacular literature, of which Zajal is a part, has been largely ignored as secondary and base, one that is not worthy of translation. Yet, Zajal is one of the most popular poetic forms in the Levant, one that is deeply rooted in the socio-cultural identity of the people of the region. Hence, the ethical question of translating the vernacular Zajal into English and having it enter world literature in a way that would have not been possible since English does not have the diglossia difference between formal and informal nor does it have the poetic form of Zajal. This paper addresses the problematics and ethics of translating the vernacular Zajal through centralizing the foreignness of this oral poetic form, rendering translation a political act of introducing foreign literary genres into world literature.
