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The Maghribi Novel in English Translation

Conclusion

Notes

The Ethics of Cultural Representation: The Maghribi Novel in Translation

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Michael A. Toler

From The Journal of North African Studies

© 2001, Journal of North African Studies
Used with permission of Frank Cass Publishers

The Maghribi Novel in English Translation

Maghribi novels are literary productions coming from a complex cultural landscape in which
multiple languages interact. Unfortunately, few translations of the Maghribi novel, be it from
French 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 to
represent much of the artistry and innovation of the original texts, but also skew, alter or
misrepresent critical and subversive dialogues in which these works are engaged. This paper is a
call for an ethics of representation in translation.

Michael Toler is a Ph.D candidate in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at

Binghamton University (SUNY).

When I was a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching English composition courses to first and second
year university students in the Moroccan university system, I used a booklet on teaching English
composition to Moroccan students that had been put together by a former volunteer. The section
dealing 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 is
exquisitely 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 of
many 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 also
according to individual authors and literary movements. I would also argue that, insofar as there
is a unified Arabic culture, it is no more of an inherently 'oral culture' than is English culture (that
is cultures which express themselves in English). In fact, the written tradition of Arabic is much
older than that of English.

Furthermore, while Arabic, and particularly more traditional literary Arabic, is generally more
ornate then English is rhetorically, it is hardly as radically different as scholars such as André
Lefevere would maintain.2 In 'The Case of the Missing Qasidah', he argues that Arabic literary
writing is somehow so 'incompatible' with that of the 'West' that it could never be appreciated by a
Western audience. He argues that the two literatures belong to diverging 'universes of discourse'.
3 Lefevere's perception of these universes is essentially ahistorical, somehow transcending
development 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. These
differentiated thought processes inevitably manifest themselves in writing even if the author is not
actually writing in Arabic or even if some of the persons thus labelled are not ethnically Arab
and/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 this
francophone novel describe it as an example of 'Arab' rhetoric:

The narrative techniques Kateb Yacine uses are occasionally disconcerting to the Western
reader...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 thought
moves in a linear duration, whereas Arab thought develops in a circular duration, each turn a
return, mingling future and past in the eternity of the moment...(The italics are in the original, the
bold 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 comments
because, as is very clear through any informed reading of the novel, the Algeria he envisioned
was expressly pluralistic and most certainly could not be limited to 'Arab' as culture imported from
the East. Kateb Yacine never wrote any major work in standard Arabic. He was educated under
the 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 he
wished 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 western
Modernism or might be innovative or 'modern' in his own right? Why is it that when T.S. Eliot
writes, "time present and time past/ Are both present in time future/ And time future contained in
time 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 by
Kateb, they represent an exclusively Arab notion of man in time? Why is Kateb, a multilingual
world traveller, always presented as essentially Algerian and Arab, whereas Eliot is sometimes
presented as cosmopolitan for moving from one anglophone country to another?

I contend that many translators and/or publishers of novels from North Africa present their
translated 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'. As
such, many (perhaps even most) published translations indicate that the translators have taken
considerable 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 has
implications that reach far beyond simple aesthetic considerations.

Before actually looking at the texts themselves, however, it is useful to have an understanding of
certain key aspects of Maghribi culture as depicted by the authors under consideration here. We
have seen that Kateb Yacine (whose name written this way is a French distortion of his real
name, Yacine Kateb) wrote his theatrical pieces in Algerian dialect, and most of his other work in
French. He is known to have regretted the fact that he had never learned Tamazight well enough
to write in it, as he regarded Amazigh culture as an integral part of Algerian culture. Kateb is
regarded by many as the father of the modern Maghribi novel, and his case is illustrative of the
position taken by many Maghribi intellectuals who, often in contrast to official policy and dominant
restrictive 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 all
three of the Maghrib countries, that is to say the standard dialect used in official and public
discourse throughout the 'Arab world'. It is not, however. the language spoken by anyone on a
daily basis. Maghribi Arabic9 is the most common language of day-to-day communication. It is, of
course. based on classical Arabic, but influenced by indigenous and colonial languages. The
indigenous language of the Maghrib is Tamazight (Berber), a language that also has differing
regional dialects, most of them no longer used in writing.10 In large areas it still thrives as the
main language of social interaction and, in recent years, has been experiencing a sort of cultural
renaissance. Still, its continued use is often perceived as being somewhat threatened by
Arabisation. Colonial languages were also added to the mix beginning in the 1830s, and quickly
became firmly rooted, particularly French. All of these language constellations are, of course, in
constant interaction, and each has impacted on aspects of the others. Ahmed Boukous11
describes this interaction as follows.

