the maghribi novel in translation

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The Maghribi Novel in English Translation

Conclusion

Notes

The Ethics of Cultural Representation: The Maghribi Novel in Translation

Email a link to this articlePrinter-friendly formatMichael A. Toler

From The Journal of North African Studies 2001, Journal of North African StudiesUsed with permission of Frank Cass Publishers

The Maghribi Novel in English Translation

Maghribi novels are literary productions coming from a complex cultural landscape in whichmultiple languages interact. Unfortunately, few translations of the Maghribi novel, be it fromFrench or Arabic, seem to take these issues into consideration when producing their English

language texts. In overlooking these cultural negotiations, the translations not only fail torepresent much of the artistry and innovation of the original texts, but also skew, alter ormisrepresent critical and subversive dialogues in which these works are engaged. This paper is acall for an ethics of representation in translation.

Michael Toler is a Ph.D candidate in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies atBinghamton University (SUNY).

When I was a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching English composition courses to first and secondyear university students in the Moroccan university system, I used a booklet on teaching Englishcomposition to Moroccan students that had been put together by a former volunteer. The sectiondealing with 'verbiage' included the following quotation from Walter Ong:

Arabic is an ancient language of oral culture. It belongs to those languages in which 'thought isexquisitely elaborated, not in analytic linearity, but in formulary fashion, through 'rhapsodizing',that is stitching together proverbs, antitheses, epithets, and other common places or loci (topoi).1

This is clearly a problematic statement, first of all because Arabic has become the language ofmany cultures and not of some singular cultural monolith. The world in which it is spoken is large,and aesthetics within it inevitably vary, not just geographically or throughout history, but alsoaccording to individual authors and literary movements. I would also argue that, insofar as thereis a unified Arabic culture, it is no more of an inherently 'oral culture' than is English culture (thatis cultures which express themselves in English). In fact, the written tradition of Arabic is much


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older than that of English.

Furthermore, while Arabic, and particularly more traditional l iterary Arabic, is generally moreornate then English is rhetorically, it is hardly as radically different as scholars such as AndrLefevere would maintain.2 In 'The Case of the Missing Qasidah', he argues that Arabic literarywriting is somehow so 'incompatible' with that of the 'West' that it could never be appreciated by aWestern audience. He argues that the two literatures belong to diverging 'universes of discourse'.3 Lefevere's perception of these universes is essentially ahistorical, somehow transcendingdevelopment in language and literary aesthetics. 4 It is also a manifestation of the belief that the'Arab' is totally alien and unknowable, so much so (s)he is believed to think differently. Thesedifferentiated thought processes inevitably manifest themselves in writing even if the author is notactually writing in Arabic or even if some of the persons thus labelled are not ethnically Araband/or have a tradition of exposure to customs and traditions which are not exclusively from'Arab' culture.

Consider this quotation from the original preface to Nedjma in which the French editors of thisfrancophone novel describe it as an example of 'Arab' rhetoric:

The narrative techniques Kateb Yacine uses are occasionally disconcerting to the Westernreader...the narrative rhythm and construction, if they indisputably owe something to Western

experiments in fiction, result in chief from a purely Arab notion of man in time. Western thoughtmoves in a linear duration, whereas Arab thought develops in a circular duration, each turn areturn, mingling future and past in the eternity of the moment...(The italics are in the original, thebold is mine.)

It is generally accepted that Kateb Yacine was, indeed, attempting to write a distinctively'Algerian' novel,5 but I would be very curious to know what he thought of his editor's commentsbecause, as is very clear through any informed reading of the novel, the Algeria he envisionedwas expressly pluralistic and most certainly could not be limited to 'Arab' as culture imported fromthe East. Kateb Yacine never wrote any major work in standard Arabic. He was educated underthe French, and his work was generally in French, with the exception of his theatrical pieces,which were written in Algerian dialect in accordance with his populist politics, the audience hewished to reach, and the fact that he regretted not being able to write in Tamazight (Berber).6 So

perhaps he found it amusing to be so paradigmatic of 'Arab thought'.

Beyond this, however, why is it unimaginable that he was in fact influenced by westernModernism or might be innovative or 'modern' in his own right? Why is it that when T.S. Eliotwrites, "time present and time past/ Are both present in time future/ And time future contained intime past." ('Burnt Norton', lines 1-5)7 and repeats the idea several times throughout the poem,the work is labelled innovative and 'High Modernism', but when such techniques are used byKateb, they represent an exclusively Arab notion of man in time? Why is Kateb, a multilingualworld traveller, always presented as essentially Algerian and Arab, whereas Eliot is sometimespresented as cosmopolitan for moving from one anglophone country to another?

I contend that many translators and/or publishers of novels from North Africa present theirtranslated works in much the same manner that Kateb's French editors perceived his novels --

not as works of art, but as ethnographic glimpses into the mind and culture of the 'Other'. Assuch, many (perhaps even most) published translations indicate that the translators have takenconsiderable liberty with the source texts, failing to devote adequate attention to, or even purging,the original8 of many of its most important literary and stylistic merits. Often this neglect hasimplications that reach far beyond simple aesthetic considerations.

