Translation and the Manipulation of Difference

Arabic Literature in Nineteenth-Century England

Tarek Shamma

• Publisher: Routledge
• Edition: 1
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Print ISBN:
  9781905763153
  9781138151918
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317641582
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Translation and the Manipulation of Difference explores the question of difference in translation and offers an extended critique of the advocacy of foreignizing translation as a practice that does not minimize the alterity of the foreign text, and could therefore serve as an antidote to ethnocentrism and cultural insularity.

Shamma examines the reception of Arabic literature - especially the Arabian Nights - in nineteenth-century England and offers a detailed analysis of the period's major translations from Arabic: by Edward Lane, Richard Burton and Wilfred Blunt. He demonstrates that the long, complicated history of interaction, often confrontation, between Europe and the Arab World, where (mis)representations of the Other were intricately embroiled with political struggles, provides a critical position from which to examine the crucial role of context, above and beyond the textual elements of the translation, in shaping the political effects of translation. Examining translation techniques and decisions in the context of the translators' own goals as well as the conditions that surrounded the reception of their work, the study shows how each translator 'manipulated' his original in line with political positions that ranged from (implicit) acquiescence to steadfast resistance to colonialism. In a carefully elaborated critique of totalizing positions, the author argues that the foreignizing-domesticating model is too limited to describe the social and political function of translation and calls for a more complex understanding of the sociopolitical dimensions of translation strategies.

1. Colonial Representation and the Uses of Literalism

Edward William Lane’s Translation of The Arabian Nights

In the history of the reception of the Arabian Nights in English, two translations stand as defining turning points – the French of Galland and the English of Lane. An analysis of the former is indispensable for understanding the latter. For Galland’s translation shaped English, and European, views, of the Nights for a long time, and Lane had to work in reference to, if against, it. More than that, the way that Lane’s translation supplanted Galland’s was symptomatic of a significant change in the conception of the Arab and Muslim world in England, as the result of new political realities in British relations with this region. An examination of this transition, as reflected in Lane’s translation, would help us explore some important issues of translation as cultural representation in its political context. In particular, it will allow us to interrogate some of the most influential formulations of resistance in postcolonial translation studies and reveal their limitations.

1. The Age of Galland

Antoine Galland’s French translation of the Arabian Nights (1704–17) not only introduced the storybook to Europe for the first time; it had a powerful impact on the way this work – and by extension the culture that produced it – was to be conceived and appreciated for a long time to come. Even in the English-speaking world, many of the later translators had to define their aims and justify their choices in relation to that inaugural work. Thus, an analysis of the conditions that surrounded Galland’s translation, and the strategies of representation that he used and popularized, can shed an illuminating light on subsequent projects, especially those that attempted a departure with, or an improvement on, the French Orientalist’s version.

Antoine Galland (1646–1715) was an eminent French scholar of Arabic, Turkish, and Persian. His knowledge of Oriental cultures and languages was based on three extended visits to the Levant. First, he served as an attaché to the French embassy at Constantinople between 1670 and 1675, when he travelled extensively in Turkey and Syria, familiarizing himself with the region, and collecting coins, antiques, and manuscripts. Then in 1676, and again in 1679, he returned to the region for scientific research that involved chiefly numismatic studies.

Galland’s major works in the field of Eastern literature before the Arabian Nights include Les paroles remarquables, les bons mots et les maximes des orientaux [The Remarkable Sayings, Apothegms, and Maxims of the Eastern Nations] (1694), a collection of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish adages and proverbs (which appeared in English translation in 1795), a translation of the Koran (1694), and his contribution to the Bibliotheque orientale (1697), which he completed and prefaced after the death of Barthélemy d’Herbelot, the principal author. This work was an ambitious attempt to compose an encyclopaedia of Islam that incorporated the most up-to-date contemporary information on the subject. Standing at the threshold of modern academic Orientalism, it had an enormous influence on subsequent generations of scholars and artists in France and Europe.

Around 1698 Galland completed “Sindbad the Sailor”, a translation from one or more of the Arabic manuscripts that presented the story as independent. It is clear that Galland had until then known nothing about the Arabian Nights. But in 1701, while he was seeing the translation through the press, he learned that “Sindbad” was “extracted from a vast collection of similar stories, in several volumes, entitled The Thousand and One Nights. This discovery obliged me to suspend the printing and focus my efforts on retrieving the collection” (qtd. in Mahdi 1994: 18–19).³ Later in the same year, “a friend from Aleppo residing in Paris” told him that “he has received from his country a book I had asked him to get for me. It is in three volumes, entitled […] The Thousand Nights” (ibid.: 19). But the manuscript in question was incomplete; it contained only 282 nights, and broke off half way through the story of “Camaralzaman” (ibid.: 23). In 1702, Galland received a fourth volume which furnished him with the rest of the incomplete story and some other tales. The remaining 1001 nights were complemented with the previously translated “Sindbad”, a number of tales transmitted to Galland (orally or in written outline) by a Hanna Diab, a Syrian priest visiting Paris,⁴ and, finally, two stories translated by François Pétis de la Croix, Galland’s colleague at the Collège Royal, which the publisher added to the collection without Galland’s permission.⁵ Lacking the dénouement of the frame tale, Galland invented one himself.

