A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature

David Tresilian

• Publisher: Saqi Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780863564055
• eBook ISBN: 9780863568022
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Modern Arabic literature remains little known and poorly understood despite growing curiosity among European readers. This brief introduction offers a unique overview, focusing on developments over the last fifty years. It provides a guide to the literary landscape, indicating the major landmarks in the shape of authors, ideas and debates. The picture that emerges shows that the literature of the modern Arab world, Europe's closest neighbour, is not so far from us as we are sometimes encouraged to think. This is a timely contribution to the dialogue between East and West, bringing modern Arabic literature into the mainstream for English-speaking readers.

Reading Arabic Literature

Orientalism, a well-known work by the late Palestinian-American critic Edward Said, develops the thought that a particular way of seeing has historically vitiated relations between the Arab world and Europe. This way of seeing, dubbed ‘orientalism’, has been present in various European representations of the Arab world and the Arabs, whether literary, artistic, academic or in the media, and these have circulated widely in western societies, European representations giving way to North American ones. ‘Orientalism’, Said writes, is ‘a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience’, that ‘special place’ being as Europe’s ‘other’, everything Europe is not. Whereas Europeans have sometimes considered themselves to be ‘rational, virtuous, mature, [and] “normal”,’ among other things, the Orient has been seen as ‘irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, [and] “different”,’ particularly in the period after 1800 and in the ‘discourse’ of orientalism.¹

While Said’s book has been controversial and continues to generate debate,² its contribution lies in drawing attention to the ways in which the Arab world has been represented in Europe and the purposes such representations have served. It drew attention, for example, to a class of intellectual middlemen, the writers, painters, photographers, professors and officials whose views the book examined in detail, as well as to the less-celebrated work of journalists and translators, who file reports on the Arab world or translate materials from one set of societies into forms that can be understood by another. The work of all these people has helped to determine the picture that Europeans and perhaps westerners more generally have been able to form of the Arab world and of Arab history and culture. ‘Everyone who writes about the Orient must locate himself vis-à-vis the Orient,’ wrote Said, ‘which add[s] up to deliberate ways of addressing the reader, containing the Orient, and finally, representing it or speaking in its behalf.’

While it would be too much to suggest that there is any ‘correct’ way of seeing the Arab world, either in absolute terms or in terms uninfected by the considerations pointed to by Said, it may be possible to arrive at a more informed picture than the one criticized in Orientalism. That, at least, is the aim of this book, which seeks neither to ‘represent’ the Orient nor to ‘speak in its behalf’ but rather to survey works by men and women who have contributed to modern Arabic literature, and, it is hoped, to allow them to speak through their works available in translation. Nevertheless, Said’s work can be helpful in suggesting ways into reading modern Arabic literature, as well as in thinking about ways in which it has sometimes been read. These concern the manner in which this literature has been approached by western readers, in other words the issues of reception and translation pointed to in Orientalism; the features of it that present particular challenges to non-Arabic-speaking readers, such as unfamiliar cultural references and the special character of the Arabic language; and the geographical spread of the Arab world and its own internal divisions that should be borne in mind when approaching its literature.

These themes naturally lead to consideration of the conditions under which modern Arabic literature circulates in its countries of origin, as well as to examination of it as a form of ‘postcolonial’ or ‘world’ literature, when seen from Europe, and reflection on its present situation. Having begun early in the last century as a new form of expression, based – at least for works in prose and drama – in some measure on European models, it has now become a flourishing component of Arab societies.

Translators of modern Arabic literature have sometimes stressed how difficult it is for works by modern Arab writers to sell in western countries. Denys Johnson-Davies, for example, probably the best-known translator of modern Arabic literature into English, has pointed to the demands that determine which texts get translated and the ways in which they are marketed and, presumably, to some extent read. There is no point in doing a translation that will not be published, but many translations have nevertheless ended up in the drawers of translators’ desks because they have failed to find western publishers. And there are also other issues. Literary translators from Arabic into English have sometimes possessed what Johnson-Davies describes as ‘excessive power’, since they play a ‘pioneering role in uncovering and furthering writing’ they believe to be valuable, with English or other foreign publishers not necessarily being well informed about the Arab literary scene.³ They have also had to respond to pressures in the target market, notably for works that answer either to a particular conception of what Arab societies are like, whether ‘picturesque’ or ‘repressive’, or to existing western interests, with regard to women’s experience, for example, or the experience of minorities. Basic to a translator’s choice of works to translate is whether or not these will find a publisher, and this tends to mean that translators choose material they consider will sell in western countries, a commercial choice, or material that answers to their conception of literary ‘talent’, an aesthetic or even a political one.