Before actually looking at the texts themselves, however, it is useful to have an understanding ofcertain key aspects of Maghribi culture as depicted by the authors under consideration here. Wehave seen that Kateb Yacine (whose name written this way is a French distortion of his realname, Yacine Kateb) wrote his theatrical pieces in Algerian dialect, and most of his other work in


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French. He is known to have regretted the fact that he had never learned Tamazight well enoughto write in it, as he regarded Amazigh culture as an integral part of Algerian culture. Kateb isregarded by many as the father of the modern Maghribi novel, and his case is illustrative of theposition taken by many Maghribi intellectuals who, often in contrast to official policy and dominantrestrictive ideology, see the Maghrib as pluralist and multi-ethnic. They resist a narrowly defined,official identity that is exclusively 'Arabo-Islamic'.

The linguistic situation in the Maghrib is complex. Classical Arabic is the official language of allthree of the Maghrib countries, that is to say the standard dialect used in official and publicdiscourse throughout the 'Arab world'. It is not, however. the language spoken by anyone on adaily basis. Maghribi Arabic9 is the most common language of day-to-day communication. It is, ofcourse. based on classical Arabic, but influenced by indigenous and colonial languages. Theindigenous language of the Maghrib is Tamazight (Berber), a language that also has differingregional dialects, most of them no longer used in writing.10 In large areas it still thrives as themain language of social interaction and, in recent years, has been experiencing a sort of culturalrenaissance. Still, its continued use is often perceived as being somewhat threatened byArabisation. Colonial languages were also added to the mix beginning in the 1830s, and quicklybecame firmly rooted, particularly French. All of these language constellations are, of course, inconstant interaction, and each has impacted on aspects of the others. Ahmed Boukous11describes this interaction as follows.

Le fait que les langages se trouvent en situation de contact dans la pratique sociale deslocuteurs conduit ces derniers, quand ils s'expriment en leur langue maternelle par exemple, emprunter des schmes morphologiques, des mots ou des expressions une autre langue, soitpour pallier les lacunes lexicales de la premire langue, soit pour des besoins expressifs, soitencore pour des raisons de prestige social.

In such processes, the languages in interaction are inevitably transformed.

Today it is a clich to say that language is the 'vehicle of culture',12 but like most clichs, there istruth in it. Clearly, if the languages interact in such a way, so too do the cultures from which theyoriginate. Culture pervades one's existence and will necessarily pervade one's writing. For mostof the writers discussed in this paper, the pluralism that emerged in the Maghrib as a result of its

cultural history did not mean a set of fixed, static identities existing separately or occasionallycolliding with each other. These writers see their respective countries as zones of contact inwhich cultures developed through interaction and in mutual dependence. The myth of purity isradically challenged in their writing. They insist on their cultural specificity, but without abandoningtheir claim to the universal, and without the need constantly to look back to tradition. AsAbdelkebir Khatibi argues, the self is only defined against the other, but in the process the otheralso becomes part of the self and identities develop. To fear the foreign unnecessarily simplybecause it is foreign is to risk stagnation and to give in to the 'guardians of order'.

A substantial portion of Maghribi literature is an exploration of how the coloniser's language canbe affected by the colonial intrusion, and the capacity for resistance this entails for the colonised.Maghribi authors often seek to 'foreignise'13 French, both in order to 'make the language theirown', and in order to undermine the authority of the coloniser's linguistic paradigm. For example,

in the following passage Assia Djebar14 describes how her francophone texts become not only aplatform for the subversion of language, but also a means to allow previously silenced voices tospeak as well.

Oui, ramener les voix non francophones -- les gutturales, les ensauvags -- jusqu'un textefranais qui devient enfin mien... Oui, faire raffleurer les cultures traditionnelles mises au ban,maltraites, longtemps mprises, les inscrire, elles dans un texte nouveau, dans une graphie quidevient 'mon' franais.

It would be a mistake to assume such strategies are limited to the francophone writers. There are


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those who write in Arabic who are concerned with making that language their own as well. The'Arab world' has its centres of cultural production and, at least in the modern period, the Maghribhas been somewhat marginalised vis vis these centres. Of course this operates in a differentmanner, but the fact remains that the aesthetics of the 'Arab World' are generally set in the'Mashriq'.15 Thus, there are writers who have established a reputation in Arab letters bysubverting Arabic in a manner similar to that in which the francophone writers have attempted toassert themselves within 'la francophonie'.16

In the case of the innovative arabophone writer, however, other forces of resistance to theircreativity can be found at home. For example, Mohamed Choukri's first novel, Al Khobz Al-Hafi(For Bread Alone), was banned in Morocco, allegedly for its graphic treatment of corruption,poverty and sexuality. Yet the novel is tame by the standards of many francophone novels thatare readily available in Morocco, so clearly the problem has to do with the fact that he treatsthese themes in Arabic. Certainly one of the charges levelled against him that resounded most inthe Maghrib was that he soiled the 'sacred language' with themes that were more appropriate to a'Western' aesthetic, and relied too heavily on dialectal Arabic, including its words of foreign origin,seen by many as a pollution of the eloquence of Arabic. Many of Choukri's texts contain phrasesand words from Spanish and French, which are printed in the novel in Latin letters and are nottransliterated into Arabic.

