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Translation and the Construction of Identity: Abstracts
Date: 12-14 August 2004
Venue: Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea
Sameh Fekry Hanna Centre for Translation &
Intercultural Studies, University of Manchester This paper invests in the claim made by Antoine
Berman (1996:xv) about theatre translation as both a representation of a
community’s being-in-the-world and its being-with-the-other. The very
function of constructing an image of the Self vis-à-vis the Other makes
theatre translation a site for negotiating the category of identity. This
becomes evident when the act of translation occurs in a target culture that,
due to socio-political reasons, faces an identity crisis, and for which
theatre is not a constituent part of its literary system.
Two translations of Othello into Arabic are examined with the purpose
of bringing to the surface the discursive relation between a constructed
identity that is inscribed in the translation text and the aesthetic
strategies deployed with the aim of nationalizing a foreign genre and
using it to reinforce the version of identity being proposed. The first
translation is by Khalil Mutran (1872-1949), a leading figure in the
romantic movement in modern Arabic literature. This translation was staged
in Egypt in 1912 in the wake of a decaying Ottoman Empire and a rising
Anglo-French colonialism that had already taken over most of the Arab world,
including Egypt. It is not surprising that Mutran (together with George
Abyad, the theatre director and actor who commissioned the translation)
found in Othello, which features as its central character an Arab who is
betrayed and plotted against, a convenient medium for mobilizing an Arab
identity that had been traumatized by colonialism. In this translation,
Mutran deploys aesthetic strategies that are typical of classical Arabic
poetry, which is reminiscent of the glorious past of the Arabs.
The second translation, by Moustapha Safouan (1921- ), is published in 1998
at the end of a decade which witnessed the shattering of Pan-Arabism in the
wake of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. In this translation, which uses
colloquial Egyptian Arabic as its medium, Safouan deconstructs the notion of
Arab identity through undermining the almost sacred status of classical
Arabic. Being a psychoanalyst himself and a translator of Freud’s The
Interpretation of Dreams, Safouan claims in his introduction that
classical Arabic has been used as a means of falsifying the Egyptian
consciousness and mystifying the Egyptian reality. Using the aesthetics of
literature written in Egyptian colloquial Arabic, Safouan displaces the
notion of Arab identity, and foregrounds instead an Egyptian identity. The
issue at stake in these two translations is the role played by the poetics
of translation in constructing a particular version of identity.
Berman, Antoine (1996) ‘Foreword’ to Annie Brisset’s A Socio-critique of
Translation: Theatre and Alterity in Quebec, 1968-1988, R. Gill and R.
Gannon (trs). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Panel 5: Translation and the (De-)construction of National/Cultural Identities
Transl(oc)ating Othello: Identity Politics and the Poetics of
Translation
References
© IATIS 2003