Edward Said in Translation
The personal and the academic
AUC Cairo, 28 Nov. 2018
Translation was a passion, more than a job, for me, although I was paid for many of my translations. I started by translating poetry. The first poem I translated into English was by the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani against an American envoy to the Middle East calling for some American military pact. I sent the piece to the poet who happened to be well acquainted with English having been in a diplomatic post in England and received a page with hardly a word left uncorrected. The second try, sometime later, was a prose poem by the Syrian poet, Muhammad al Maghout, turned out to be rendered in better English and was accepted for publication in the Brummana High School cultural magazine.
When I like a literary next I translate it irrespective whether it will be sent for publication or not – mostly writings by Etel Adnan, John Berger, Nazim Hikmet, Pablo Neruda, and Paul Eluard.
I suppose all translators suffer a bit from this syndrome of identifying with the author and wishing to appropriate his work. There exists a more altruistic motive: sharing with the reader a text you love, admire, or find some intellectual relevance in. I think I came to that in this later phase of my translation work.
Translation as a militant act
In the 60s and 70s I translated as ‘freelance’, the driving motive was a militant one: as I translated a number of leftist texts, theories in Marxism and national liberation. We were a group of comrades and friends who believed that such action would contribute to raising awareness and mobilization for Revolution. We published in Dar At-Taly`a, owned by Bashir al-Da`ouq, an exceptional reader and generous publisher. There, I translated works by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, John Reed, Che Guevara, Isaac Deutscher, etc. In those days, we translated works in German, Spanish, or German from English and French translations.
I stopped translation during the war years in Lebanon (!1975-1990).
Translating Edward Said: the personal
I translated Edward Said by coincidence. He had come to Beirut for an academic occasion at AUB and showed me a few pages from his forthcoming autobiography translated by a friend. I made a few modifications. Before leaving Beirut, Edward asked me if I would be interested in translating his autobiography, and I answered positively, pending one condition: your language is convoluted and highly intellectualized, I plan to deconstruct it and reconstruct in Arabic. He agreed and this is how the Arabic translation of Out of Place (2000) came to be.
I got to know Edward Said in rather bizarre circumstances.
In October 1971, I received a letter from a certain Edward W. Said, member of the board of the Arab American University Graduates Association (AAUG), inviting me to attend the Association’s congress in Boston and give a presentation on the revolution in Dhofar. I had just come back from a visit to the southern province of the sultanate of Oman where a leftist armed insurrection was raging against the autocratic Sultan Said Bin Taymour, a relic from the middle ages, backed by the British government and by anti-guerilla Special Air Services (SAS) British troops. At that time, I was studying for my PhD in Arab Studies at the School of Asian and African Studies (SOAS) at London University and had organized with a group of friends the ‘Gulf Committee’ for solidarity with the national liberation movements in Yemen and the Gulf. Later, the Fred Halliday and I had signed a contract with Penguin’s press to write a book about those movements and we used the advance money to fund a visit to the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) and the liberated region of Dhofar. In Dhofar, our immediate goal was to bring evidence on British troops involvement in the war against the guerillas, to feed the campaign we launched against what we called ‘Britain’s Vietnam’. We brought back shots of military plane wreckage, communications’ codes, interviews with fighters, men and women, aspects of military and ordinary life in the liberated regions, etc. We wrote articles and showed on BBC television a few minutes I shot with the Bolex camera left to us by the Yemeni television crew who were too scary to carry on with the trip.
I took the AAUG’s invitation letter to the American consulate, got a visa. But a day later, a consulate employee came to our house, in my absence, and asked my mother to give him back the passport, pretexting an error in the visa. Later the passport was returned with the visa crossed with the tip of a compass. I informed the AAUG about the incident and was told not to worry, they had charged Abdeen Jebara, a lawyer on the board of AAUG, who would successfully deal with the matter. In effect, I was soon contacted from the consulate and given a four days visa. I briefly met Edward at the conference and would see him for a longer time when he came to Beirut that summer with his wife Mariam, who was a college colleague of mine.
After that abrupt visit to Boston, I was barred from entry to the United Sates for 20 years. Apart from one or two visits he made to Lebanon during the war years, I only met Edward when I was finally allowed in to the United States, in the early 1990s, I visited him at home. He was beginning to deal with his newly discovered cancer.
