Stranded in Arabic: Tales of the Novel in Translation Open Access
Kesrouany, Maya Issam (2011)
Published
Abstract
This dissertation examines the history of the translation of the European novel into Arabic from the middle of the 19th century until the 1930's primarily in Egypt and Lebanon. It studies the complex exchange in this particular context of translation under different forms of British and French colonization and under Ottoman rule, reading four such performances of translation into Arabic closely: Buṭrus al-Bustānī's 1861 translation of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), Muṣṭafa al-Manfalūṭī's 1923 translation of Bernadin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie (1788) and his 1915 adaptation of François René de Chateaubriand's René and Atala (1802), Muḥammad al-Sibā'ī's 1912 translation of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and finally Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal's 2-volume biography of Jean Jacques Rousseau, published in 1921 and 1923. The dissertation argues that the novel in Arabic cannot be read except through the complex exchange that happens in the translation of the European text into the Arabic context. Re-reading canonical mappings of the development of the novel, my dissertation also seeks to use the context of translation into Arabic to uncover some of the assumptions of Western genealogical accounts of the novel. Moreover, in exposing these assumptions, "Stranded in Arabic" works to unveil some of the intricacies of the translation process and to show how such particular moments of adaptation into a foreign language can help us rethink the concept of genre and reception much more broadly, across and in spite of national boundaries. The Introduction lays out a general historical map of the movement of translation and then takes up particular theories that speak to the complexity of the translation of the novel into an Arabic context. The following chapters place each translator in a particular socio-historical setting and then read his translations closely in comparison with the British and French originals. Every chapter concludes on the particular borrowings and form of each translation and the insight those provide into the originals and into the novel as a genre.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Hybrid Souls: The Translator's Debt 1
Chapter One: Stranded in Arabic: Robinson Crusoe in Beirut 48
Chapter Two: In the Name of the Idiom: Mustafa Lutfi al-Manfaluti's Task of Translation 105
Chapter Three: A Tale of Three Cities: London, Paris, Cairo 193
Chapter Four: Tarjamah as Debt: Haykal's Love of Rousseau 274
Conclusion 362
Bibliography 389
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