Such appropriation of the Arabic language can be regarded as a kind of resistance to thehegemony of Mashriq within the smaller world of Arabic culture. In fact, I can recall colleaguesfrom the Mashriq alongside whom I taught under the Moroccan university system being infuriatedby reports that Choukri was said to have claimed he was not an 'Arab' writer at all, but that hewas a Tanjawi writer from Tangier, and that was all that was relevant. What emerges in thewritings of both arabophone and francophone Mahgrebi writers is something that might be called'hybrid' in Homi Bhabha's sense of the term. 17

Abdelkebir Khatibi18 speaks of the 'bi-langue', or even the 'pluri-langue' -- one who is not simplybilingual, but instead writes from a much more subversive place in which

[a] never-ending and uninterrupted chain of significations and associations...co-exist in the bi-langue's mind. The process of translation is a perpetual one, and the traces of both classical

Arabic and the dialect are always present within the writer's mind.19

Mehrez neglects to consider Tamazight in this mix, but the point is well argued none the less. Theeffect of such bilingualism is to undermine the authority of languages and their discourse. Astriking example of this is provided in Abdelkebir Khatibi's novel Amour Bilingue, in which aMoroccan narrator is involved with a French woman in France. 20 For the narrator:

The manifold linguistic and cultural traces tracking through his 'mother tongue' emphasise thefundamental impurity of the originless language he speaks and consequently problematize thenotion of an authoritarian discourse based on unitary stabilized speech. Each time he speaks,these languages play back and forth. When he speaks the language of the woman he loves, heoccasionally substitutes a word from Arabic for a word from French. At such times he has nofeeling of grammatical error, but rather of speaking two languages simultaneously. 21

Clearly the issue is more complex than can be dealt with fully in the confines of this paper, butany discussion concerning the translation of postcolonial Mahgrebi literature must bear thiscomplex situation in mind. Most importantly, it must be recalled that for many Mahgrebi writers,especially though not exclusively those who write in French, writing itself is a process oftranslation. Furthermore, as Mehrez outlines so clearly, the ideal reader for such fiction issomething of a translator, as well. Beginning with the titles, the full significance of a text can onlybe realised by a reader who has some knowledge of Mahgrebi language and culture.

Therein lies the difficulty for the translator. In spite of extensive theoretical interrogation of the


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concept, translation is still considered to be the rendering of the meaning contained in one textinto another language. How, then, do we theorise translation of the 'bi-langue'? How does onetranslate from an impure, and intentionally destabilised language into another?22 What is to bedone when the very manner of using language is part of the 'meaning' of the text? In the case ofthe Mahgrebi novel, the way in which the language is used is often as important as plot, figurativelanguage, and all the other things that constitute the 'meaning' translation is supposed to capture.In other words, the bilingual nature of the text is, in large part, its meaning.

There is no easy formula for translation of a hybrid text, but in this paper I hope to point out someof the issues that need to be considered when strategies are proposed. In order to do this, I willdemonstrate how a great many translations of Mahgrebi novels are done without consideration ofthe linguistic complexity of those texts. Indeed, there is often a reckless disregard for the originalon the part of the translator. I will argue that, by and large, the Mahgrebi novel appears in Englishtranslation as a glimpse into a culture and not as a work of art with any inherent merit asliterature. As a result of this approach, artistic and literary innovations are sabotaged in thetranslations.

I should stress, however, that when speaking of the translator, I am not necessarily speaking onlyof the individual who actually does the translation. Within this paper, the term translator will referto all those involved in the process of preparing and publishing a translated work. My analysis

proceeds from published texts and I have no way of knowing for which elements the translator isresponsible and which were introduced elsewhere in the publication process, by editors, forexample. Furthermore, only one of the texts I shall discuss in this paper has a translator'sintroduction, and three of them provide no information about the translator other than a name.

What is surprising (indeed shocking) about many published tranSlations of Mahgrebi novels is theextraordinary liberties that have been taken with them. To be sure, not all translations ofMahgrebi literature are so questionable. There are translations of Maghribi literature that are quitegood: Shirley Eber's translation of Rachid Mimouni's La ceinture de l'Ogresse (The Ogre'sEmbrace),23 Alan Sheridan's translation of Tabar Ben Jelloun's La Nuit Sacree (The SacredNight),24 and Issa Boullata's translation of Mohamed Berrada's Arabic novel Lua'bat Annisyan(The Game of Forgetting),25 are among those I consider to be the better translations.

It should also be acknowledged that there is no single standard for evaluating literary translations.Indeed, objective or empirical evaluation of any work of art is probably not possible, and thiscertainly applies to translated texts as well. As might be expected, the criteria proposed thus farhave been highly subjective and have raised as many questions as they have provided answers.The evaluation of literature has never been an empirical science, and it is certainly futile to expectthe evaluation of literary translation to be so. Still, when one goes through the texts mentionedabove, it is clear that nothing has been left out, nothing is seriously mistranslated, and argumentscan be made to justify the style, syntax and word choices of the translator. Certainly one mightfeel small things could have been done differently, but in general I am comfortable saying that thetranslators seem to have done careful and thoughtful work.