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

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

Today it is a cliché to say that language is the 'vehicle of culture',12 but like most clichés, there is
truth in it. Clearly, if the languages interact in such a way, so too do the cultures from which they
originate. Culture pervades one's existence and will necessarily pervade one's writing. For most
of 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 occasionally
colliding with each other. These writers see their respective countries as zones of contact in
which cultures developed through interaction and in mutual dependence. The myth of purity is
radically challenged in their writing. They insist on their cultural specificity, but without abandoning
their claim to the universal, and without the need constantly to look back to tradition. As
Abdelkebir Khatibi argues, the self is only defined against the other, but in the process the other
also becomes part of the self and identities develop. To fear the foreign unnecessarily simply
because 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 can
be 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 their
own', 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 a
platform for the subversion of language, but also a means to allow previously silenced voices to
speak as well.

Oui, ramener les voix non francophones -- les gutturales, les ensauvagés -- jusqu'un texte
français qui devient enfin mien... Oui, faire réaffleurer les cultures traditionnelles mises au ban,
maltraitées, longtemps méprisées, les inscrire, elles dans un texte nouveau, dans une graphie qui
devient 'mon' français.

It would be a mistake to assume such strategies are limited to the francophone writers. There are
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 Maghrib
has been somewhat marginalised vis à vis these centres. Of course this operates in a different
manner, 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 by
subverting Arabic in a manner similar to that in which the francophone writers have attempted to
assert themselves within 'la francophonie'.16

In the case of the innovative arabophone writer, however, other forces of resistance to their
creativity 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 that
are readily available in Morocco, so clearly the problem has to do with the fact that he treats
these themes in Arabic. Certainly one of the charges levelled against him that resounded most in
the 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 phrases
and words from Spanish and French, which are printed in the novel in Latin letters and are not
transliterated into Arabic.

Such appropriation of the Arabic language can be regarded as a kind of resistance to the
hegemony of Mashriq within the smaller world of Arabic culture. In fact, I can recall colleagues
from the Mashriq alongside whom I taught under the Moroccan university system being infuriated
by reports that Choukri was said to have claimed he was not an 'Arab' writer at all, but that he
was a Tanjawi writer from Tangier, and that was all that was relevant. What emerges in the
writings 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 simply
bilingual, 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. The
effect of such bilingualism is to undermine the authority of languages and their discourse. A
striking example of this is provided in Abdelkebir Khatibi's novel Amour Bilingue, in which a
Moroccan 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 the
fundamental impurity of the originless language he speaks and consequently problematize the
notion 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, he
occasionally substitutes a word from Arabic for a word from French. At such times he has no
feeling 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, but
any discussion concerning the translation of postcolonial Mahgrebi literature must bear this
complex 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 of
translation. Furthermore, as Mehrez outlines so clearly, the ideal reader for such fiction is
something of a translator, as well. Beginning with the titles, the full significance of a text can only
be 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
concept, translation is still considered to be the rendering of the meaning contained in one text
into another language. How, then, do we theorise translation of the 'bi-langue'? How does one
translate from an impure, and intentionally destabilised language into another?22 What is to be
done when the very manner of using language is part of the 'meaning' of the text? In the case of
the Mahgrebi novel, the way in which the language is used is often as important as plot, figurative
language, 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 some
of the issues that need to be considered when strategies are proposed. In order to do this, I will
demonstrate how a great many translations of Mahgrebi novels are done without consideration of
the linguistic complexity of those texts. Indeed, there is often a reckless disregard for the original
on the part of the translator. I will argue that, by and large, the Mahgrebi novel appears in English
translation as a glimpse into a culture and not as a work of art with any inherent merit as
literature. As a result of this approach, artistic and literary innovations are sabotaged in the
translations.

