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Found in Translation-The Contemporary Arabic Novel
What do you know about how people live in Cairo or Beirut or Riyadh? What bearing does such information have upon your life? There are, of course, newspapers to keep responsible Americans up to date when trouble looms, and public television or even the History Channel to inform us about the occasional historic battle or archeological discovery or civil war. What else do we need? The ways that people think and work and suffer and fall in love and make enemies and sometimes make revolutions is the stuff of novels, and Arabic novels, while not yet lining the shelves of the local bookstore, have been increasingly available in English translation, offering a marvellous array of answers to questions we did not know we wanted to ask. On such subjects as: the nature of the clientele of the elegantly crumbling pre-Islamist bars in downtown Cairo, straight and gay (“The Yacoubian Building,” by Alaa Al Aswany); what it felt like to live through the massacre in the Shatila refugee camp, in 1982, and how some of the people who still live there have been managing since (“Gate of the Sun,” by Elias Khoury); the optimal tactics that a good Saudi girl should use to avoid being married off, which appear to require that she study either medicine or dentistry (“Girls of Riyadh,” by the twenty-something Rajaa Alsanea, who has herself completed an advanced degree in endodontics). There is clearly insight as well as information in these books. And then, considering the reduced size and the volatility of the world we share, we might recall the essential lesson of a very old Arabic book that everyone knows, “The Thousand and One Nights”—that stories can have the power to save your life.
Our long history of indifference has made it difficult, down the years, to come by stories of Arab life that do not involve genies or magic lamps. True, the novel is a comparatively recent phenomenon in Arabic literature; poetry, an ancient art, has traditionally held wider prestige. The exciting new storytelling form, barely a century old, was adapted from the European novels that European armies brought in their wake: Napoleon’s troops were in Cairo for three years, but, thanks to Egypt’s Paris-worshipping nineteenth-century khedives, Balzac and Zola stayed for good. The form developed sporadically in the first half of the last century, and no more than three or four Arabic novels appeared in English before the mid-fifties. After the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize, in 1988, there was a significant surge of interest—Mahfouz himself finally got an American commercial publisher—but the burden of bringing Arabic books to English readers still falls mainly on devoted translators, and on the small and heroic presses that have performed this service from the start. Their joint efforts have rarely mattered more. The Arab reading public, although avid for all sorts of fiction, in a plethora of newspapers and cheap feuilletons, has (for evident economic reasons) not fully embraced the novel as a published book. Few Arabic novels sell enough copies to earn their authors anything like a living income; even Mahfouz kept a civil-service job until he was sixty. Today, the most sophisticated literary public is under siege. “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads” is a saying that prevailed in what now seems a dream of literary possibility, free of stifling fundamentalism, civic chaos, and bombs.
Lately, there has been a concerted effort by forces of intercultural good will, Arab and otherwise, to bring newer Arabic literary works to our attention, with annual prizes—culminating in the so-called Arabic Booker Prize, established in 2007, in Abu Dhabi—whose principal aim is to secure international (but primarily English-language) publication. From the fifties through the seventies, the United States pursued a far more extensive project: the Franklin Book Programs translated and distributed American books in the Arabic-speaking Middle East, and not only textbooks and dictionaries but “Little Women,” “Ethan Frome,” and “The Bridge of San Luis Rey”—books meant to promote “the Western ideals of the dignity and freedom of individual men” and to “minimize the difficulty of Arab-Western collaboration.” These days, the privately sponsored Global Americana Institute is attempting to renew this sort of literary diplomacy, starting with the publication of selected essays by Thomas Jefferson in Arabic. Yet, if the goal is collaboration, isn’t it as important to listen as to speak? There is little danger of encountering anything like official propaganda, since the Arab novelist stands, almost by definition—as a thinker, as a conduit of intellectual life—in opposition to the retrogressive forces in the modern Arab state.
Six years after winning the Nobel Prize, Mahfouz, aged eighty-two, was knifed in the neck by a religious zealot carrying out a fatwa issued by an Islamic cleric outraged by one of the books the Nobel committee had cited. (Mahfouz survived, and lived for two more years, although he temporarily lost the use of his right hand and had to relearn how to write. The cleric is currently serving a life sentence in the United States, for his part in a conspiracy to bomb the United Nations and other New York monuments.) Nothing so grave has happened to Alaa Al Aswany, whose “Yacoubian Building,” a skillful page-turner with a winning cast of characters, takes on the subjects of class oppression, government corruption, torture in prison, the rise of fundamentalism, and the Egyptian state’s propensity to push even profoundly decent but poor young men to religious extremism and, ultimately, to killing.
Published in 2002, by a private Cairo firm—there being no way to get such a manuscript through the state’s official publishing house—“The Yacoubian Building” quickly became one of the biggest best-sellers that the Arab world has ever seen. In Humphrey Davies’s smooth English translation (Harper Perennial; $13.95), it has been an astonishingly big seller here, too, and the book has appeared in more than twenty other languages around the globe. Al Aswany believes that his international fame has kept him safe, although he has frequently been accused in the state-run media of the crime of “tarnishing Egypt’s image abroad,” and the public discussions that he used to host at a Cairo café were shut down by the police. (He quickly relocated the discussions elsewhere.)
Claudia Roth Pierpont
The New Yorker