Les mille et une nuits, contes arabes [The Thousand and One Nights, Arab Tales] appeared in twelve volumes between 1704 and 1717, the last two volumes published in 1717 after Galland’s death from manuscripts that he had prepared. By all accounts, the work was an outstanding and immediate success. It “spread like wildfire all over Europe” (Rosenthal 1974: 346), and pirated editions appeared almost immediately in The Hague (Macdonald 1930: 414). The first two volumes, published in 1704, were reissued the next year, and the book went through numerous reprints, including pirated editions (Macdonald 1932: 388). Moreover, the popularity of the Nights created a demand for more oriental material: the “Arabian Tales” were soon followed by “Turkish” as well as “Persian” tales – L’histoire de la sultane de perse et des vizirs, contes turcs [The History of the Sultan of Persia and his Ministers, Turkish Tales] (1707), and Les mille et un jours, contes persans [The Thousand and One Days, Persian Tales] (1710–12). Both claimed to be translations from respective sources, and were highly popular. It was not until the twentieth century that The Thousand and One Days was revealed to be pure fabrication. The author, François Pétis de la Croix, professor of Oriental languages at the Collège Royal, collected a vast body of stories, story elements, themes, and motifs, invented others, arranged them into 1001 days, and attached the whole to a frame tale of his own creation (Fähndrich 2000: 98–99).

There followed countless other imitations, adaptations, abridgements, enlargements, and “continuations” (Conant 1908: XXIV). These works fuelled an “Oriental renaissance”, reflected in a fascination with all aspects of Eastern life. On the literary level, the most remarkable product of this trend was “the Oriental Tale”. That was a new genre which employed Oriental themes and settings for various purposes. It flourished in England, France, and other European countries throughout the eighteenth and part of the nineteenth centuries, and was employed by figures as diverse as Joseph Addison, François-Marie Voltaire, Benjamin Disraeli, Oliver Goldsmith, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Lord Byron, Charles Montesquieu, William Beckford, and Dr. Johnson.

Les mille et une nuits was translated into English shortly after its appearance in French. The exact date of the first edition (in six volumes) has not been ascertained, but studies have confirmed the existence of an English version as early as 1706, and possibly earlier (Su Fang 2003: 21). It was, by all accounts, a commercial edition prepared in haste to bank on the success of the French translation. Due to this fact, and also to the inferior quality of the print (which is probably the main reason that it has not survived), this edition has been dubbed the “Grub Street Edition”. The identity of the first translator is unknown; MacDonald believes that he “turned Galland’s artistic French into the strangest Grub Street English” (1932: 405). It was these early editions that gave the collection the name which has remained with it to this day. It was part of the voluminous title Arabian Nights Entertainments: consisting of One Thousand and One Stories, told by the Sultaness of the Indies, to divert the Sultan from the Execution of a Vow he had made to marry a Lady every Day, and have her cut off next Morning, to avenge himself for the Disloyalty of his first Sultaness.

As was the case with the French version, the book was a tremendous success in England. Within few years the tales were so popular that a literary allusion could be made to their title, as one could see from Charles Gildon’s collection of stories The Golden Spy: or, A Political Journal of The British Nights Entertainments, published in 1709. By 1718, at least five editions had been published (Times 1922: 176). Translations of “Persian” and “Turkish” tales followed in rapid succession.

Several explanations have been given for the instantaneous enthusiasm with which the Arabian Nights was met in Europe. The most common and widely accepted of these is that it represented “a natural reaction from the dominant classicism of Boileau” (Conant 1908: xxiii). “In France”, Martha Pike Conant says, “the popularity of the fantastic and marvellous stories […] had testified to a truant desire to escape from the strict artistic rules and classical ideals […] Conditions were similar in England” (243). According to this argument, the “wild imagination” and the vast range of “intense and spontaneous emotions” which the tales displayed touched a nascent romantic spirit which later culminated in the “nineteenth-century romanticists who enthusiastically welcomed Le Orientales” (ibid.: xxiii).

On the other hand, in the larger historical context of Europe’s relationship with the East, and specifically Muslim countries, military and political developments in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries made possible an appreciation of these cultures in entirely fresh ways. The Ottoman threat to Europe, the most recent stage in a long series of aggressions and counter-aggressions that had fashioned the European view of the Muslim East, had all but vanished with the failure of the siege of Vienna in 1683. Consequently, as Norman Daniel remarks, “as the centres of power in the world shifted, fear gave way to patronage” (1966: 11). Of the host of negative representations developed over centuries of military and cultural confrontations, those of a terrifying and destructive enemy disappeared, while the attendant images of lasciviousness, license, and superstition (central to the hostile European conception of Islam) were relegated to the unthreatening realm of the exotic, and even the romantic. Thus, “during the eighteenth century, this world of Turks and Muslims developed into a world full of magic in the minds of Europeans, who no longer felt threatened by it” (Fähndrich 2000: 97).