The story doesn’t end here. Some time ago, a student of mine working on the US State Department archives on Lebanon sent me what he called ‘your only appearance in US State Department documents’ which turned out to be on the visa incident. The letter, with ‘Fawaz Trabulsi’ as its subject, is addressed by a Mr. A.F. Gilmore to a Mr. Dale on October 20, 1971 asking him to use his good offices to obtain a waiver under Section 212 (d) (3) (a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act for Mr. Trabulsi informing him that the case was brought to his attention by a Mr. John Volkmar of the Quaker UN office, who [claimed to] “know Trabulsi personally and ‘vouched for him as a distinguished scholar with a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics”. Volkmar mentioned that he was involved in the matter because of a call from Professor Edward Said of Columbia University who “sounded distressed over the fact that Traboulsi was apparently refused a visa”.
I cannot vouch that Edward’s initiative succeeded and not the attorney of AAUG, but the story is worth being told.
While working on the translation of Out of Place, Edward and I entertained an email correspondence (March, 2000 –August, 2002) both of us recently initiated to the internet.
A lot of it had to do with my queries concerning words and terms in Edward’s text, and he would write in more detail about some of the persons who had an impact on his early life, especially his communist cousin Farid Haddad, who had died in prison in Egypt. We discovered our common passion and admiration for Tahiyya Karioka on whom he had written an article and an obituary and that led us to discover our common crush on the American dancer and actress Cyd Chariss. He informed that he had met when she was 70 (she died in 2008) and found her still ‘absolutely ravishingly stunning’ to use his words. Conversely, we exchanged critiques of familiar intellectual adversaries of his, Sadek Jalal al Azm, Kenaan Makkiya, Bassam Tibi, etc.
In that same year, the Israeli army evacuated the occupied territories of south Lebanon and I remember being on the email with him on the day we were celebrating the event, the 15th of May, and he hailed the ‘amazing victory’ of the Lebanese resistance led by Hizb Allah.
After the publication of the Arabic translation of Out of Place, Edward would relate the compliments he received on what he called the ‘wonderful’ translation; all the while informing me about his health as he was on and off from hospital and trying new treatments, never complaining: ‘my spirits are good’, he would say, ‘even if my body isn’t’.
After Edward Said left us, I translated two posthumous works Humanism and Democratic Critique (2005) and On Late Style. (2015).
When /Where translations are taken seriously
My translation of Isaac Deutscher’s Stalin, a Political Biography (1969), was an experience in the practical effects of translation. In more than one occasion, friends related to me the admiration of Saddam Hussein for this work; two of them, namely Wamidh Omar Nadhmi and Taher Kenaan, insisted that the Iraqi dictator kept the cherished book on his bedside table. The responsible of the cultural section of a weekly magazine went as far as to make me responsible, by way of translation, for the sordid deeds of the Iraqi ruler. Be it said, Stalin is the work of the famous Polish Marxist historian whose biography was one of the pioneer leftist critiques of Stalinism.
Earlier I had translated Leon Trotsky’s, The Permanent Revolution, the publication of the book in Arabic (1966). The translation attracted to Beirut a leader of the Trotskyist Fourth International, who happened to have been the secretary of the founder of The Red Army during his exile in Primpiko. I cannot remember how did Pierre Frank discover me, as the translation was signed by a pseudonym. But I avidly heard his emotional recollections of Frank from his days with the exiled leader of the Red Army, and declined his offer to join the Fourth International, as we enjoyed a fish lunch at the old Hajj Daoud café, suspended on wooden pillars over the sea at what is now called Zeytouna Bay. Needless to say, the translation branded me as an unrepentant Trotskyst in the Arab communist movement while never winning me the sympathy of Arab Troskyists.
Yet translations can be rewarding, though in a somewhat paradoxical way. During that same year, I translated John Reed’s famous account of the October Revolution in Russia, Ten Days that Shook the World (1966). Lenin had written a short preface to the book; and the editor at Dar al Taly`a and I thought it a good idea to print it in hand writing, so I lent my hand to it. The editor instructed the printer by writing ‘meme’ under the text in blue, to photograph it ‘as is’. When I visited Baghdad, a few months later, I was acclaimed for the book as if I was the author, which was widely read and pirated, while I tried helplessly to confirm that I was only the translator. However, what drew more attention was Lenin’s preface: I received elated comments of the sort “Ha! Did comrade Lenin know Arabic?” In fact, the editor had written meme is a quick freestyle way, so it appeared as if it were Lenin’s signature!
