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Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature

Prophetic TranslationThe Making of Modern Egyptian Literature

By Maya I. Kesrouany

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About this book

Considers the changing role of literary translation in Egypt from the 1910s to the 1940s

In this novel and pioneering study Maya I. Kesrouany explores the move from Qur’anic to secular approaches to literature in early 20th-century Egyptian literary translations, asking what we can learn from that period and the promise that translation held for the Egyptian writers of fiction at that time. Through their early adaptations, these writers crafted a prophetic, secular vocation for the narrator that gave access to a world of linguistic creation and interpretation unavailable to the common reader or the religious cleric. This book looks at the writers’ claim to secular prophecy as it manifests itself in the adapted narrative voice of their translations to suggest an original sense of literary resistance to colonial oppression and occupation in the early Arabic novel.

Key Features
  • Case studies of Arabic adaptations of European literature (including works from Chateaubriand, Carlyle, Dickens and Voltaire) contribute to an understanding of the development of the modern Arabic novel today
  • Explores the exchange between the Arabic and the European novel in an original and radically comparative framework
  • Shows how different translation trends signal the emergence of literature as a historical and aesthetic field
  • Draws on translation, literary and post/colonial theory to rethink nahda literature’s contribution to the post 1950s Arabic novel

Reviews

[...] Prophetic Translation offers important leads into the study of modern literary subjectivity and of our heavy inheritance of this very subjectivity as it denies its own social positionality
Considering the urgent demands imparted in translation, Maya Kesrouany brilliantly traces a history of translation in colonial Egypt as disruption, alteration, transformation, as a series of acts and events that leave nothing, including the Arabic language, intact. Beautifully written,　Prophetic Translation　compels us to rethink the staid opposition between the secular and the religious in its relation to the institution of authorship, the making and unmaking of literary objects, and the promise of futurity—a capacious and compelling tour de force.
In Prophetic Translation, Maya Kesrouany provocatively challenges Euro-American representations of translation in Egypt in the early 20th century by suggesting that translators retained a resistant residue from their Islamic education: they practiced translation as an agent of potential transformation for a literature of prophetic potential rather than as mimetic representation. Kesrouany’s scholarly readings situate Egyptian and Levantine translation outside the European framework within which they are conventionally presented and judged. In doing so, she opens new possibilities for the conceptualization not only of the history of Egyptian literature but also of translation theory itself.
Table of contents

Introduction: Prophetic Tendencies: Egyptian Translators of the 20th Century

  1. Translation in Motion: A Survey of Literary Translation in Lebanon and Egypt During the Nahḍa
  2. Plagiarised Prophecy in the Romantic Works of al-Manfalūṭī, al-ʿAqqād and al-Māzinī
  3. The Hero at Home: Muḥammad al-Sibāʿī and Thomas Carlyle
  4. Tarjama as Debt: The Making of a Secular History of Arabic Literature

Conclusion: The Prophet Today: The Novel in Distress

Bibliography

About the author

Maya I. Kesrouany

Maya Kesrouany is Assistant Professor of Literature and Middle Eastern Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD). She is interested in exploring experimental political imaginaries, conversations in the public sphere, critical theory and cultural production.

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