The Happy Traitor: Tales of Translation

I trust that my title leads the reader back to the familiar tag concerning translators, namely "traddutore traditore" in Italian, implying that the translator is a "traitor." This familiar quotation does not, of course, mention what particular cause it is that the translator is betraying, and it is my goal here to explore as many dimensions of that issue as possible and within the more particular context of translating works of Arabic fiction into English. I make use of the adjective "happy" in my title, by way of acknowledging from the outset that I personally am quite content to admit that literary translation is a maximal act of interpretation and that it should involve those people who have a broad acquaintance with at least two literary traditions and preferably more as well as their critical and theoretical underpinnings; in our case, by which I imply the translation of Arabic literature, most of those people are literature scholars.

I further assert that if the notion of "traitor" implies fidelity or loyalty as its opposite, then the very idea of literal translation is almost certainly impossible and equally undesirable. Let me briefly illustrate with two short examples: "Il pleut chats et chiens" or "Yumtir qitat wa-kilab" are exquisitely literal translations into French and Arabic of the English expression "it's raining cats and dogs," but I do not think that anyone would wish to retain such a version in any published translation of an English text into French or Arabic. My second example comes from Italy and concerns the first occasion on which Silvio Berlisconi was elected premier—an event that occurred while I was teaching at the Orientale University in Naples in late 2001. During his campaign, he had emphasized "le tre 'I": "internet, investimente, e inglese." The members of his cabinet in formation, consisting of a number of graduates of the world-famous Bocconi Institute in Milan, were required to construct an English version of their websites. Following what was clearly a somewhat flawed translation process, they all emerged on their websites—if only for a day or so—as being graduates of the Big Mouths Institute. In other words, translation in both theory and practice can easily produce such transcultural faux pas, most of which occur beyond the purely word-for-word translation level.

"Translation" as a term and an activity implies, it goes without saying, a process of carrying something across a linguistic and cultural divide. In that sense, everyone who studies another culture and wishes to analyze and write about it is, in one way or another, a translator, whether the focus be literature, politics, anthropology, or whatever. However, if we restrict our purview to the specific realm of texts and literary translation, then the notion of "literature" itself, according to at least one dictionary definition ("writings in which expression and form, in connection with ideas of permanent and universal interest, are characteristic and essential features"), clearly demands a consideration of a potentially enormous variety of parameters and criteria. In what follows, I propose therefore to make use of my own experience in order to comment on modern literature and, more specifically, modern fiction of Arabic expression. In so doing, I also propose to make use of the triad frequently invoked in theoretical writings about translation: the source culture and its language or languages and texts; the target culture and its language or languages; and, between the two, the intertextual stage (noting here that this usage of the term "intertext" has no connection with that of "intertextuality," the study of the presence of, and allusions to, other texts, in a particular text).

Any discussion of issues connected with source texts and cultures in our current context confronts us with a whole host of interesting questions: the status of the writer and work in the source society, for example, and the level of engagement of the translator with that society, with the genre of the work, and with the writer in question. Within the framework of closer linkages between the literary communities of many Arab-world countries on the one hand and, on the other...