Critics have long viewed translating Arabic literature into English as an ethically fraught process of mediating between two wholly incommensurable languages, cultures, and literary traditions. Today, Arabic literature is no longer "embargoed" from Anglophone cultural spaces, as Edward Said once famously claimed that it was. As Arabic literary works are translated into English in ever-greater numbers, what alternative model of translation ethics can account for this literature's newfound readability in the hegemonic language of the world literary system? The Worlding of Arabic Literature argues that an ethical translation of a work of Arabic literature is one that transmits the literariness of the source text by engaging new populations of readers via a range of embodied and sensory effects. The book proposes that when translation is conceived of not as an exchange of semantic content but as a process of converting the affective forms of one language into those of another, previously unrecognized modalities of worldliness open up to the source text. In dialogue with a rich corpus of Arabic aesthetic and linguistic theory as well as contemporary scholarship in affect theory, translation theory, postcolonial theory, and world literature studies, this book offers a timely and provocative investigation of how an important literary tradition enters the world literary system. The Worlding of Arabic Literature: Language, Affect, and the Ethics of Translatability is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.
Anna Ziajka Stanton is Caroline D. Eckhardt Early Career Professor of Comparative Literature and Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University. She has published articles in the Journal of Arabic Literature, Philological Encounters, the Journal of World Literature, the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, and Middle Eastern Literatures. Stanton is the translator of Hilal Chouman's Limbo Beirut, which was longlisted for the 2017 PEN Translation Prize and shortlisted for the 2017 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. She has been an editor at the Journal of Arabic Literature since 2014.
Note on Translations and Transliterations ix Introduction: From Embargo to Boom: The Changing World of Arabic Literature in English 1 1 Sonics of Lafz. : Translating Arabic Acoustics for Anglophone Ears 27 2 Vulgarity of Saj?: The Scandalous Pleasures of Burton's The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night 56 3 Ethics of the Muthanna: Caring for the Other in a Mother Tongue 83 4 ?Ajami Politics and Aesthetic Experience: Translating the Body in Pain 113 Conclusion: Beyond Untranslatability 140 Acknowledgments 157 Notes 161 Bibliography 197 Index 219
. . . [T]his is a book that opens up immensely important new directions, not just in Arabic literary studies, but in literary studies in all languages.-- "International Journal of Middle East Studies" Stanton provides a theory-rich examination of the evolution of Arabic literature, looking at the ethics of translation, accessibility of signature somatic effects, and political contexts contributing to a changing global readership. Highly recommended.-- "Choice Reviews" Combining rich meditations on translation theory and practice with a nuanced attention to the sounds and sensations produced by Arabic texts and their English translations, The Worlding of Arabic Literature is a ground-breaking work. The close comparative readings of Arabic texts and their English translations are a revelation.---David Fieni, SUNY Oneonta