Consequently, these texts are not those I wish to consider here. This paper is an investigation ofmistranslation. The differences between the originals and the English translations discussed in

this paper are not losses of the sort that are to be expected and tolerated, but rather they aresignificant distortions of the text. Furthermore, the better translations mentioned above tend to beof texts whose originals are far less experimental with their language and style than the texts I willexamine in this paper. In such cases a translator with a good command of the languages involvedand a moderate degree of cultural knowledge can usually do fine, but the novel that is hybrid in itsvery language poses more of a challenge.

I shall divide these mistranslations into three groups. The first includes examples of works thatare simply weak translations. It appears that the translators were either not up to the task in handor were simply too careless in their work. These translations are plagued by oversights and


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errors. The second group can hardly be called translations at all, because the liberties taken bythe translator with the source text make the text published as a translation not only a rewriting,but also a significant distortion of the original. The third includes examples of publishedtranslations that are, on the surface, quite good. Yet on a more subtle scale, it can be argued thatthe original text has been significantly distorted, although perhaps not deliberately. The elementmost distorted in this group is the author's attempt to negotiate his/her bilingualism throughwriting.

Ironically, most of the examples I will use in all three groups are from presses that haveestablished reputations as promoters of literature in Arabic. These publishers were commendedby Edward Said for being 'small but conscientious' in his article, 'Embargoed Literatures'.26Granted, Said was simply commenting on the fact that these publishers have Arabic texts in theircatalogues and not on the quality of the translations, but one is compelled to ask which is better:not to be represented at all, or to be so terribly misrepresented?

The first group of translations is of the so-called 'Berber Trilogy', by Morocco's Driss Chraibi.These are all very weak translations, particularly the last in the series, Birth At Dawn (Naissance l' aube), translated by Ann Woollcombe.27 The novels recount moments in the history of the AtYafelman family and were originally marketed by Three Continents Press as the 'BerberTetralogy'. (An appellation that can only fit if the fourth volume has been lost like so many of the

plays in the tetralogies of ancient Greece.) The first novel, Flutes of Death (Une enqute aupays),28 translated by Robin A. Roosevelt, is set somewhere in the Atlas Mountains ofcontemporary Morocco and tells the story of two policemen from Rabat who come among the AtYafelman searching for a subversive element The second, Mother Spring (La Mre duprintemps),29 translated by Hugh Harter, begins with an epilogue to the previous volume, inwhich Raho At Yafelman struggles to adjust to life in post-colonial Morocco. The novel properdepicts the Muslim conquest of Morocco and the reaction of the At Yafelman to it. The thirdvolume, Birth at Dawn, also contains an epilogue very similar to the epilogue at the beginning ofMother Spring, (perhaps the epilogue to the second volume, or perhaps an alternative epiloguefor Flutes of Death), with the novel, itself, recounting the entry into Spain of Tariq Ibn Ziyyad atthe head of the Muslim army, including soldiers of the At Yafelman.

As even these few, sketchy plot notes suggest, the three novels are very closely related to each

other, and knowledge of the other two volumes yields valuable clues to the interpretation of anyindividual volume. Yet Three Continents Press allowed a different person to translate eachvolume of the series, each having done so with seemingly very little awareness of the textualclues that unite the three novels. Take, for example. the first sentences of Mother Spring andBirth at Dawn. In 1989, Harter translated the first line of Mother Spring:

Raho At Yafelman cheminait le long de la route, par ce pur matin d'aot de l'an de grcechrtienne mille neuf cent quatre-vingt-deux -- un Berbre trs long et trs mince, le visageempreint de paix.

Raho At Yafelman was walking along the roadway one pure August morning in the Christianyear of grace nineteen hundred eighty-two -- a very tall and very thin Berber whose face bore thestamp of Peace.

This line is echoed at the beginning of Birth At Dawn, but Woollcombe somehow misses this fact.She translates the beginning of the third volume in the trilogy:

Raho At Yafelman cheminait le long de la route, par ce lumineux matin d't de l'an de grcechrtienne mille neuf cent quatre-vingt-cinq -- un Berbre trs long et trs mince, le visageempreint de srnit.

In the year of grace nineteen hundred eighty-five, Raho At Yafelman walked along the road ona bright summer morning. He was a Berber, very tall and very thin with a serene face.


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The failure to make clear that the date 1985 belongs to the Christian calendar may seeminsignificant, but in fact it ruins the symmetry between the opening passages of the two novelsand deprives the reader of a clue regarding the relationship between them. It also ignores acentral theme of the three novels. For Raho At Yafelman the Muslim abandonment of the Islamiccalendar is symbolic of his country's loss of faith and the collapse of the moral order. In MotherSpring, Raho comments on it as evidence that the nation is wandering from its true identity.