The ways in which such choices determine the translation of non-western literatures and the images of such literatures formed by western readers as a result have been investigated in recent years. It is well known, for example, that the ‘boom’ in Latin American writing that swept western publishing in the 1960s and 1970s, propelling a previously little-known body of work to international fame, took place in part because that writing answered to the needs of the western marketplace. It sold. According to one assessment, by the early 1970s North American and European readers ‘knew what they wanted from Latin America: magical realism … the genre which presented the region’s realities in hyperbolic surrealist terms, the genre which portrayed the exoticizing image of Latin America that readers found intriguing and entertaining, [and the genre that represented] a wild regressive liberating escape from the humdrum of ordinary progressive overly civilized life.’⁴ This added up to an image of Latin American writing among European and North American readers that was not necessarily one that readers from one of the many countries involved may have had of their own society’s literary production. But it was an image that was self-perpetuating as far as western readers were concerned, since it dictated the works that publishers were likely to consider for publication and the choices made by those translating them.

While sales considerations dictate commercial choices, there are also aesthetic considerations underlying them. Readers of translated works of foreign literature tend to respond best to works that fit in with their pre-existing tastes and interests. While it is not impossible for a work that lies outside these to be successfully translated, marketed and sold, in this way creating the taste by which it is to be read, in general the closer a work lies to the expectations and interests of foreign readers the more likely it is to be translated and the greater the success it is likely to enjoy in the target market, whatever that work’s status may be in its country of origin. ‘Magical realism’ answered notably well to a demand in western societies for a particular image of Latin America and for a type of literature that seemed to convey it. As a result, for a time Latin American literature was magical realism, even if, in fact, there were other competing styles.

While literary writing in Arabic did not benefit from the boom conditions that put Latin American literature on the map in the 1960s and 1970s, the processes underlying the translation of modern Arabic literature into European languages can be understood in similar terms. Until the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz in 1988, for example, modern Arabic literature was perhaps a literature of only marginal international interest, something indicated not only by the statistics for published literary translations from the Arabic, but also by the choice of works translated and the way in which these were promoted.

Salih Altoma, for example, notes that between 1947 and 1967, only sixteen modern literary titles were translated from Arabic into English, this picking up to a further eighty-four between 1967 and 1988, possibly as a result of political tensions in the Middle East and certainly thanks to the efforts of a handful of translators and a few dedicated publishers. After 1988, however, this trickle became a flood.⁵ Early translations tended to be of works that could either be easily assimilated to western interests or that portrayed the West in a flattering light. They gave little sense of the literary landscape as a whole, or the place of the translated writers within it, as is perhaps indicated by the failure of repeated attempts to secure the Nobel Prize for Literature for Taha Hussein, one of the most important of all Arab writers, before the latter’s death in 1973. It is a sobering thought that even as late as the 1990s, according to a recent biographer, one of the best-known Arab authors among western readers was Gibran Kahlil Gibran, an expatriate Lebanese whose writings served a taste for the exotic and the ‘spiritual’ in a manner drawing on late nineteenth-century symbolism. ‘He came from the East,’ his biographer writes, ‘which was beginning to be equated with a more spiritual approach to life.’⁶ But Gibran’s meaning in the Arab context is quite different from that he was given, or played up to, among his western readers. Whereas in the Arab world Gibran is seen as a historically significant, though still minor, figure in the development of modern Arabic poetry, among western readers he has sometimes been taken at his own estimation as a kind of ‘prophetic’ writer, one who articulates supposedly eternal themes.⁷