Galland and His Readers

It should be noted that Galland took up his translation to satisfy a popular appetite for a brand of Arabic fiction that was often considered, by scholarly standards, much inferior to the “serious” literature to which he had so far dedicated his career. His remarks on the projected translation give us a clear idea about the context in which he saw his work. In a letter to Pierre-Daniel Huet on February 25, 1701, he said: “I also have another little translation from Arabic, stories just as good as the fairy tales published these last years in such profusion”⁶ (qtd. in Mahdi 1994: 19).

Therefore, it is clear that Galland went about his new project with a different approach from the one he had adopted in his earlier works. His Les paroles remarquables, for example, had shown that he “could work with philological, bibliographical, and historical exactitude. He evidently considered that these qualities would be out of place in putting the Nuits before the public” (MacDonald 1932: 411). In other words, Galland, as translator of the Nights, was the popularizer rather than the scholar: he was anxious to make the tales acceptable and desirable to his readers. Not only did he have to defer to the modes of popular literature, but, specifically, to the tastes of the “society ladies” who were, as was the case with Perrault’s fairy tales, his “most influential partisans” (Irwin 1994: 19). Indeed, Galland’s translation was dedicated to a distinguished lady of the French court, “Marchioness D’o”, who had already lent her support to his translation of “the seven Arabian stories” (Galland 1813).⁷ Marchioness D’o was the daughter of the deceased Gabriel-Joseph de Guilleragues, former French ambassador in Constantinople, under whom Galland had served for almost a decade (1679-88). By then she had become a lady in waiting to the Duchess de Bourgogne, wife of Louis, Duc de Bourgogne, Dauphine de France.

The hallmark of Galland’s style was to domesticate the tales into the acceptable literary modes of the time, while consciously preserving, or even enhancing, their exotic flavour. Thus in the “frenchified dialogue” (Gerhardt 1963: 20) of the Nuits, characters address each other as “madame”, “monsieur”, and “seigneur”; “courtisans” address their king as “votre Majesté” [Your Majesty]. People use “sequins” instead of dinars, and are transported in “equipages”; and houses are equipped with porches. When he added descriptions such as “un […] jardin […] consacré aux fètes et aux divertissements de la cour” [garden dedicated to fetes and diversions of the court] (1840 I: 3), or “sa maison était le rendezvous de toute la noblesse de la cour” [his house was a rendezvous place for all the nobles of the court] (1840 II: 44), it was obviously the French court of the eighteenth century that Galland had in mind. Moreover, Arabic names were modified so as to mitigate their foreign sound. Names like Zobéide, Amine, Giafar, Schemseinihar, Noureddin, Casgar had an appealing exotic cachet, without sounding too cumbersome. When the “literal” translations later made their debut in nineteenth-century England, the suddenly jarring foreignness of the names was the first and most obvious cause of complaint.

Galland was careful to gloss over any customs that might have struck his readers as radically alien. As Mia Gerhardt observes, Galland was translating for an audience that “mocked at any word or gesture that departed from its own polite custom; it resented the bizarre” (1963: 19). Hence, in the story of “Noureddin and the Beautiful Persian” (1840 II: 134–181), Galland omitted a reference to circumcision; indeed, mention of this practice was suppressed in the entire translation. Also, in the context of the “Story of Ali Ebn Becar”, the Arabic text talks about Haroun Alraschid’s “concubines”; Galland has “dames ses favorites” [favourite ladies] (1840 II: 44). These changes resulted in “a certain vague generality in the description of manners, conduct and things of everyday life” (Gerhardt 1963: 73).

What is more, Galland went to great lengths to justify the actions of the characters and to explain away anything that might have rendered them unsavoury to the refined tastes of his readers. Thus, when Schahzenan discovers his wife in bed with “an officer of the guard”, and proceeds to kill her, Galland provides him with a lengthy monologue in which he explains that, as king, he has to punish wickedness within his dominion, and that he has a “just resentment” as a husband, and so on (Galland 1995:2). Moreover, Galland did not hesitate to censor the text “when modesty obliged us to it” (1813). Accordingly, the orgy in Schahriar’s garden and the two brothers’ encounter with the glass-box woman in the frame tale, the most erotic e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Half Title
• Table of Contents
• Transcription Conventions
• Introduction
• 1. Colonial Representation and the Uses of Literalism
• 2. The Exotic Dimension of Foreignizing Strategies
• 3. Domestication as Resistance
• Conclusion
• References
• Index