Abstract
This chapter introduces the field of popular fiction in Arabic at the turn of the twentieth century and explores the critical discourse surrounding the novel genre and its translation through the second half of the century in Egypt. Building on a discussion of the intersections between the cultural discourses of orientalism and nationalism, the chapter examines the politics of translation in modern Arabic literary historiography of the nahda. Selim describes how the perceived “foreignness” of the novel genre according to national critics was constructed around critical and reformist anxieties about both translation and popular culture as objects of suspicion, and how national literary history effectively made a vast corpus of early Arabic fiction disappear while installing realism as the only legitimate mode of the genre.
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Notes
- 1.
Cohen, Sentimental Education, 4.
- 2.
Peter Gran, Beyond Eurocentrism (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 47.
- 3.
Cohen, Sentimental Education, 6–7.
- 4.
Ibid., 5.
- 5.
All of the extant scholarly bibliographies of these works of fiction are partial at best. See Henri Pérès “Le Roman, le conte et la nouvelle dans la littérature arabe moderne.” Annales de l’institut d’études orientales, Tome III. (Faculté des lettres de l’université d’Alger, 1937), 266–337; Muhammad Yusuf Najm, Al-Qissa fi al-adab al-ʿarabi al-hadith (Beirut: Manshurat al-maktaba al-ahliyya, 1961), 13–21; ʿAbd al-Muhsin Taha Badr, Tatawwur al-riwaya al-ʿarabiyya fi Misr (Cairo: Dar al-maʿarif, 1992), 413–430; Latif al-Zaytuni, Harakat al-tarjama fi ʿasr al-nahda (Beirut: Dar al-nahar, 1994), 163–171. See also Latifa al-Zayyat’s recently published doctoral dissertation: Harakat al-tarjama al-adabiyya min al-injiliziyya ʾila al-ʿarabiyya fi Misr (Cairo: Al-Markaz al-qawmi lil-tarjama, 2017).
- 6.
Matti Moosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1997), 6.
- 7.
The dates Matti Moosa gives for his “Age of Translation” in Egypt and Lebanon are 1870–1925, 1925 being the year when the “New School” writers published their modernist manifesto in the first issue of their short-lived journal Al-Fajr. Pierre Cachia uses 1834–1914 instead in An Overview of Modern Arabic Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 1914 being the date of the publication of Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s foundational novel, Zaynab.
- 8.
Kawthar El-Beheiry, L’Influence de la littérature française sur le roman arabe (Quebec: Editions Naaman, 1980), 121. All translations from French and Arabic primary and secondary sources in this book are my own unless otherwise noted in the bibliography.
- 9.
This slippage perhaps also goes some way to explaining the later relegation of popular or genre fiction in Arabic to the exclusive domain of young adult literature in the form of the “pocket novels” produced by various writers, translators and presses from the mid-1930s till the end of the century. See Basilius Bawardi and Alif Faranesh, “Non-canonical Arab Detective Fiction: the Beginnings of the Genre,” Journal of Arab and Islamic Studies 18 (2018): 23–49 for an overview of this process and some of the major serial titles in detective, adventure and science fiction.
- 10.
See Richard Jacquemond, “Translation Policies in the Arab World,” The Translator 15, no.1 (2009): 15–35 for a survey and discussion of state sponsored translation projects in the twentieth century.
- 11.
The first publication of the Bulaq Press (1822) was an Italian-Arabic dictionary. See Richard Verderey, “The Publications of the Bulaq Press under Muhammad ʿAli of Egypt.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 91, no.1 (1971): 1.
- 12.
The Aleppo-born priest Rafaʾil Antun Zakhur (d.1831) made a translation of Machiavelli’s work at the request of Muḥammad ʿAli, “preserved as MS 435 in the Egyptian National Archives at Dar al-Kutub.” Zakhur served as a translator with Napoleon Bonaparte’s Institut d’Egypte, and eventually entered Muḥammad ʿAli’s service in 1816 (Moosa, Origins, 95–6). Scholars consider Rifaʿa al-Tahtawi’s translation of François Fénelon’s eighteenth-century didactic romance, Les Aventures de Télémaque (1867) to be one of the first canonical literary translations made under the aegis of the quasi-official translation project launched by Muhammad ʿAli earlier in the century. The great majority of translated works supported by this nineteenth-century state project were military and scientific. Seminal nahda figures like Ahmad Faris Shidyaq (d.1887), Butrus al-Bustani (d.1883) and Nasif al-Yaziji (d.1871) were involved in nineteenth-century translations of the Bible under the sponsorship of religious organizations like The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, The Syrian Mission and the American Bible Society.
- 13.
Rocambole is the avenger-hero of French nineteenth-century feuilleton author Ponson du Terrail’s famous novel cycle; so famous that an adjective—rocambolesque—was coined from his name. Arsène Lupin is the creation of another popular nineteenth-century French writer, Maurice Leblanc. Lupin is the consummate gentleman thief and also the hero of a series of novellas and stories. Both characters were widely translated and have inspired numerous spin-offs, and both are fondly remembered by many modern and contemporary Arab writers as youthful sources of inspiration.
