Journal of Levantine Studies

Journal of Levantine Studies Vol 9 No 2 Winter 2019 Translation and the Colonial Encounter: מַּכְ ת ּו ּב • َمكْ ُتوب • Maktoob THE VAN LEER JERUSALEM INSTITUTE Published by Van Leer Institute Press Table of Contents Editors’ Note dockument 5 Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani, Yonatan Mendel From the Neoclassical to the Binational Model of Translation 23 Eyad Barghuthy, Antwan Shulhut, Elias Khoury, Raef Zreik, Huda Abu Much, Areej Sabbagh-Khoury Palestinian Intellectuals Discuss Politics and Ethics of Translation 37 Hana Morgenstern What Is Anticolonial Translation? The Form and Content of Binational Reviews Resistance in Maktoob 61 Huda Abu Much Gendered Temporality and Space: Women in Translation from Arabic into Hebrew 81 Nadeem Karkabi Arabic Language among Jews in Israel and the New Mizrahi Zionism: Between Active Knowledge and Performance Prose 107 Eyad Barghuthy Between Two Neighborhoods 111 Almog Behar, Yuval Evri Samir Naqqash and His Polyglotic Literature in the Age of National Partition Prose 133 Samir Naqqash The Prophet Nahum’s Prophecy of Doom to His Manservant Mordekhai-Hai in the Year 1941 139 Tami Sarfatti Lost (and Gained) in Translation: Reflections on Translation and Translators of al-Jabarti’s Chronicles of the French Occupation of Egypt k doc157 umentYonatan Mendel, Rawiya Burbara, Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani Amputated Tongue: On the Potential for Change in a Political Act of Translation Prose 181 Fida Jiryis The Khawaja 189 Rawiya Burbara The Art of Rhetoric Reviews 192 Duygu Atlas Maktoob in Action Dossier: "Where Did the Ghetto Come From?" 205 Tawfiq Daʿadli In This Ghetto for Which We Have Gathered 207 Elias Khoury This Is al-Lydd/This Is Palestine 211 Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani The Political Syntax of the Absentees: A Translator’s Reflection on Stella Maris Prose 225 Elias Khoury Thirst Journal ofof L Levantineevantine S tudiesStudiesVol. Vol. 7, No. 9 No. 1, Summer 2, Winter 2017, 2019, pp. pp. 9-34 5-21 From the Neoclassical to the Binational Model of Translation Editors’ Note Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani and Yonatan Mendel Literary translation—whether a branch within comparative literature, linguistics, hermeneutics, or elsewhere in the academic disciplinary maze—has grown and developed mainly in accordance with the European neoclassical tradition. The previous issue of JLS was dedicated to the critique of the neoclassical model’s supposed transparency and impartial representation of the original source, allegedly trying to reach a “fluent” translation of the original. This critique—developed by, among others, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Lawrence Venuti, and Walter Benjamin—is further heightened in the framework of the colonial encounter. After all, modern translation was developed alongside the colonial European project that sought to understand the “Other’s” primitive thought, to represent it, domesticate it, and speak on its behalf, to make it part of the occupier’s knowledge system. Missionaries, anthropologists, orientalists, and many others have translated native texts into the image of the enslaved world that they claimed to civilize and educate.1 Unsurprisingly, all colonial enterprises were accompanied by translation projects, including the translation of maps, art, newspapers, letters, travel diaries, novels, and poetry. These texts were compressed into the ostensibly harmonized logos of Western knowledge, but their terms of conditions and production were masked and ignored. European norms dominated literary translation, and in the context of the so-called “third world” literature, they constituted a form of violence, as they were never part of a dialogue and exchange of relations.2 6 From the Neoclassical to the Binational Models of Translation In recent decades this understanding has been embedded and learned in all academic disciplines and has been articulated most succinctly in anthropology, where the ethnographic realism—that the ethnographer is supposedly an honest broker, devoid of interests, indifferent to whims—has been undermined. Criticism of classical ethnography revealed the pretense of anthropology and the fact that classical anthropologists such as E. E. Evans-Pritchard arrived at their research sites on the bayonets of the British Empire. Similar criticism is relevant to translation’s workers—whether they are interpreters, copiers, dubbers, or linguistic intermediaries—who have no interest other than delivering the text intact. Translation, as was highlighted in the last issue of JLS, is a reflexive process by which translators discover that they are political agents and not just professionals who have completed their work and await the next translation project.3 In every translation the translator’s voice is always present on matters of war and peace, violence and amity, race and identity, terror and globalization. It is always the case that translators’ strategies reflect the political context within which they are carried out, beyond the translators’ good intentions. As such—just like the turn in linguistics, following which