The Revolt of the Young: Essays by Tawfiq al-Hakim trans. by Mona Radwan (review)

Tawfiq al-Hakim (October 9, 1898–July 26, 1987) was a prominent Egyptian writer and a visionary. He authored more than seventy plays, eleven novels, and twenty-five collections of essays. Nonetheless, his most significant contribution was in the realm of theater. His book The Revolt of the Young, as Roger Allen succinctly puts it, "presents to its readers a voice from the past, one that seeks to offer comment and counsel to present generations of Egyptians in all their variety" (foreword, xii).

Mona Radwan, translator of The Revolt of the Young, explains that "by the time the January 25 Revolution (2011) took place in Egypt, I had already finished translating the book but was even keener on editing it and looking for a publisher" (xix). The book deserved to be available in English for those who are interested in Arabic literature. She believed, and I agree, "this book deserves to be in the limelight as it predicts the revolt of the Egyptian and the American people socially and culturally, if not politically, in the twenty-first century" (xx). Not only did The Revolt of the Young foresee the Arab Spring but it also continues to serve as a universal reference to the rebellious nature of the youth all over the world, from U.S. opposition to the Vietnam War to the Wall Street sit-ins and France's housing unrest. As Mona Radwan succinctly puts it, "his book inspires" (xxii).

In her English rendition of The Revolt of the Young, Radwan effectively dealt with al-Hakim's elevated and abstruse classical Arabic. To do so, she rid the target text of the many ellipses that al-Hakim used either to signify pondering or in place of commas. Further, she also eliminated from the target text many of the exclamation marks that al-Hakim used so profusely. Additionally, al-Hakim's erudite style necessitated in the source text the inclusion of a myriad of cultural allusions to Western, Asian, and Arab works and writers. However, al-Hakim almost never cites the sources and rarely mentions the names of the writers fully. Nor did his source text include a bibliography. This required Radwan to insert many explanatory footnotes and add the years of publication of said referenced works. She did this while keeping citations in the same manner al-Hakim wrote them to make her translation "more reader friendly" (xxi).

Clearly, Radwan's translation has brought the author home (Venuti 1995, 20) to the English readership. Overall, it is both domesticated and transparent. Nonetheless, her translation seems to be best suited for the British readership. This is clearly manifested in her word and idiomatic choices. For instance, she uses "lift" where Americans would use "ride." To this effect, Radwan has done a magnificent job in making The Revolt of the Young accessible to the English readership, but unfortunately much of al-Hakim's writing persona was lost. Radwan might have stretched and bent the target language much farther to better accommodate aspects of the source text's foreignness (Schleiermacher 2012, 62). In the end, this would be my preference, a preference for which I am regularly criticized for urging the easily distracted reader to strain to hear the voice of the original (Scott 2000, 14).