I should stress, however, that when speaking of the translator, I am not necessarily speaking only
of the individual who actually does the translation. Within this paper, the term translator will refer
to 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 is
responsible and which were introduced elsewhere in the publication process, by editors, for
example. Furthermore, only one of the texts I shall discuss in this paper has a translator's
introduction, 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 the
extraordinary liberties that have been taken with them. To be sure, not all translations of
Mahgrebi literature are so questionable. There are translations of Maghribi literature that are quite
good: Shirley Eber's translation of Rachid Mimouni's La ceinture de l'Ogresse (The Ogre's
Embrace),23 Alan Sheridan's translation of Tabar Ben Jelloun's La Nuit Sacree (The Sacred
Night),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 this
certainly applies to translated texts as well. As might be expected, the criteria proposed thus far
have 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 expect
the evaluation of literary translation to be so. Still, when one goes through the texts mentioned
above, it is clear that nothing has been left out, nothing is seriously mistranslated, and arguments
can be made to justify the style, syntax and word choices of the translator. Certainly one might
feel small things could have been done differently, but in general I am comfortable saying that the
translators seem to have done careful and thoughtful work.

Consequently, these texts are not those I wish to consider here. This paper is an investigation of
mistranslation. 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 are
significant distortions of the text. Furthermore, the better translations mentioned above tend to be
of texts whose originals are far less experimental with their language and style than the texts I will
examine in this paper. In such cases a translator with a good command of the languages involved
and a moderate degree of cultural knowledge can usually do fine, but the novel that is hybrid in its
very language poses more of a challenge.

I shall divide these mistranslations into three groups. The first includes examples of works that
are simply weak translations. It appears that the translators were either not up to the task in hand
or were simply too careless in their work. These translations are plagued by oversights and
errors. The second group can hardly be called translations at all, because the liberties taken by
the 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 published
translations that are, on the surface, quite good. Yet on a more subtle scale, it can be argued that
the original text has been significantly distorted, although perhaps not deliberately. The element
most distorted in this group is the author's attempt to negotiate his/her bilingualism through
writing.

Ironically, most of the examples I will use in all three groups are from presses that have
established reputations as promoters of literature in Arabic. These publishers were commended
by Edward Said for being 'small but conscientious' in his article, 'Embargoed Literatures'.26
Granted, Said was simply commenting on the fact that these publishers have Arabic texts in their
catalogues 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
à l' aube), translated by Ann Woollcombe.27 The novels recount moments in the history of the Aït
Yafelman family and were originally marketed by Three Continents Press as the 'Berber
Tetralogy'. (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 enquête au
pays),28 translated by Robin A. Roosevelt, is set somewhere in the Atlas Mountains of
contemporary Morocco and tells the story of two policemen from Rabat who come among the Aït
Yafelman searching for a subversive element The second, Mother Spring (La Mère du
printemps),29 translated by Hugh Harter, begins with an epilogue to the previous volume, in
which Raho Aït Yafelman struggles to adjust to life in post-colonial Morocco. The novel proper
depicts the Muslim conquest of Morocco and the reaction of the Aït Yafelman to it. The third
volume, Birth at Dawn, also contains an epilogue very similar to the epilogue at the beginning of
Mother Spring, (perhaps the epilogue to the second volume, or perhaps an alternative epilogue
for Flutes of Death), with the novel, itself, recounting the entry into Spain of Tariq Ibn Ziyyad at
the head of the Muslim army, including soldiers of the Aït 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 any
individual volume. Yet Three Continents Press allowed a different person to translate each
volume of the series, each having done so with seemingly very little awareness of the textual
clues that unite the three novels. Take, for example. the first sentences of Mother Spring and
Birth at Dawn. In 1989, Harter translated the first line of Mother Spring:

Raho Aït Yafelman cheminait le long de la route, par ce pur matin d'août de l'an de grâce
chrétienne mille neuf cent quatre-vingt-deux -- un Berbère très long et très mince, le visage
empreint de paix.

