Once upon a time André Lefevere argued that “of all the great literatures of the world, the literature produced in the Islamic system is arguably the least available to readers in Europe and the Americas.” Since that time, there has been a marked increase in translation from the Islamic world into European languages, especially English.
When it comes to Arabic literature, translation has conventionally focused on poetry, reflecting its ‘privileged’ status. Egyptian poet Iman Mersal, in describing the “limited exposure the West has had to Arab literary output”, noted two trends: the favoring of traditional, especially Sufi, poetry, at the expense of the modern, and when it comes to the modern, presenting the works of known poets (Adonis, Darwish, Saadi Youssef) “as if suspended in a poetic vacuum…without providing a background that would place them in a cultural or literary tradition.”
In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on modern Arab literary output, and a rise in translations of novels beyond those of Naguib Mahfouz.
Poetry, however, has remained privileged, with a dramatic increase in translations modern Arab poets beyond the handful already "recognised" outside the Arab world. This should be a good thing. However, several warning voices have pointed out that there are problem with this phenomenon. As Elie Chalala points out the “trend toward prolific translation of marginal Arab poetry” potentially “distorts the image of Arab poetry [and] the importance of the poets in their own native poetic environment.”
It’s not of course that it is only marginal poetry being translated. There are also books like Nathalie Handal’s The Poetry of Arab Women, a continuation of the work begun in Salma Khadra Jayyusi’s seminal Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology. Sarah Maguire, often referred to as perhaps the only living English-language poet who has had a collection translated into Arabic, cites Jayussi as the beginning of her fascination with Arab poetry. What drew her, she says, was the poetry’s lyricism, it’s “enormously sensual” quality “as well as—or rather linked with—a deep political sense.”
Advertising this popular politico-sensual quality is often a good marketing strategy. It is a quality captured in translations of obscure poetry from war-torn countries, collected under the adaptable title: “Poems of Love and War.”
However, there is much that does not translate as well, such as the “bombast and self-aggrandisement and showing off” which, from Maguire’s Western perspective is “a problem with a lot of poets writing in Arabic.”
I would say that the political and literary underpinnings of the age-old tradition of bombast make it a little too deep-rooted to be set aside and labeled audience-repelling problem. Qabani’s poems, for example, frequently employ this bombastically explosive ‘I’ who proclaims:
My poem won't kiss your hand, it is
Sultans who should kiss its hand.
Self-aggrandizement, maybe. But it also reminds the reader of Al Mutannabi’s famous claim that his words are more important than the battle won - without the words, history would not remember the battle.
Maguire stresses that reading Arab poetry provides “a perspective which is crucial if we are to apprehend what’s happening in the world today”, as well as an “aesthetic injection” to the poetry of what she refers to as ‘grey’ countries. Her own poetry quietly injects words like ‘zaatar’ (Arabic for thyme) as symbol for a bitter history, described as:
pollen like gunpowder
dust in the hand
cast over Palestine
from the mouths of stones.
The personal, according to some, is increasingly converging with poetical and political in young Arab poetry. Dr. Basilyus Bawardi who teaches Arabic poetics, argues that it is “leaving behind the ‘sanctified’ subjects – lachrymose love poems or poems of cliched symbols, resistance poetry.” Even when poems deal with these tired or tiresome themes, it is “in a way that is more intellectual and calculated. Arabic poetry today is more personal, but it still radiates a certain kind of collectivity.”
Maurits Berger heaves a sigh of relief in similarly noting the move away from “heroic and nationalistic Palestinian literature” to “personalised miniatures”, and “refined style [which] yields very powerful images. No mention is made of ‘Palestine’, ‘homeland’ or similarly grand terms.” This last statement could be interpreted in a variety of ways: either poems which mention Palestine are not personal, or they are unfashionably epic-leaning, or perhaps, Berger means to say that Palestinian poets have finally woken up to the postmodern and ditched the meta-narrative. Whatever the interpretation, it is clear that personalized miniature Palestinian poetry which doesn’t appear to hassle or hector the reader too overtly is easily confined to the story circle and stripped of political depth. So, Darwish’s work becomes poetry you can read out loud “in the company of friends, with coffee or tea and a plate of halwayat.” And apparently, this is also imminently translatable poetry.
It is true that there’s also something of an appetite for modern Arab poetry not so lightly consumed. This is where taboo-breaking and/or diaspora poetry steps in. Popularity is greatly increased if the poet has been imprisoned or exiled. As Mersal incisively comments: “[for] Western organizations… drawing writers who had been imprisoned in their countries is a way of stating their inculpability from the absence of the freedom of speech. It could also be a denial of the role the West plays in not encouraging this right in some areas of the world like the Middle East.”
Similarly, although less sympathetically, Syrian poet and critic Nouri Jarah points out that many poets rushed into translation are often "transformed from individuals fleeing repression into individuals benefiting from repression." In such a situation, being granted political asylum has more influence on translation than the merit of the poetry. This leads to the slightly ludicrous situation where someone completely unknown to Sudanese audiences, for example, can become Sudan’s representative poet. And this poet is then assumed to be the best a certain culture has to offer. Because no one else has been translated.
If repression leads to seeking political asylum which leads to being granted asylum which leads to being translated, quite clearly, as Jarah says, "the more repression intensifies... the more prosperous the conditions of the poet." Choice of where to apply is strategic. If you want to be translated into German apply for asylum in Germany. This is how, as Jarah puts it, "the Danish reader had his own Iraqi poet; the Swedish his Kurdish poet…and the French his Algerian."
Perhaps this is inevitable. That the rush of translation has made literature produced in and by the Arab world increasingly more available is obvious. What’s not so certain is whether this rush of translation has fulfilled the functions Adrienne Rich describes in this passage:
We translate…for illumination of the poetic core of literatures we could not enter any other way. And for other reasons too, having to do with what in poetry is inimitable, intransigent, telegraphic, musical, explicit, indirect, physical, impalpable, unmistakably human as the human face, yet varied as faces are.