- 14.
Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians, 118.
- 15.
Ibid., 27.
- 16.
Moosa, Origins, 97–8.
- 17.
Ahmad Tahir Hasanayn, Dawr al-shamiyyin al-muhajirin ʾila misr fi al-nahda al-adabiyya al-haditha. (Damascus: Dar al-wathba, 1983), 107–8.
- 18.
According to Khalil Sadiq, publisher of Musamarat al-shaʿb (The People’s Entertainments , henceforth cited as “MS”; all citations will include volume number and page citation, e.g. MS89:7). Other serialized novels in the Entertainments that went into multiple three-volume reprintings were Niqula Rizqalla’s 1000-page adaptation of Emile Gaboriau’s The Fall of Napoleon III and his adaptation (in nine consecutive volumes of the periodical), of The Lost Child by Maxime Villemar.
- 19.
Moosa, Origins, 101. See Spenser Scoville, “Reconsidering Nahdawi Translation,” The Translator 21, no. 2 (2015): 223–236, for a fascinating discussion of Baydas’ Arabic translations of Pushkin.
- 20.
Moosa, Origins, 104–5. Title translations are Moosa’s.
- 21.
Al-Zaytuni, Harakat al-tarjama, 133–4.
- 22.
Ibid., 126.
- 23.
Between the two World Wars, the quasi-official “Committee for Writing, Translation and Publication” (Lajnat al-taʾlif wal tarjama wal nashr) oversaw the translation of a number of Victorian and Edwardian British authors, such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde. This work was continued after World War II by the Egyptian Writers’ Publishing House (Dar al-katib al-misri) under the aegis of Taha Husayn and which contributed works by Voltaire, Huxley, Gide, Stendhal and Mérimée to the growing corpus of sanctioned literary translations. (Moosa, Origins, 117–119).
- 24.
Al-Zaytuni acknowledges this fact and condemns it out of hand, in a symptomatic attitude of critics and historians throughout the twentieth century: “The novel translators were not interested in the classics of the genre and did not translate them. Instead they translated according to their whims and tastes. They were encouraged in this by the absence of criticism and control (riqaba). They all lavished praise on each other and gave themselves the right to translate as they pleased, thereby doing a grave injustice to the work in form, style, and content. This mutilation included the translator (naqil) neglecting to include the title of the work, the name of its author and the language from which it had been translated. Many of them changed the title and were content simply to admit that they had translated it.” (Harakat al-tarjama, 121–2).
- 25.
According to Badr, Jurji Zaydan once admonished Niqula Haddad for passing off his original work as translation (Badr, Tatawwur, 144).
- 26.
Some critics have vigorously disputed this claim, however, attempting instead to construct an alternate genealogy for the Arabic novel from pre-Islamic and medieval Arabic narrative sources. For example, Faruq Khurshid, Fi al-riwaya al-ʿarabiyya fi ʿasr al-tajmiʿ (Cairo: Dar al-qalam, 1960). For a general discussion of this contentious issue of origins, see Sabry Hafez, The Genesis of Modern Arabic Narrative Discourse (London: Saqi Books, 1993), 17–36.
- 27.
See Samah Selim, The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt 1880–1985 (New York and London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004).
- 28.
See John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses (London: Faber and Faber, 2012) and Patrick Bratlinger, The Reading Lesson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
- 29.
Sir Hamilton Gibb, Studies on the Civilization of Islam (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982), 300.
- 30.
Peter Gran, The Islamic Roots of Capitalism (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1998), xvii.
- 31.
Gibb, Studies, 258–9.
- 32.
This attitude survives in the writing of contemporary orientalists like Bernard Lewis who doubt “the possibility that modernization can occur without a simultaneous commitment to modernity.” (Watenpaugh, Being Modern, 6).
- 33.
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 281.
- 34.
Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009), 129.
- 35.
Ibid., 135.
- 36.
See Maria Rosa Menocal, A Forgotten Heritage: the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) and Hendrik Van Gorp, “Traductions et Evolution d’un genre littéraire: Le roman picaresque en Europe au 17ème et 18ème siècles,” Poetics Today 2, no, 4 (1981): 209–219.
- 37.
Honoré de Balzac refers generally to this influence and particularly in relation to his own fiction in a letter to Hippolyte Castile: “How can one get across such a fresco [the Comédie humaine] without the resources of the Arabian tale, without the aid of buried Titans?” (cited in Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 118). See also Peter Caracciolo, “Introduction” in The Arabian Nights in English Literature, ed. Peter Caracciolo (London: Macmillan Press), 1–80.
- 38.
Certain subgenres of the nineteenth-century novel (e.g. gothic and neo-gothic) traveled in time and text across the Middle East and Europe through Byzantine processes of translation and adaptation, and the inevitable plagiarisms and forgeries which follow in their wake. The marvelous itinerary of the Arabian Nights offers a fascinating example of this process. From pre-Islamic Persian and medieval Arabic to modern Indian translations/editions, the “text” of the Nights travels across eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe through a variety of adaptations, forgeries and rewritings into the domain of contemporary fiction: Antoine Galland’s 1717 forgery “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp;” Frances Sheridan’s The History of Nurjahad (1767) and William Beckford’s pseudotranslation Vathek (1787) for example. In his essay on Tarchetti’s 1865 version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Lawrence Venuti (“I.U. Tarchetti’s Politics of Translation” in Rethinking Translation, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 1992), 180–196) explores the intriguing politics of adaptation and plagiarism in the context of the nineteenth-century Italian popular novel with its gothic, oriental and feuilleton sources.