Raho Aït Yafelman was walking along the roadway one pure August morning in the Christian
year of grace nineteen hundred eighty-two -- a very tall and very thin Berber whose face bore the
stamp 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 Aït Yafelman cheminait le long de la route, par ce lumineux matin d'été de l'an de grâce
chrétienne mille neuf cent quatre-vingt-cinq -- un Berbère très long et très mince, le visage
empreint de sérénité.

In the year of grace nineteen hundred eighty-five, Raho Aït Yafelman walked along the road on
a bright summer morning. He was a Berber, very tall and very thin with a serene face.
The failure to make clear that the date 1985 belongs to the Christian calendar may seem
insignificant, but in fact it ruins the symmetry between the opening passages of the two novels
and deprives the reader of a clue regarding the relationship between them. It also ignores a
central theme of the three novels. For Raho Aït Yafelman the Muslim abandonment of the Islamic
calendar is symbolic of his country's loss of faith and the collapse of the moral order. In Mother
Spring, Raho comments on it as evidence that the nation is wandering from its true identity.

Quelle année pouvait-il bien être chez les Arabes, selon l'Hégire? Ils ne savaient pas eux-
mêmes, sans doute. Ils comptaient à présent par écrit, les dates et l'argent, à la façon des
Zéropéens. (p.15)

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

The translation published under the title Birth at Dawn is the most problematic in this first
category. The pages of the original French novel Naissance à l'aube are elaborately decorated
with Islamic calligraphy, but these are left out of the English version, as is other art work directly
referred to in the text. For example, in the French text, the following section is part of a
description of the glories of the new Islamic civilisation. The arrow refers to the illustration, which
can be seen in the French text:

L'indigo, Ie vert cru même de la vie extrait d'un lichen qu'ils étaient seuls à connaître, le rouge
vif qu'ils obtenaient en faisant bouillir une poignée de cochenilles dans de la saumure, et l'ocre
des contreforts de l' Atlas et le bistre de la suie des os de mouton calcinés, oui, ils sauraient les
faire éclater en un éclatement de couleurs sur ce morceau de grès-ci, de telle sorte qu'un jour
des jours à venir, le passant qui irait se désaltérer à la fontaine se désaltérerait d'abord l'âme,
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 would
drink from the fountain, would first restore his soul, just by looking at this...' Being followed only by
white 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 on
Daliesque.

Cordoue conquise, ils étaient à présent là, assis sur leurs talons face aux futaies, torse nu,
l'avant-bras pris dans un poignet de force en fer, comme s'ils méditaient devant l'Historie et ses
méandres, une hache entre les genoux. Et l'instant d'après, 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 their
heels in front of the forest, bare-chested, their forearms in an iron bracelet, as if they were
meditating about History [sic] and its tortuous paths, an axe between their knees. And only a
moment later they were flying through the branches, as light as maggots that jumped from branch
to branch. (p.S8, italics are mine).

One need not even know that the word magot means Barbary ape to know that the last image in
the 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
series, Flutes of Death and Mother Spring, commented favourably on the translations, but even
the reviews that compared the translated versions to the French texts failed to note that entire
sentences, sometimes even sets of sentences, are simply left out of the translations for no
discernable reason except carelessness. In the 'Prologue' of Hugh Harter's translation of La Mère
du 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 were
not adequately familiar with the cultural context. For example, on page 78 of Flutes of Death, the
translator's footnote explains the acronym PCV as 'Morocco's Ma Bell'. In fact, it is an
abbreviation for à percevoir, the French term for a reverse charge call. Finally, there are
instances where the translators failed to reproduce Chraibi's use of different linguistic registers
and dialects of French to convey information about the characters. This is most evident in Une
enquête au pays, where factors such as how much characters use (or misuse) French and the
number of Arabic words they insert into their French is very important in delineating their
characters. It is also a source of much of the novel's humour, but this is not clear in the English
translation.

How can such mistranslations be explained? I believe that the translators failed adequately to
appreciate Chraibi's talent as a writer. They sought to translate a story, and seem to have
neglected the form and style of the writing. In addition, they seem to have been less than careful
in 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 a
special 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 that
some of the translations were done so poorly.