Works of modern Arabic literature that were translated up to as late as the 1970s commonly either served documentary purposes, giving information on ‘manners and customs’ in the manner of European travel literature though with greater claims to authenticity, or answered to particular western agendas, such as the desire to see the Arab world as ‘backward’, enlightenment coming to it as a result of the impact of the West, or Arab women, in particular, as repressed, achieving freedom through their adoption of what were seen as western ideas of female emancipation. The French writer Richard Jacquemond, for example, comments that Taha Hussein’s autobiography, The Days, and Tawfiq al-Hakim’s novel Diary of a Country Prosecutor (discussed in Chapter 2), were translated into French in the 1930s, probably in part because both works draw a contrast between a ‘backward’ native society and the impact of enlightened European ideas. This contrast is also apparent in translated works by Arab women, both then and now, those that are the most often translated drawing a contrast ‘between the liberating values associated with the West that their authors defend and the sexual oppression of the ‘oriental male’ that they denounce’.⁸ This has led to decades of controversy over the translation and promotion in the West of works by Arab women, from those of Out el-Koloub (written in French), criticized in the 1930s by Taha Hussein, to those of Nawal al-Saadawi, Alifa Rifaat and others, discussed in Chapter 6.

Following Mahfouz’s award of the Nobel Prize, however, the translation of modern Arabic literature received a tremendous fillip, though this success was not without ironies of its own. Arabic literature was still expected to conform to a particular western image of it, and anything not doing so found a foreign market only with difficulty, or not at all. While Mahfouz was remarkable for having reinvented himself more than once over the course of a long career, many of his most accomplished novels, dating from the 1950s, are written according to the familiar canons of nineteenth-century realism. This means that much of his best work is not representative of the work of Arab writers from the 1970s to the present day. Yet, such features of Mahfouz’s career, and of the post-war development of modern Arabic literature more generally, were flattened out in the reception of the novels in the West. For many western readers, modern Arabic literature was understood to be simply rather like the earlier works of Naguib Mahfouz. Moreover, while Mahfouz is often read in the Arab world as an experimental, or even subversive writer, in western societies he has tended to be seen as a kind of latter-day Dickens, accomplished certainly, and containing lots of local ‘colour’, but easily assimilated as a kind of fluent foreign pupil of established European styles. Jacquemond, for example, comments that Mahfouz has commonly been received abroad as the ‘ethnographer of the “ordinary people of Cairo”, who have been frozen into the “brightly coloured” image that their “chronicler” has produced of them, like figures in an orientalist painting.’⁹ Nothing could be further from the truth.

Taken together, these factors have tended to produce an image of modern Arab literature that is both old-fashioned and picturesque, even Mahfouz’s success with international readers having produced an idea of the literature as a whole that is in many respects misleading. Who would have guessed from the reception of Mahfouz’s earlier novels that their author was also the author of experimental, ‘modernist’ thrillers? Or that the earlier novels are politically engaged? Or, indeed, that modern Arabic literature, at least from the 1960s on, has in large part consisted of writing that is quite unlike the earlier or later works of Mahfouz? (It has, of course, been even more unlike the works of Gibran.) Fortunately, the greater availability of translations today, and the greater transparency of the Arab world in the post-cold war period, has meant that many, though by no means all, of these preconceptions are disappearing.

Such issues have to do with the expectations that western readers may bring to literary texts translated from the Arabic and the kinds of text that may be offered to them. They also have to do with the limited options available to Arab writers wishing to build an international career and the few niches available to them in the international marketplace. Yet there are also other, perhaps more technical, issues to bear in mind when reading Arabic literature in translation, as in reading any translation, and these include the ways in which unfamiliar cultural and other references in the ‘source’ text are rendered in the ‘target language’ of the translation. How much is it necessary to know about the societies from which they come in order to enjoy these foreign texts? Such issues are complicated in the case of translation from Arabic by the diversity of the Arab world and by specific features of the Arabic language.

There was a time when it was standard practice when translating literature from Arabic into English to do so in an antiquated style, as if the intention was to cast an air of mystery or exoticism over the text. Nineteenth-century translations of classical works of Arabic literature, such as Burton’s version of The Arabian Nights, are famous for this style, ‘a sort of composite mock-Gothic, combining elements from Middle English, the Authorised Version of the Bible and Jacobean drama,’ in the words of one commentator,¹⁰ though in an era when ‘modern’ poetry could still be written in the medieval idiom of Tennyson it was perhaps considered natural to render foreign material in the language of Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (supposedly a ‘translatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Reading Arabic Literature
• 2. The Modern Element
• 3. The Novel and the New Poetry
• 4. Occupation and Diaspora:the Literature of Modern Palestine
• 5. Disillusion and Experiment
• 6. The Contemporary Scene
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Index