Walking the Tightrope of Invisibility in Palestinian Translated Fiction Mona Nabeel Malkawi University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville ScholarWorks@UARK Theses and Dissertations 1-2016 Twice Heard, Paradoxically (Un)seen: Walking the Tightrope of Invisibility in Palestinian Translated Fiction Mona Nabeel Malkawi University of Arkansas, Fayetteville Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd Part of the Near and Middle Eastern Studies Commons, and the Translation Studies Commons Recommended Citation Malkawi, Mona Nabeel, "Twice Heard, Paradoxically (Un)seen: Walking the Tightrope of Invisibility in Palestinian Translated Fiction" (2016). Theses and Dissertations. 1769. http://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/1769 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UARK. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UARK. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Twice Heard, Paradoxically (Un)seen: Walking the Tightrope of Invisibility in Palestinian Translated Fiction A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies by Mona Nabeel Malkawi Yarmouk University Bachelor of Arts in English Language and Literature, 2006 Yarmouk University Master of Arts in Translation, 2009 December 2016 University of Arkansas This dissertation is approved for recommendation to the Graduate Council: ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Professor John DuVal Dissertation Director ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Professor Adnan Haydar Professor Charles Adams Committee Member Committee Member ©2016 by Mona Nabeel Malkawi All Rights Reserved Abstract This study examines the translators’ invisibility in postcolonial translated Palestinian fiction. On one hand, this analysis revolves around the ethical stance of translators towards authors in a postcolonial theoretical framework. On the other, it brings postcolonial translation scholars’ approaches into practice and examination. Therefore, this study provides a critical analysis of reading novels in translation as both a channel of decolonization from Oriental and imperial discourses and an aesthetic catalyst for freedom in exile, specifically translated by Trevor LeGassick, Elizabeth Fernea, Salma Jayyusi, Adnan Haydar, and Roger Allen. The intriguing paradox of the translator’s invisibility is inherent in the contradiction between an invisible and a visible translator. If the translator is invisible, he translates in a fluent, transparent language spinning the illusion that the translation is the original. If the translator is visible, he/she uses translation as a means of resistance against the hegemonic Anglo-American readership practice of fluency and transparency through a preservation of the difference between cultures. I argue that the way out of such contradiction or binary opposition is to review translation in terms of whether it matches the original in all its intents and purposes, preserves and/or mediates between cultures, while also being aware of the original works’ socio-political and ideological environment in order to ascertain what choices best serve the decolonizing translation of Third World literatures. Although this study does not argue against theory per se, an incorporation of the work’s socio-political context best serves the decolonizing reading of a translation. The study further shows that the translator’s choice to maintain the decolonizing reading is affected by any alteration of the authorial or narrative voices. Acknowledgments My deepest gratitude to Prof. John DuVal whose direction and constructive criticism go beyond the limits of this dissertation. For the past five years, John has been a tireless advocate for me and my work. Truly grateful to Prof. Adnan Haydar for his kindness and continuous support. The Comparative Literature and Literary Translation program is enriched by your affiliation. Many thanks to Prof. Charles Adams for serving on my dissertation committee and for the time he has taken to review this work and provide valuable opinions and feedback. My sincere gratitude goes to my parents, Nabeel and Laila, my brothers and sister, Marwan, Haya, and Ali. Many blessings for the late nights and early morning conversations, for juggling the eight-hour time difference, for the unwavering support and priceless care. Thank you, family. My love goes to Omar, for enduring the stress of being away from each other and still making our love endure. Thank you to Robin Roggio from the Interlibrary Loans staff at Mullins Library for providing me with so many of my inter-library loan requests. Many thanks to Megan Clark for her timely help. Dedication To Omar, whose loving support cannot be counted in pages. Table of Contents I. Introduction: A Window onto the Invisible Act, Authors, and Third World Spaces…………………………………………………………………………………….1-33 II. The Shot and Reverse Shot: A Writing Back to the Empire with Modern Trends…………………………………………………………………………………...34-67 III. On the Translator’s Invisibility in the Scenario of Orientalism and Imperialism…………………………………………………………………………….68-133 IV. On the Translator’s Invisibility, Style, and Ideology in the Decolonizing Aesthetics of Exile Literature……………………………………………………………………134-178 V. Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….179-183 VI. Works Cited………………………………………………………………………184-197 I. A Window onto the Invisible Act, Authors, and Third World Spaces While criticism of Palestinian fiction has been developing in a multiplicity of approaches and discourses, which includes all its strength and richness, criticism of translated Palestinian fiction has focused for a long time on linguistic-oriented approaches. Consequently, a translation is judged according to mathematics-based concepts of semantic equivalence, one-to-one correspondence, or linguistic errors. It is thus unsurprising that the very expression “translation criticism” may lead to misunderstandings, for it seems to be essentially developed towards negativity and often obsessively focused on the defects of translation and standardization of translation. However, an imbalance in the number of translated works between First World Literature and Third World Literature illustrates the power relations among nations and cultures. In The Translator’s Invisibility , Lawrence Venuti has indicated that the rate of translation into the English language is merely a fraction of the number of books translated from English into other languages. While this imbalance reflects the hegemony of the English language and culture, it seems justifiable to notice that the status of Palestinian fiction is still “invisible,” rarely acknowledged, in First World academic institutions, even though it has been translated into English. Invisibility in translation occurs in two directions: first, the invisibility of the translator, within the translation itself, which refers to the translator’s attempt to get as close as possible to what the author meant and consequently, write in a way that encourages the reader to believe he/she is accessing the original work and its author; second, the invisibility of the translator when publications fail to credit him/her by name either in publication details and/or fail to refer to him/her in critical articles. His/her name is often overlooked or even disparaged, except in the most perfunctory way by reviewers, editors, and critics. The invisible hand of the translator throughout the act of translation takes me back to Milan Kundera’s famous adage to his translators (or to any translator) in his Author’s Note in 1 the 1996 edition of his novel, Žert , first published in 1967 and first translated into English in 1969 as The Joke . Kundera states, “You are not in your own house here, my dear fellow… this is my house not yours…rage seizes me at what I see happening in my house” (n.d.). Reading that a translator is not welcome in Kundera’s “house” suggests a transgression had been committed to the organic unity between Kundera and his work. Writers want their works to remain the way they have created them, especially when their works have a political agenda. Naturally, translators cannot complete such a translation without becoming invisible. Intrinsic to the concept of a translator’s invisibility is getting as close to the writer’s intention as possible so that the reader will experience the illusion that he/she is hearing the author’s voice(s). A literary translator, according to, Gregory Rabassa, must be modest, careful and cannot impose him/herself, and yet, he/she must be adventurous and original, bound all the while to the author’s thoughts and words. 1 His view is consistent with Ralph Manheim, who believes that, “translation is a kind of interpretive performance, bearing the same relationship to the original text as the actor’s work does to the script, the performing musician’s to the composition” (qtd. in Grossman 11). The nature of invisible translation is conveyed in Norman Shapiro’s metaphor that such translations should be “like a pane of glass. You only notice that it’s there when there are little imperfections-scratches, bubbles. Ideally, there shouldn’t be any. It should never call attention to itself.” (qtd. in Ramone 164). In the various descriptions of the craft of translation, metaphors and similes are prominent. Anne Appel imagines the act of translation as a mask