Far more troublesome than these sloppy renderings are texts that can only be described as
complete misrepresentations of the work being translated. One such example is Ed Emery's
translation of Mohamed Choukri's Arabic novel Zaman al Akhtaa, the title of which can be literally
translated as 'A Time of Errors'. 31 The title of the published English translation, on the other
hand, is the overused cliché, Streetwise, an indication of even greater liberties taken with the text
itself. The English version is, in fact, visibly different from the original version in that the original
contains two chapters that are clearly in verse. Emery seems to take literally the adage that
poetry 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 to
problems inherent in translating poetry from any language into another; it has simply been
eliminated.

Choukri is famous for his rebellious writing style. He writes about taboo subjects, incorporates a
great deal of Moroccan dialect into his standard Arabic texts, and in general experiments with the
form of the language. In its original, his work is socially significant in so many ways. He dares to
experiment with the 'sacred language', writing in dialectal Arabic that was not, and to a great
extent still is not, considered appropriate for or capable of rendering intellectual or artistic
expression. Emery's translation is in perfect standard English of a sort that would make a school
teacher blush with pride. Somehow this style comes across as incongruous given that he has
also left in the 'shocking' bits of Cboukri's novel, specifically the graphic descriptions of the
ravages 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 anger
and rebellion Choukri communicates (and performs), in part through his distinct writing style. I
cannot even imagine what might be the rationale for such sweeping changes in a text unless
Emery saw Choukri's writing as little more than poor writing by someone without sufficient
command over the standard forms of the Arabic language and took it upon himself to correct the
text in his translation. Choukri was not educated as a child and only began to write after starting
school when he was 20 years old.

Perhaps this would explain why, on the first page of the book he translates felfla, the Moroccan
dialect word for 'peppers', as falafel, a Middle Eastern dish that has no peppers in it and is not
widely prepared in Morocco except in Lebanese restaurants. Perhaps he thought he had found a
spelling error. If that is not the case, then one would be inclined to argue that the translator lacks
sufficient knowledge of Moroccan culture and of the significance of Choukri as an important figure
therein to translate this work. Like so many other translators, he seems to be unwilling to
recognise 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 an
invention of the West. Interestingly enough, none of the reviews I have seen of the English
version make a comparison with the original. They recapitulate the plot and comment on the
poignant story line and the harshness of the society the text describes, but never mention the
aesthetic impact of the original text. Publishers Weekly's only comment on the translation is that it
is too 'slangy' (sic),33 an interesting comment as this did not strike me at all when I was reading
it. Had the translation been a bit more 'slangy', it might actually have been effective in catching
some of the rebelliousness of the original Arabic text. Capturing the style, however, does not
seem to have been the translator's concern.

The third set of translations is the most difficult to analyse. They are, in fact. fairly accurate
translations that read well. There are no 'errors' or serious oversights that can be easily pointed
out in the translation. Yet. it is not uncommon to find that some of the works that read the most
smoothly in English, are not so smooth in their original versions. Because we have seen that the
issue 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, which
appeared in English under the title Muhammad.34 It is a 'fictional account' of the first revelations
received by the Prophet Muhammad. On one level this is a fine translation. It reads very well and
is also by and large an accurate translation of the story and its imagery. As a rendering of
Chraibi's writing style, however, it is not an accurate representation. The first sentence of the
novel reads as follows:

Debout dans une caverne, un homme, enveloppé dans un manteau de laine écrue, sans
coutures, 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 order
to make it so, the sentence has been rearranged and an important parallelism lost. The phrase
'enveloppé 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 enveloppé dans son manteau... (p.l4, p.20)

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

Un homme, d'un quarante d'années, vêtu d'un manteau de laine écrue sans coutures ni
manches... (p.91)

Finally, at the end of the first chapter, a similar scene occurs 14 centuries later, and in a different
place: 'dans une grotte dans une montagne de l'Azerbaïdjan. Debout dans cette grotte, un
homme...' None of this parallelism is preserved in the English. Each time the phrases appear,
they are arranged differently. For example, the first time 'enveloppé dans son manteau' appears it
is simply not translated. The second time the descriptive phrase becomes an action: 'Pulling his
mantle about him...: (p.14). The third time, Muhammad is 'draped in his mantle' (p.19). Only in the
last instance (p.82) is the translation the same as in the first line. Stylistically, many might argue
that the variation introduced by the translator is more effective in written English, as one could
also argue about the original French. Chraibi was most certainly aware of this, yet he chose not to
introduce this variety. What justification does the translator have for not respecting this stylistic
choice?

