Translating the Arabic novel: Distorting our literature, diminishing our voice

Translation has helped marginalize our literature in the eyes of the “other,” not only because so little of it reaches the world's most widely read languages, but because Arabic literature as a whole is subject to a quiet, persistent discrimination. Texts find their way into translation through distorted back channels, arriving faintly and in diminished form, without regard for their true literary standing.

The literary critic and academic Gaber Asfour recounts something of this in his book “Ba’eedan an Misr” (“Far From Egypt”). During a visit to the Library of Congress, he made a point of browsing Arabic literary works translated into English. What he found was a sample that did not reflect the state of Arabic literature, which has reached a level of maturity and solidity the West does not wish to acknowledge. This is not only because it knows so little of that literature, but because it insists that the old conditions it once saw as obstacles to mature literary creation still endure.

Weak in quantity and quality

A survey of works translated into widely read languages, such as English, Chinese, Spanish, and French, reveals several flaws. The first is sheer scarcity compared with the literary output produced each year across genres: novels, short story collections, poetry, plays, memoirs, biographies, and cross-genre texts.

Second, the works selected are not necessarily the finest, whether by the standards of recognized literary achievement or by the broader consensus of critics and readers.

Third, the tendency is to favor texts that illuminate the realities of Arab societies, or more often, texts that feed Western stereotypes about Arabs: terrorism, the oppression of women, homosexuality, social corruption, confrontations with hard-line religious discourse, political tyranny, mythical narratives.

Fourth, translated works largely conform to the West's prevailing epistemological and moral agenda — the same agenda imposed on organizations operating within Arab civil society, though it frequently fails to answer the actual needs of those societies.

Fifth, many of these translations misrepresent the originals and fail to capture the aesthetic qualities of Arabic literary writing.

Sixth, many came about through personal relationships between writers and translators, or between both and the institutions that fund translation.

Seventh, some translations are so literal that style is left weakened. The text loses its literary spirit, the emotional charge woven through it dissipates, and the tone of its authentic voice grows faint.

Eighth, translators tend to favor accessible, straightforward texts with little linguistic density or imagistic force, because such works are more manageable — particularly for those insufficiently attuned to the subtleties of Arabic.

Ninth, there are abridged, selective translations that assemble miscellaneous literary pieces through what might be called a minimalist approach to translation. Such collections cannot represent the literary scene as a whole. More often, they reflect the translator's own vision and taste — and perhaps a desire to convey a distorted impression of the state of our literature.

Courting the Western translator

Tenth, some Arab novelists deliberately court the Western translator from the outset, hoping to attain what they imagine to be “global stature.” Their discourse has, in some cases, come to address that translator, when it should be addressed to an Arab reader. This self-dispossession, this headlong rush toward the other, has harmed their creativity. It appears estranged, if not crushed, and suffers a profound loss. The text forfeits the essence of the person who belongs to its world and context. Such a grave concession may inflict serious damage without the writer realizing it.

The 11th feature is that some translations of Arabic literature, including some Maghrebi novels translated into French, do not place the translator’s name on the cover, but only on the inside pages. This is astonishing. Beyond violating publishing norms and intellectual property rights, it effaces the translator’s crucial role. A translation depends fundamentally on the translator’s command of both the source and target languages in recreating the text in another language—to the point that some regard the translated work as a different text altogether.

Some translators delete, add, and reorder events. Some can grant a poor text an eloquence it does not possess in its original language. Knowing the translator's name is also essential to assessing their command of Arabic, their familiarity with the social context in which the original was produced, and their knowledge of the cultural system into which they are translating.

A poor translator can damage a wonderful text. A strong translator can breathe life into a flawed one, granting it splendor in the language into which it moves. How often have we seen weak texts enriched by translation, and the reverse. This is why some Arab writers seek out capable translators or refuse translation altogether, while others accept any translation — and damage their literary standing in doing so.

The 12th feature is that Western readers often prefer Arab authors who write about our societies in a foreign language. This was the case with the Egyptian Albert Cossery, the Lebanese Amin Maalouf, and the Algerian writers Assia Djebar and Tahar Ben Jelloun in French, and with the Egyptian Ahdaf Soueif and the Libyan Hisham Matar in English.

The 13th feature is that some novels are translated into English and French by Egyptian translators for sale in the local market, targeting students and graduates of foreign-language schools in Egypt who prefer to read in those languages. Some of these translations eventually reach Western bookstores, where they are counted as translated literature despite their weakness.