Quelle anne pouvait-il bien tre chez les Arabes, selon l'Hgire? Ils ne savaient pas eux-mmes, sans doute. Ils comptaient prsent par crit, les dates et l'argent, la faon desZropens. (p.15)

This is but one example of the kind of mistranslation that pervades the three books. I have mulledover them in my mind incessantly and I can think of no reasons for the changes other thancarelessness. Clearly someone in the translation and publishing process did not see that thesetexts are the sort which merit careful translation and editing. I believe it is among the first tasks oftranslators, particularly when translating a figure of the stature of Driss Chraibi, to familiarisethemselves with the collective body of his work, particularly when there seems to be someinterconnectedness between the work being translated and other texts.

The translation published under the title Birth at Dawn is the most problematic in this firstcategory. The pages of the original French novel Naissance l'aube are elaborately decoratedwith Islamic calligraphy, but these are left out of the English version, as is other art work directlyreferred to in the text. For example, in the French text, the following section is part of adescription of the glories of the new Islamic civilisation. The arrow refers to the illustration, whichcan be seen in the French text:

L'indigo, Ie vert cru mme de la vie extrait d'un lichen qu'ils taient seuls connatre, le rougevif qu'ils obtenaient en faisant bouillir une poigne de cochenilles dans de la saumure, et l'ocredes contreforts de l' Atlas et le bistre de la suie des os de mouton calcins, oui, ils sauraient lesfaire clater en un clatement de couleurs sur ce morceau de grs-ci, de telle sorte qu'un jourdes jours venir, le passant qui irait se dsaltrer la fontaine se dsaltrerait d'abord l'me,rien qu'en voyant ceci -> (Naissance a l'aube, p.58)

The passage is accurately translated in Birth at Dawn, but ends with, 'the passer-by who woulddrink from the fountain, would first restore his soul, just by looking at this...' Being followed only bywhite space, there is nothing to indicate to the reader what 'this' refers to.

In addition to these examples, there are also mistranslations so amazingly absurd they verge onDaliesque.

Cordoue conquise, ils taient prsent l, assis sur leurs talons face aux futaies, torse nu,l'avant-bras pris dans un poignet de force en fer, comme s'ils mditaient devant l'Historie et sesmandres, une hache entre les genoux. Et l'instant d'aprs, ils voltigeaient dans les ramures,aussi agiles et ludiques que les magots qui bondissaient de branche en branche. (p.34)

Now that Cordoba was conquered, they [the 'Berber' soldiers] were here, squatting on theirheels in front of the forest, bare-chested, their forearms in an iron bracelet, as if they weremeditating about History [sic] and its tortuous paths, an axe between their knees. And only amoment later they were flying through the branches, as light as maggots that jumped from branchto branch. (p.S8, italics are mine).

One need not even know that the word magot means Barbary ape to know that the last image inthe English version of this passage does not make sense!

When they were first published, reviewers of the English versions of the other novels in the


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series, Flutes of Death and Mother Spring, commented favourably on the translations, but eventhe reviews that compared the translated versions to the French texts failed to note that entiresentences, sometimes even sets of sentences, are simply left out of the translations for nodiscernable reason except carelessness. In the 'Prologue' of Hugh Harter's translation of La Mredu printemps entire paragraphs have been left out of the translation of Chraibi's original'Prologue'.30 There are also examples of mistranslations which reveal that the translators werenot adequately familiar with the cultural context. For example, on page 78 of Flutes of Death, thetranslator's footnote explains the acronym PCV as 'Morocco's Ma Bell'. In fact, it is anabbreviation for percevoir, the French term for a reverse charge call. Finally, there areinstances where the translators failed to reproduce Chraibi's use of different linguistic registersand dialects of French to convey information about the characters. This is most evident in Uneenqute au pays, where factors such as how much characters use (or misuse) French and thenumber of Arabic words they insert into their French is very important in delineating theircharacters. It is also a source of much of the novel's humour, but this is not clear in the Englishtranslation.

How can such mistranslations be explained? I believe that the translators failed adequately toappreciate Chraibi's talent as a writer. They sought to translate a story, and seem to haveneglected the form and style of the writing. In addition, they seem to have been less than carefulin checking the text for mistranslations and omissions. It is worth reiterating that the novels were

published by Three Continents Press, a publisher which, as Said noted, did indeed maintain aspecial commitment to the 'emerging literatures' from outside the West even long before the post-colonial studies boom in the United States made such things fashionable. It is unfortunate thatsome of the translations were done so poorly.

Far more troublesome than these sloppy renderings are texts that can only be described ascomplete misrepresentations of the work being translated. One such example is Ed Emery'stranslation of Mohamed Choukri's Arabic novel Zaman al Akhtaa, the title of which can be literallytranslated as 'A Time of Errors'. 31 The title of the published English translation, on the otherhand, is the overused clich, Streetwise, an indication of even greater liberties taken with the textitself. The English version is, in fact, visibly different from the original version in that the originalcontains two chapters that are clearly in verse. Emery seems to take literally the adage thatpoetry is what is lost in translation, because he has, in fact, lost the poetry.32 The verse has not

been rendered into prose, a move for which one might be able to make a convincing case due toproblems inherent in translating poetry from any language into another; it has simply beeneliminated.