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

Similarly, there is evidence in these pages that the translator was not sufficiently aware of the
corpus of Chraibi's work. 'A l'aube du VIIème siècle' 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 first
section of the novel, in which the phrase cited above occurs, is called 'La Première aube'. In
addition, as we have seen in the Berber trilogy, other Chraibi texts document similar 'dawns' in
the history of Islam. Space does not allow me to elucidate fully the importance of this metaphor in
Charibi's work, but clearly a translator should be aware of it and pay special attention to when it
occurs.

Furthermore, the translator has also taken it upon herself to clarify certain aspects of the text that
Charibi did not deem it necessary to clarify. The first example is the title, in which L'Homme du
Livre must be positively identified as the prophet Muhammad. On some level this change
removes the text from the realm of allegorical fiction to that of biography. Certainly the source text
is clearly about the Prophet Muhammad, but there are other 'Men of the Book' besides him, most
notably 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 places
in the novel. The original French version did not include such clarification. The use of notes in a
Chraibi text is a subject of study in itself, but I believe clarifications by a translator should be
considered in relation to the writer's intentions. Chraibi has been known to use what might be
called 'anti-footnote' footnotes in his novels, as if he were purposefully defying an editor's orders
to clarify terms. For example, in La Mère du Printemps there is a footnote that says, 'Je refuse de
traduire ce terme (note de l'auteur)', and in Naissance a l'aube a footnote linked to an Arabic
slang word for penis says. 'Dois-je vraiment traduire en français ce mot concret?' Such notes
would indicate that there are certain things in the texts that the author expects the reader to
simply get, or not get, but which the author refuses to explain. One might say that these terms act
as a kind of shibboleth. The publisher, Three Continents Press, has been very inconsistent in
handling 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 Mother
Spring, some footnotes are kept, but in general the words that appear in transliterated Arabic in
the text are simply translated into English or definitions are provided directly in the text of the
English translation.

The use of footnotes, glossaries and explanations or translations inserted into the text can
become a serious issue in the translation of post-colonial literature from the Maghrib.36 If the
French text includes words or cultural references that the author chose not to explain to his
francophone reader, should the translator clarify such items for the anglophone reader? Surely
the English translator cannot expect the ideal reader to be trilingual, because if that were the case
they would have no need for a translation. Yet somehow, if the source text manifests a resistance
to appropriation into French, then it must not be appropriated into English, either. Negotiating this
is 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 her
own, and to use it to allow repressed voices to speak. Accordingly, her writing is often rather
unorthodox in its style and syntax. Some sentences may only be fragments, others link clause
after clause in long flowing sentences full of detours and elaborations and more detours. She also
manipulates the syntax of her sentences to produce a text that is somewhat antagonistic toward
the stylistic expectations of the francophone reader. For example, occasionally she inverts the
standard subject-verb-object sequence in her sentences to bring some element in a sentence to
the forefront. This is, of course, acceptable, provided certain rules of grammar and punctuation
are 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, in
Femmes d'Alger ..., translated into English as Women of Algiers by Marjolijn de Jager,37 Djebar
writes: 'A Alger, Delacroix ne séjournera que trois jours', but it is translated as 'Delacroix spends
only three days in Algiers'. Djebar gives prominence to the name of the city, the English text does
not. Yet the juxtaposition of places (Algeria, France, Morocco) is such an important thematic
element of this text. Similarly, page 126 of Djebar's original reads, 'A l'entrée, des hommes d'âge
mûr...' 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 the
scene. Djebar is a film-maker, and this line is one of many she has written that read like scene
descriptions. 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 the
emphasis is lost when conventional syntax is restored.