- 39.
Hafez, Genesis, 56, 85; Gibb, Studies, 300; Hasan Al-Sharif, “Nahdat al-adab fi misr,” Al-Hilal 1 (October 1918): 68.
- 40.
Najm, Qissa, 25.
- 41.
See al-Zaytuni’s study, Harkat al-tarjama, which includes an appendix of newly coined and arabized words from the nineteenth century.
- 42.
Badr, Tatawwur, 121.
- 43.
Ibid., 19.
- 44.
For a discussion of these attitudes, see Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) and Ahmad Zakariyya Shalaq, Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul wa qadiyyat al-taghrib (Cairo: Maktabat madbuli, 1966).
- 45.
See Muhammad ʿUmar, Hadir al-misriyyin was sir ta’akhurihim (Cairo: Dar al-mahrusa, 2002/1902).
- 46.
Cited in Badr, Tatawwur, 123.
- 47.
Hafez, Genesis, 85.
- 48.
Cited in Ahmad Ibrahim al-Hawwari, Naqd al-riwaya fi al-adab al-ʾarabi al-hadith fi Misr (Cairo: ʿAin lil-dirasat wal-buhuth al-ʾinsaniyya wal-ʾijtimaʿiyya, 1993), 35.
- 49.
Al-Zaytuni, Harakat al-tarjama, 143.
- 50.
Cited in Badr, Tatawwur, 45.
- 51.
Cited in Gibb, Studies, 297.
- 52.
Cited in Najm, Al-Qissa, 25 1ff.
- 53.
Al-Sharif, “Nahdat al-adab,” 68.
- 54.
El-Beheiry, L’Influence, 126; Gibb, Studies, 281; Moosa, Origins, 105; Najm, Al-Qissa, 23. The British Sir Hamilton Gibb lamented the characteristic Arab attraction to “particular currents in French literature,” which included Rousseau, De Vigny, De Musset, Victor Hugo and Anatole France—cynics and pessimists all—and expressed the wish that Arab translators would pursue “the propagation of healthier and more constructive elements in Western thought” (Studies 280–81).
- 55.
Davis, Factual Fictions, 73.
- 56.
Badr, Tatawwur, 175–80.
- 57.
Manfaluti rendered the following French novels into Arabic: Dumas fils’ La Dame aux camelias, Chateaubriand’s Atala et Rene and Le Dernier abencérage, Alphonse Carr’s Sous les tilleuls, Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, Francois Coppée’s Pour la Couronne and Bernardin de St. Pierre’s Paul et Virginie.
- 58.
The authors translated by Baydas from Russian versions into Arabic are Marie Corelli, Emilio Salgari and L. Műhlbach.
- 59.
Moosa, Origins, 102.
- 60.
Ibid., 107.
- 61.
Al-Zaytuni, Harakat al-tarjama, 125.
- 62.
Ibid., 121–2.
- 63.
Najm, Al-Qissa, 23.
- 64.
See, for example, Farah ʾAntun’s introduction to his 1908 translation of Chateaubriand’s Atala, sections of which are cited in Al-Zaytuni, Harakat al-tarjama, 25–26.
- 65.
An exception to this is Ahmad Ibrahim al-Hawwari’s fascinating discussion of language usage in nahdawi fiction in his Naqd al-riwaya (78–99). Al-Hawwari proposes that nahdawi critics anxious to revive the classical linguistic heritage were actually oblivious to the fact that the classical critical tradition strongly supported the strategic practice of transcribing vernacular speech—a form of “linguistic realism”—in story narrative.
- 66.
For one such study, see Nafusa Zakariyya Saʿid, Tarikh al-daʿwa ʾila al-ʿamiyya (Cairo: Dar qasr al-thaqafa bil iskindiriyya, 1964).
- 67.
Faisal Darraj, “Al-Riwaya al-ʿarabiyya: al-wilada al-muʿawwaqa,” Al-Karmal 74–5 (Winter/Spring 2003): 99–131.
- 68.
Al-Sharif, “Nahdat al-adab,” 69–70.
- 69.
In her important study of early modern literary culture in Egypt, In Praise of Books, Nelly Hanna includes in this stratum of book owners a “middle class” of educated and literate readers whose reading habits lay at the intersection of literate and oral culture (Cairo: the American University in Cairo Press, 2004), 64–69.
- 70.
Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation (New York: Routledge, 1998), 68.
- 71.
K. K. Ruthven, Faking Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 91.
- 72.
Venuti, Scandals, 31.
- 73.
Venuti, Scandals, 1.
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Selim, S. (2019). Bad Books for Bad Readers. In: Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt. Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20362-7_2
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