Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction – Prophetic Tendencies: Egyptian Translators of the Twentieth Century
- 1 Translation in Motion: A Survey of Literary Translation in Lebanon and Egypt during the Nahḍa
- 2 Plagiarised Prophecy in the Romantic Works of al-Manfalūṭī, al-ʿAqqād and al-Māzinī
- 3 The Hero at Home: Muḥammad al-Sibāʿī and Thomas Carlyle
- 4 Tarjama as Debt: The Making of a Secular History of Arabic Literature
- Conclusion – The Prophet Today: The Novel in Distress
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction – Prophetic Tendencies: Egyptian Translators of the Twentieth Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2019
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction – Prophetic Tendencies: Egyptian Translators of the Twentieth Century
- 1 Translation in Motion: A Survey of Literary Translation in Lebanon and Egypt during the Nahḍa
- 2 Plagiarised Prophecy in the Romantic Works of al-Manfalūṭī, al-ʿAqqād and al-Māzinī
- 3 The Hero at Home: Muḥammad al-Sibāʿī and Thomas Carlyle
- 4 Tarjama as Debt: The Making of a Secular History of Arabic Literature
- Conclusion – The Prophet Today: The Novel in Distress
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible, that you might discover the formal principles of its colour and odor, as to seek to transfer from one language into another the creations of a poet.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1882)The form (of the story) crystallised in the newly arrived seed and a contemporary style was readied for it. But there remained above and beyond both a mysterious thing which I call the intuitive feel for the soul of narrative art, its rhythm, and its temperament. These were available exclusively to writers intimate with Western culture. Stories written by others, despite fulfilling all the [formal] requirements, still lacked that secret scent which makes story [writing] an art. This phenomenon persists to this day [1960]. There is no harm, therefore, in admitting that the story came to us from the West and that its foundations here were laid by pioneering individuals who had been influenced by European, especially French literature. For even though some English masterpieces had been translated into Arabic, the origins of the story in our culture are rooted in French literature. The Egyptian temperament at that time felt no alienation from France as it did from England – perhaps because of the cultural similarity among the peoples of the Mediterranean basin. Another factor may have also contributed to that, namely the fact that some French writers had played important political roles in the history of their country. The names of these writers became widely known as symbols of liberation movements. [Victor] Hugo, whose Les Misérables Ḥāfiẓ [Ibrāhīm] translated, was such a writer; al-Manfalūṭī followed suit and rendered in Arabic only texts of French literature.
Yaḥya Ḥaqqī (1905–92)The Arabic novel has yet to tell its own story. Accused of being a purely borrowed form, it has been compelled to follow other stories unfolding in other places. As a form, the Arabic novel was in fact always partially on loan from European traditions, but this loan came packaged in translation. Traditionally, translation implied the translator's submission to an outside power: either the original source or divine inspiration. It is not surprising that in the history of Western literature, translation was always bound to revealed religions; it was expected to reproduce the original word intact in singular vernaculars.
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- Prophetic TranslationThe Making of Modern Egyptian Literature, pp. 1 - 49Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018