Choukri is famous for his rebellious writing style. He writes about taboo subjects, incorporates agreat deal of Moroccan dialect into his standard Arabic texts, and in general experiments with theform of the language. In its original, his work is socially significant in so many ways. He dares toexperiment with the 'sacred language', writing in dialectal Arabic that was not, and to a greatextent still is not, considered appropriate for or capable of rendering intellectual or artisticexpression. Emery's translation is in perfect standard English of a sort that would make a schoolteacher blush with pride. Somehow this style comes across as incongruous given that he hasalso left in the 'shocking' bits of Cboukri's novel, specifically the graphic descriptions of theravages of poverty and of the narrator's sexual encounters. The end result is a distanced,

anthropological look at poverty in the cities of northern Morocco, conveying very little of the angerand rebellion Choukri communicates (and performs), in part through his distinct writing style. Icannot even imagine what might be the rationale for such sweeping changes in a text unlessEmery saw Choukri's writing as little more than poor writing by someone without sufficientcommand over the standard forms of the Arabic language and took it upon himself to correct thetext in his translation. Choukri was not educated as a child and only began to write after startingschool when he was 20 years old.

Perhaps this would explain why, on the first page of the book he translates felfla, the Moroccandialect word for 'peppers', as falafel, a Middle Eastern dish that has no peppers in it and is not


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widely prepared in Morocco except in Lebanese restaurants. Perhaps he thought he had found aspelling error. If that is not the case, then one would be inclined to argue that the translator lackssufficient knowledge of Moroccan culture and of the significance of Choukri as an important figuretherein to translate this work. Like so many other translators, he seems to be unwilling torecognise that the literature he is translating might have some merit beyond that of 'a look inside'a society which is far from closed to begin with, and whose strangeness is very much aninvention of the West. Interestingly enough, none of the reviews I have seen of the Englishversion make a comparison with the original. They recapitulate the plot and comment on thepoignant story line and the harshness of the society the text describes, but never mention theaesthetic impact of the original text. Publishers Weekly's only comment on the translation is that itis too 'slangy' (sic),33 an interesting comment as this did not strike me at all when I was readingit. Had the translation been a bit more 'slangy', it might actually have been effective in catchingsome of the rebelliousness of the original Arabic text. Capturing the style, however, does notseem to have been the translator's concern.

The third set of translations is the most difficult to analyse. They are, in fact. fairly accuratetranslations that read well. There are no 'errors' or serious oversights that can be easily pointedout in the translation. Yet. it is not uncommon to find that some of the works that read the mostsmoothly in English, are not so smooth in their original versions. Because we have seen that theissue of language is of tremendous importance to the Maghribi writer, it should be an overriding

concern for the translator.

One such translation is the English version of Driss Chraibi's novel, L'Homme du Livre, whichappeared in English under the title Muhammad.34 It is a 'fictional account' of the first revelationsreceived by the Prophet Muhammad. On one level this is a fine translation. It reads very well andis also by and large an accurate translation of the story and its imagery. As a rendering ofChraibi's writing style, however, it is not an accurate representation. The first sentence of thenovel reads as follows:

Debout dans une caverne, un homme, envelopp dans un manteau de laine crue, sanscoutures, ni manches

The English reads:

In a cave stands a man in a sleeveless mantle of dyed wool

Whereas the original is a phrase without a verb, the translation is a complete sentence. In orderto make it so, the sentence has been rearranged and an important parallelism lost. The phrase'envelopp dans un manteau' is not translated, even though variations of both it and the phrase'debout dans une caverne' are repeated several times throughout the novel:

...debout dans une caverne (same page)

Debout dans sa caverne (p.14)

L'homme envelopp dans son manteau... (p.l4, p.20)

L'homme dans sa caverne... (p.l5)

Un homme, d'un quarante d'annes, vtu d'un manteau de laine crue sans coutures nimanches... (p.91)

Finally, at the end of the first chapter, a similar scene occurs 14 centuries later, and in a differentplace: 'dans une grotte dans une montagne de l'Azerbadjan. Debout dans cette grotte, unhomme...' None of this parallelism is preserved in the English. Each time the phrases appear,they are arranged differently. For example, the first time 'envelopp dans son manteau' appears it


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is simply not translated. The second time the descriptive phrase becomes an action: 'Pulling hismantle about him...: (p.14). The third time, Muhammad is 'draped in his mantle' (p.19). Only in thelast instance (p.82) is the translation the same as in the first line. Stylistically, many might arguethat the variation introduced by the translator is more effective in written English, as one couldalso argue about the original French. Chraibi was most certainly aware of this, yet he chose not tointroduce this variety. What justification does the translator have for not respecting this stylisticchoice?