language was seen as not only a reflection of reality but also an element that takes an active role in shaping it—translation ceased to be viewed also as a source for studying the original text or the society that it translates; rather, it came to be viewed as a source of understanding the viewpoint, limitation, worldview, needs, and desires of the host society (and the host discourse). For example, it is customary today for translation to replace the original source and take its place in monoglot form. The readers of a novel in the host language are not exposed to the original language or the gaps between source and target. Whereas in the modern European tradition “fluent translation” might be considered the most desirable, analyzing it in the colonial context and the struggle between languages argues that such a model can be easily perceived as an act of erasure. It requires recognition and sensitivity to the fact that every translation is anchored in historical time and mediates in social, cultural, and political contexts. Literary translation in colonial contexts (whether postcolonial, post-colonial, neo-colonial, imperialist, etc.) is obviously also part of a broader framework that includes the economic and political doings of colonial and postcolonial regimes. It is no wonder that postcolonial theory—which rejected the boundary between literature and politics, aesthetics and violence—grew out of criticism of English literature and that Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, among others, were literary critics. They have shown that translation is not only a textual endeavor but also the living experience of people who experience colonial violence. Poetics, literature, Journal ofof L Levantineevantine S tudiesStudiesVol. 7, No. 1, Summer 2017, pp. 9-34 7 and politics are inseparable, as metaphor, figuration, narrative, irony, and allegory are not detached from the colonial context of writing, translation, and reading. Today, the violence—the erasure and appropriation of language under conditions of colonial power relations—cannot be exaggerated or ignored. For this reason some critics go as far as arguing that translation between Europe and the Third World should be banned.4 If we want to address the limitations of the neoclassical translation model in the context of political and verbal violence—as these issues suggest we must do—we need to move out of our comfort zone so that the translation model does not restore (by omission or commission) the colonial conditions that are paramount outside the translation room and that affect the very possibility of translation. Such a translation seeks to escape from the over-determination of linguistic, syntactic, and lexical concerns, as if they lack context. It also seeks to recognize that translation is not a one-way process; rather, it is a dialogue that cannot be completed in one round.5 It endeavors to create a third space, in which translation is part of ongoing communication, dialogue, and exchange. Ultimately, the differences in translation are not related only to individual differences; they also represent the political and social context within which they are conducted.6 *** In the case of translation from Arabic into Hebrew, this phenomenon is aggravated by the colonial conditions that exist today between the two languages in the Israeli- Palestinian context, demonstrated most clearly in the power relations between the two communities, in the Israeli Jewish perception of itself and of its Other—be it Arab or Eastern—or in its striving for territorial expansion while using a “modernizing” discourse. The translators are located on the seam line that is seen as transparent, yet separating between Jews and Arabs—but beneath them is a minefield of colonial enmity relations. To this we should add the polar theological-political distinction that denies binational existence because it is based on a complete separation between a friend and a foe, and a state of emergency that preserves the context of hostility. Linguist and Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich stated that “a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot” (a language is a dialect with an army and navy).7 In this vein we can say that Hebrew was not only part and parcel of the overall Zionist project but also of the actual battles and war on the ground, both vis-à-vis the Palestinians (including the ongoing Nakba from 1948, via 1967, and up to the present day) and inter-Jewish relations (including the erasure of Semitic sounds and the adoption of Ashkenazi 8 From the Neoclassical to the Binational Models of Translation Hebrew phonology). This process has been accompanied by the process of purging space of Arabic and turning the language into that of the enemy. The elimination of Arabic in Israel and its expropriation from Arabs and the Arab-Jews are an integral part of the establishment of sovereignty through the Hebrew language. One of the most astounding phenomena in Israel is the illiteracy in and ignorance of Arabic. The percentage of Jews under the age of seventy who can read a book or newspaper in Arabic is negligible: less than 0.5%.

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