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

La chimie de cet effacement, dois-je l'éclairer à rebours, risquer de faire réapparaître, de la

mémoire pas encore putréfiée, quelque toile d'araignée friable, un enchevêtrement de soie ou de
poussière, à effet mélancolique ?

Dans ce déblayage de ruines, le visage de l'autre, pendant treize mois, me parut

irremplaçable. (pp.25-26)

Must I explain the nature of this clearing away, risking in the process that some powdery
spider's web will re-emerge, some tangle of silk or dust with its melancholy effect, from memory
not yet rotten.

For thirteen months, in the excavation of ruins, the face of the other had seemed irreplaceable
to 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 first
sentence 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 in
the chapter from which this passage is taken. Its title is 'L'effacement dans le coeur', rendered in
English as 'What is Erased in the Heart'. The prominent features are not preserved in the
translation and the symmetry between the chapter title and the first line of the first paragraph
quoted above is lost.

As is the case with the Chraibi translations I have already discussed, Djebar's translators often
see 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 her
husband reads, 'Elle se refusa obstinément depuis ce jour'. This is translated as, 'From that day
on she refused to sleep with him'.38 Not only does the translator find it necessary to stipulate that
the refusal is sexual, (something that is obvious from the context, the passage beginning with the
husband's attempt to force his wife into sex, and ending with his 'repudiation' of her as a result of
this refusal) but she leaves out the stubborness of the act, a very important thematic element of
this collection, the central theme of which is women's attempts to assert control in their lives. In
and of themselves, neither of these would seem significant distortions of the text, and hardly
worth noting, but when such changes are frequent enough, they distort the writer's style. This is
particularly unfortunate when the style, itself, is so significant to the novel's negotiation of cultural
identity.

It is probably unfair to judge a book by its cover, especially when the translator may have had no
say in the design of a book's dust jacket or paperback cover. Yet, with that caveat, I would argue
that the cover images chosen are indicative of the approach translators and publishers take
toward a book by Assia Djebar. Many of the covers show pictures of women either behind a
window and presumably cloistered, or very heavily veiled.39 Too often her work is viewed as a
look 'behind the veil' at the status of women and nothing else. Depicting the status of women
within Algerian society is, of course, a very important concern for Djebar, but her work cannot be
reduced to that. As a trained historian, she interrogates the very foundations of women's
oppression through a return to historical, literary and cultural sources. Her fiction mixes with
historical 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 and
language in which the submerged voices can break forth. Nowhere is this clearer than in Vaste
est la Prison, a novel that is as much about preservation of memory and forgotten languages as it
is a protest against the condition of women.40 When translators tinker unnecessarily with her
style they are, in fact, tinkering with one of the most important aspects of her work. Djebar and
Chraibi are the two francophone writers who have the largest percentage of their work translated
into English. With Chraibi, virtually all the texts have been published by Three Continents (now
Lynne Reinner Press). With Djebar, on the other hand, there is actually competition for virtually
everything 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, by
Seven 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, all
the novels published in English have glossaries. Again the question poses itself, if Djebar has
written a text that resists appropriation into a French aesthetic, what are the ethical dilemmas
involved 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 in
Arabic, often miss one of the most important dimensions of this region's culture, what Khatibi41
called 'bilinguisme' or, even more accurately, 'plurilinguisme'. In a recent article he provocatively
states:

Nous avons mis peu moins d'un siècle pour apprendre le français à peu près, nous avons mis
quatorze siècles pour apprendre l'arabe à peu près et nous avons mis un temps immémorial pour
ne pas écrire le berbère. Il faut analyser les effets réels et imaginaires, cette chose forclose qu'est
l'écriture dans l'histoire de la culture maghrébine pour comprendre le processus historique du
concept d'écriture, ici même et non seulement par rapport aux concepts théologiques, mystiques,
linguistiques ou politiques de la langue arabe telle qu'elle c'est pensée elle-même depuis des
siècles par rapport à ce lieu. Il convient d'analyser cette résistance, sinon cette dissidence, par
rapport le champ réel de la graphie et ce redoublement ou le déplacement de cette graphie
archaïque.

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