The handling of the image is particularly important, as it is allusive. Biographies of the Prophet tellus that the revelations had a physical effect on him, making him perspire on cold days andmaking him cold when it was warm. Indeed, tradition has it that upon receiving the firstrevelations the Prophet, although warmly dressed, went home to his wife Khadija and asked to bewrapped in blankets as he was trembling with cold. The image of the Prophet's mantle also hasprecedents in Islamic literary tradition. Beyond that, I would argue that the repetition of thephrases has an important poetic effect, giving Chraibi's novel some of the aural quality of sacredtext.

Similarly, there is evidence in these pages that the translator was not sufficiently aware of thecorpus of Chraibi's work. 'A l'aube du VIIme sicle' is translated as 'Early in the seventh century',leaving out the metaphor of the 'dawn'. Granted, the semantic meaning is adequately rendered,

but not the metaphor, a metaphor that occupies a prominent place in Chraibi's work. The firstsection of the novel, in which the phrase cited above occurs, is called 'La Premire aube'. Inaddition, as we have seen in the Berber trilogy, other Chraibi texts document similar 'dawns' inthe history of Islam. Space does not allow me to elucidate fully the importance of this metaphor inCharibi's work, but clearly a translator should be aware of it and pay special attention to when itoccurs.

Furthermore, the translator has also taken it upon herself to clarify certain aspects of the text thatCharibi did not deem it necessary to clarify. The first example is the title, in which L'Homme duLivre must be positively identified as the prophet Muhammad. On some level this changeremoves the text from the realm of allegorical fiction to that of biography. Certainly the source textis clearly about the Prophet Muhammad, but there are other 'Men of the Book' besides him, mostnotably Joseph, Moses, and Jesus, all of whom are mentioned in this novel. 35

Another example is the 'translator's note' explaining the letters 'Y.S.' that appear at various placesin the novel. The original French version did not include such clarification. The use of notes in aChraibi text is a subject of study in itself, but I believe clarifications by a translator should beconsidered in relation to the writer's intentions. Chraibi has been known to use what might becalled 'anti-footnote' footnotes in his novels, as if he were purposefully defying an editor's ordersto clarify terms. For example, in La Mre du Printemps there is a footnote that says, 'Je refuse detraduire ce terme (note de l'auteur)', and in Naissance a l'aube a footnote linked to an Arabicslang word for penis says. 'Dois-je vraiment traduire en franais ce mot concret?' Such noteswould indicate that there are certain things in the texts that the author expects the reader tosimply get, or not get, but which the author refuses to explain. One might say that these terms actas a kind of shibboleth. The publisher, Three Continents Press, has been very inconsistent inhandling the footnotes from Chraibi's original texts. In Birth At Dawn there is a glossary, in Flutes

of Death there are footnotes, including some additional ones that are not accurate. In MotherSpring, some footnotes are kept, but in general the words that appear in transliterated Arabic inthe text are simply translated into English or definitions are provided directly in the text of theEnglish translation.

The use of footnotes, glossaries and explanations or translations inserted into the text canbecome a serious issue in the translation of post-colonial literature from the Maghrib.36 If theFrench text includes words or cultural references that the author chose not to explain to hisfrancophone reader, should the translator clarify such items for the anglophone reader? Surelythe English translator cannot expect the ideal reader to be trilingual, because if that were the case


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they would have no need for a translation. Yet somehow, if the source text manifests a resistanceto appropriation into French, then it must not be appropriated into English, either. Negotiating thisis tricky, but it must be an issue of which the translator must at least be aware.

I have already quoted Assia Djebar on her desire to make the francophone text she writes herown, and to use it to allow repressed voices to speak. Accordingly, her writing is often ratherunorthodox in its style and syntax. Some sentences may only be fragments, others link clauseafter clause in long flowing sentences full of detours and elaborations and more detours. She alsomanipulates the syntax of her sentences to produce a text that is somewhat antagonistic towardthe stylistic expectations of the francophone reader. For example, occasionally she inverts thestandard subject-verb-object sequence in her sentences to bring some element in a sentence tothe forefront. This is, of course, acceptable, provided certain rules of grammar and punctuationare observed, but the inversion will be noticed and the out-of-place element given prominence.When a translator interferes with such a structure, this prominence is lost. For example, inFemmes d'Alger ..., translated into English as Women of Algiers by Marjolijn de Jager,37 Djebarwrites: 'A Alger, Delacroix ne sjournera que trois jours', but it is translated as 'Delacroix spendsonly three days in Algiers'. Djebar gives prominence to the name of the city, the English text doesnot. Yet the juxtaposition of places (Algeria, France, Morocco) is such an important thematicelement of this text. Similarly, page 126 of Djebar's original reads, 'A l'entre, des hommes d'gemr...' This is rendered in English as, 'Elderly men at the entrance...'. As is so often the case in

Djebar's novels, the spatial dimension is prioritised in the arrangement of the figures on thescene. Djebar is a film-maker, and this line is one of many she has written that read like scenedescriptions. Figures are arranged as if on a stage or screen, and the arrangement is highlighted.There is significance in this physical placement and this is emphasised in the wording, but theemphasis is lost when conventional syntax is restored.

Betsy Wing polishes her translation of Vaste est la prison in a similar manner. Consider thefollowing two paragraphs, given first in French, then in English.

