The Seduction of Seduction

Focusing on Egypt’s occupation by the French (1798–1801) and the British (1882–1954), this book tries to answer the classic question of why the colonizers’ culture appeals to the colonized. In theoretically fluent, and often brilliant, close readings of original texts and translations by Napoleon Bonaparte, Hassan al-‘Attar, Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi, Ali Mubarak, Muhammad al-Siba‘i, Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Taha Hussayn, ‘Abbas Mahmud al-‘Aqqad, and Naguib Mahfouz, Shaden Tageldin examines crucial moments in the history of translation from French and English into Arabic from 1798 to 1947. She argues that major Egyptian intellectuals and translators were “seduced” by European orientalists’ mastery of, and apparent reverence for, the Arabic language and its literature.

Derived from Jean Baudrillard, this notion of seduction works by giving the seduced the illusion of power (sovereignty), the easier to “disarm” their resistance and entice them to love rather than hate their colonial masters. This game involves a masquerade: whereas colonial discourse casts the European in the role of a male sexually possessing a feminized Orient, in seduction, the European male is dressed in drag (76)—although at one point he is also described as a hermaphrodite (72)—luring the Egyptian male into fantasizing himself the seducer and forgetting his feminized status. As the game begins with the European “translating himself,” so to speak, into Arabic, so it ends with the Egyptian intellectual not only translating European books into Arabic but also translating himself and his culture into European terms. This turns translation from French and English into Arabic, which was the key activity in the nineteenth-century project of modernization, known as al-Nahda, into the medium of cultural imperialism and the native intellectual-translator into an emasculated pimp.

This thesis is elegantly argued throughout the book and buttressed by erudite philological and textual meditations on well-known and lesser-known texts. However, reducing translation to the mechanism of seduction as described by Baudrillard can be misleading when used as the basis for an interpretation of cultural translation in (post)colonial Egypt over one and a half centuries, or as a theory of cultural imperialism more generally, as the book announces in its “Overture.” Translation is no straightforward activity. As its Latin etymology indicates, translation is transfer in the broadest sense, encompassing a wide range of human thought and activity from cognition to the traffic in goods and ideas to movement across all manner of literal and figurative boundaries, and from language to philosophy, biology, technology, and theology. It is not limited by any single definition or procedure: witness, for example, Emily Apter’s “Twenty Theses on Translation,” which range from “Nothing is translatable” to “Everything is translatable,” with statements like “Translation is a universal language of techne” and “Translation is the language of planets and monsters” falling in between (xi–xii).

It is possible to add “translation is seduction” to that list, a list that I doubt Apter meant to restrict to only twenty. Nor does she present those interesting, insightful, and thought-provoking notions that illuminate different and sometimes contradictory aspects of translation, as analytically useful in the sense of offering a sufficient basis for a comprehensive theory. This is because, even in this restricted sense, “translation” is itself a metaphor for a wide range of exchanges, a metaphor that is often explained in terms of other metaphors. Seduction is one such metaphor that helps us understand an aspect or topic (e.g., the way Napoleon’s proclamation upon entering Egypt was calibrated, especially in its Arabic version, to win the support of Egyptians against their Mamluk rulers, as Tageldin shows in chapter 1). And as one among any number of possible metaphors, seduction does not offer an adequate theory for explaining all the activities of translation that followed in the context of the Nahda, although the notion works to some extent in many of Tageldin’s chosen examples. There is much more to translation here than the metaphor of seduction...