The harvest of distortion

All these features are familiar to writers and critics who follow the flaws and problems attending the movement to translate Arabic literature. Among them is the weakness of institutions concerned with translation — constrained by limited resources and the absence of systematic planning.

There are linguistic challenges as well. The long, intricate structure of Arabic sentences, and the syntax that governs them, can make it difficult to preserve precise meaning in translation.

There are cultural challenges too, reflected in translators' unfamiliarity with the social context and inherited knowledge surrounding a creative text — making it difficult to find precise, appropriate equivalents for Arabic structures in other languages, to the point that some have come to regard translation as a process that inevitably compromises the text.

The problem deepens when major Western publishing houses treat the translation of Arabic literature as a commercial gamble, unable to guarantee that a work will sell. Most translated works therefore remain confined to universities and research centers, where they are read as a form of social and political documentation rather than literature for the general reader. In this, despite the brilliance of Taha Hussein’s “Al-Ayyam” (“The Days”), Hilary Wayment’s remark in the introduction to his English translation of the book’s second part still seems to hold: “This is strange literature belonging to countries that are scientifically, industrially and economically backward.”

Even this has changed. The vast communications revolution has given the West other sources through which to form a more comprehensive and representative picture of contemporary Arabs. These sources convey their immediate, present-day image faster and more widely than the novel or short story can.

In truth, these phenomena surrounding translation are not new. They are deeply rooted in the history of cultural exchange between what Arabs write and what the West wants to read, with translation acting as mediator. The West has often sought to identify points of weakness in Arab-Islamic civilization and magnify them before Western audiences, feeding stereotypes about the East or warning against the negative effects of irrational religious tendencies. At other times, these efforts have followed the colonial logic of studying the other in order to dominate it.

Light from the East

The translation of Arabic books into European languages began with a literal rendering of a text attributed to the hadith scholar Ibn Abbas on the Isra and Mi’raj, the Prophet Mohammed’s night journey and ascent to heaven. The text was presented as a kind of myth, or as the product of an imagination inclined toward superstition, although there is no book by Ibn Abbas on the subject. In the 11th century, some Arabic poetry, especially love poetry, was also translated. European poets benefited from these translations, but they never gained a wide readership.

Europe’s greatest benefit from Arab cultural production came through translations of Ibn Rushd (Averroes), whose works sparked a revolution in Renaissance thought and helped European rationalism confront rigid metaphysical theology.

The West is not interested in a comprehensive, deep view of Arabic literature. It sees it instead through a narrow ideological window

In 1280, “Hayy ibn Yaqzan” was translated into Italian. The work later influenced major European texts, including Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe,” Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” “The Jungle Book” and the figure of Tarzan, the man who lives alone in the forest. Dante, too, drew on Abu al-Alaa al-Maarri’s “The Epistle of Forgiveness” when writing “The Divine Comedy.”

The translation of “One Thousand and One Nights” had a broad and lasting effect on the West’s idea of the “magic of the East,” and on the making of what Edward Said called the West’s image of the East. It later became one of the frames through which many Western critics and readers approached Arabic literature.

Yet the West has rarely sought a comprehensive view of Arabic literature, whether classical, modern or contemporary. It has tended instead to look through a narrow ideological window, shaped at its most extreme by colonial theory and Eurocentrism. It is also shaped by a taste for myth, one that insists on seeing the Arab as steeped in superstition, legend and metaphysics, and as inclined toward laziness and backwardness

This perception did not stop with ancient Arab tales of marvels and wonders. The same taste extended into readings of contemporary Arabic literature. In his reading of Moroccan writer Bensalem Himmich’s “Majnun Al-Hukm” (“The Theocrat”), the Spaniard Juan Goytisolo focused on the story of the enslaved man Masoud and on homosexuality, linking both to the world of “One Thousand and One Nights”—a connection the author did not intend.

In this sense, translation, especially when hasty or weak, contributes to the distortion of Arabic literature and to its global marginalization. The problem is not only how little is translated compared with how much is written. It is also that translations often fail to carry the feelings, contexts, words, and eloquent constructions on which one dimension of literariness depends: the rhetorical and semantic shaping of language.

The translated text then appears stripped of Arabic's meaning and radiance — of the image's aesthetic charge, of its connection to the social environment that produced it and to the taste of its original reader — all surrendered in deference to another taste.