La chimie de cet effacement, dois-je l'clairer rebours, risquer de faire rapparatre, de lammoire pas encore putrfie, quelque toile d'araigne friable, un enchevtrement de soie ou depoussire, effet mlancolique ?

Dans ce dblayage de ruines, le visage de l'autre, pendant treize mois, me parutirremplaable. (pp.25-26)

Must I explain the nature of this clearing away, risking in the process that some powderyspider's web will re-emerge, some tangle of silk or dust with its melancholy effect, from memorynot yet rotten.

For thirteen months, in the excavation of ruins, the face of the other had seemed irreplaceableto me. (p.26)

Granted, these are difficult lines to translate closely. The sentences are long and cumbersome,and some reworking is undoubtedly necessary when translating them into English. But in the firstsentence of each paragraph an element is given prominence by being brought to the front:

images of erasure and ruin. These are themes that are particularly important in this novel and inthe chapter from which this passage is taken. Its title is 'L'effacement dans le coeur', rendered inEnglish as 'What is Erased in the Heart'. The prominent features are not preserved in thetranslation and the symmetry between the chapter title and the first line of the first paragraphquoted above is lost.

As is the case with the Chraibi translations I have already discussed, Djebar's translators oftensee fit to clarify her text in areas where they judge it ambiguous. For example, on page 121 of'Les Femmes d'Alger..., a passage describing the marriage between a young bride and herhusband reads, 'Elle se refusa obstinment depuis ce jour'. This is translated as, 'From that day


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on she refused to sleep with him'.38 Not only does the translator find it necessary to stipulate thatthe refusal is sexual, (something that is obvious from the context, the passage beginning with thehusband's attempt to force his wife into sex, and ending with his 'repudiation' of her as a result ofthis refusal) but she leaves out the stubborness of the act, a very important thematic element ofthis collection, the central theme of which is women's attempts to assert control in their lives. Inand of themselves, neither of these would seem significant distortions of the text, and hardlyworth noting, but when such changes are frequent enough, they distort the writer's style. This isparticularly unfortunate when the style, itself, is so significant to the novel's negotiation of culturalidentity.

It is probably unfair to judge a book by its cover, especially when the translator may have had nosay in the design of a book's dust jacket or paperback cover. Yet, with that caveat, I would arguethat the cover images chosen are indicative of the approach translators and publishers taketoward a book by Assia Djebar. Many of the covers show pictures of women either behind awindow and presumably cloistered, or very heavily veiled.39 Too often her work is viewed as alook 'behind the veil' at the status of women and nothing else. Depicting the status of womenwithin Algerian society is, of course, a very important concern for Djebar, but her work cannot bereduced to that. As a trained historian, she interrogates the very foundations of women'soppression through a return to historical, literary and cultural sources. Her fiction mixes withhistorical writing and autobiography in order to investigate and illuminate the systematic manner

in which the feminine voice has been silenced throughout time.

In addition, the very style and structure of Djebar's writing is an exploration of the form andlanguage in which the submerged voices can break forth. Nowhere is this clearer than in Vasteest la Prison, a novel that is as much about preservation of memory and forgotten languages as itis a protest against the condition of women.40 When translators tinker unnecessarily with herstyle they are, in fact, tinkering with one of the most important aspects of her work. Djebar andChraibi are the two francophone writers who have the largest percentage of their work translatedinto English. With Chraibi, virtually all the texts have been published by Three Continents (nowLynne Reinner Press). With Djebar, on the other hand, there is actually competition for virtuallyeverything she writes. Her books have been published by the University of Virginia, Quartet(another of the presses commended by Said in 'Embargoed Literature') and, most recently, bySeven Stories. Yet, regardless of the press, the approach taken has been to produce translations

that restore conventional syntax and to explain references she had left vague. For example, allthe novels published in English have glossaries. Again the question poses itself, if Djebar haswritten a text that resists appropriation into a French aesthetic, what are the ethical dilemmasinvolved in producing a translation that appropriates the text into English?

It has been stated that translators and scholars of Maghribi literature, both in French and inArabic, often miss one of the most important dimensions of this region's culture, what Khatibi41called 'bilinguisme' or, even more accurately, 'plurilinguisme'. In a recent article he provocativelystates:

Nous avons mis peu moins d'un sicle pour apprendre le franais peu prs, nous avons misquatorze sicles pour apprendre l'arabe peu prs et nous avons mis un temps immmorial pourne pas crire le berbre. Il faut analyser les effets rels et imaginaires, cette chose forclose qu'est

l'criture dans l'histoire de la culture maghrbine pour comprendre le processus historique duconcept d'criture, ici mme et non seulement par rapport aux concepts thologiques, mystiques,linguistiques ou politiques de la langue arabe telle qu'elle c'est pense elle-mme depuis dessicles par rapport ce lieu. Il convient d'analyser cette rsistance, sinon cette dissidence, parrapport le champ rel de la graphie et ce redoublement ou le dplacement de cette graphiearchaque.

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the maghribi novel in translation

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