The Theocrat

Начало книги

I begin this translator’s note to The Theocrat, the English translation of Bensalem Himmich’s novel, Majnun al-hukm (1989), with what may be a somewhat unusual admission: my reasons for selecting this particular work for translation are, firstly, that my reading of the original Arabic text suggested to me almost immediately that it would pose unusually difficult challenges for the translator, and secondly (as a consequence of those challenges), that the resulting English version would almost certainly confront its readers with a narrative that illustrates some of the particularities of contemporary Arabic novel writing.

In the context of Western reactions to the award of the Nobel Prize for literature to the Egyptian novelist, Naguib Mahfouz in 1988 and to the published translations of Arabic novels that have followed that event, I have been concerned, in selecting novels for translation, to identify works that tend to distance themselves from the expectations (whether implicit or explicit) of Western readers regarding the nature, techniques, and purposes of fiction. In other words, I have hoped to find examples of Arabic novels that, through the process of transfer, of “translation,” across the cultural divide between Arabic-speaking and English-speaking countries, will manage to convey to readers of English aspects of the more intrinsically Arab and Arabic contributions to contemporary Arabic fiction rather than those which, in one way or another, can be seen as replications of the Western tradition of fiction, albeit transplanted to a different (and even, exotic) cultural environment. This perception does not, needless to say, reflect an either/nr situation After all, the novel has been and remains a world-wide phenomenon of breath-taking variety.

Читать дальше →