Translation:personal notes
Let me confess that apart from short notices on translation in prefaces of Edward Said’s books, I have little knowledge of translation as a discipline; so, the best you can expect from me would be the fruit of a few readings to pepper notes on my personal experience in translation.
1.One of the obvious issues in translation is that of fidelity/infidelity between the original and the translated text. There is an easy way out here by adopting the Italian adage “traduttore traditore”. I would rather opt for another Italian approach, that of Umberto Eco who defines translation as ‘saying nearly the same thing’ (‘dire presque la meme chose); the problem Eco leaves out is ‘to what extent’ can one go with this proximity, and indeed how to measure it (Eco, 2003). In a similar vein, Cervantes likened the translated text to the other side of a carpet, that is a mere faded, rough copy of the original. (Grossman, 2010: 50) Yet, the comparison with the carpet is what should draw our attention: the great Spanish master is talking about the text as a texture: the other side of the texture reveals how the texture had been woven. An interesting line of thought here: should we assume that there is no possible translation that could be held comparable to the text? That is, the same in literary value in the translated language as the original?
But there is an initial question: what should we translate from/in a text? Borges had an answer. He used to tell his ‘secretary’: “don’t write what I say, write what I mean” (Grossman, 2010: 73). In this request, Borges is asking his secretary to play the role of translator, to translate the meaning of the spoken words and not simply transliterating the oral into the written, despite the fact that ‘translation’ is taking place inside the same Spanish language. I believe the first criterion of a successful translation is to abide by Borges’ rule. Successful translations are ones that are “faithful to … contextual significance. They are not necessarily faithful to words or syntax, which are peculiar to specific languages” (Grossman, 2010: 71) Being faithful to contextual significance means utting the meaning of a text in the original language to mean ‘nearly the same’ as in the translated language. It is taken for granted here that what applies to literature should also apply to the humanities and the social sciences.
2. Translation as an exchange.
Translation is often referred to as a dialogue between two texts, literatures, languages, cultures, etc. In my preface to the Arabic version of Out of Place, I suggested to look at the work of translation as similar to musical rearrangements, as music itself is a language. What we hear is not the original piece, what has changed might include the musical instruments themselves, some improvisation, the rhythm, etc. yet the result is recognizable as ‘nearly the same’ music. But with time, I came to believe that translation is closer to a struggle, a relationship of power, between two languages rather than a mere dialogue. The stakes are clear: how to make a text written in a language comply with the structure of another. This requires the application of a set of stratagems, ploys, ruses that the translator progressively acquires though he is often required to adapt them to each different author, each new text.
3. The translator and the author.
Physically, the relationship between the translator and the author is a silent one. In most cases the translator does not know the author (on the assumption that he/she is alive) or there is no or scant exchange between them. The translator is more often alone with the original text than not.
What is the translator to the author? A variety of answers have been proposed and practiced. Should the translator disappear behind the text? Or, conversely, behave as the match of the author, the parallel author in another language? Or should he/she behave as if the author is ‘dead’, in the sense of Roland Barthes famous concept?
Dealing with a text as if the author is dead can be/has been quite a popular school in literary criticism; it cannot be one in translation. The opposite would rather be the case. The translator needs to understand the text rather than interpret it, on the (correct) assumption that any text is open to many interpretations. And the translator can only understand the text if the author is very much alive for him; if he masters his/her biography, art, style, nature of the subject, social and cultural context, to whom the text is addressed, etc.
On the other hand, the idea of the translator as match to the author can have the reverse effect and damage the translation. Translators with this approach translated one or two of Edward Said’s works into Arabic. The result was a more convoluted style and a baggage of words, terms and concepts that required a lexicon to define/explain the new terms coined by the translator-cum-author; the result: an opaque and confusing rendering of the original.
In more direct terms, the translation is successful when the translated text reads as if it is and original work written in the language it is translated into.
The translator as critical reader
I was not professionally engaged to translate Edward. I chose what to translate and was, moreover, engaged intellectually with reading him and being in dialogue with him outside the translation act. But translating Edward required, in itself, a deeper reading of his writings and a critical understanding of his work. I would like here to share a few findings.
1.There is a growing and flagrant paradox about Orientalism.
With the years, the book seems to have been endowed with a life of its own, divorced from the rest of its author’s life and intellectual development. Edward Said’s masterpiece is too often read and presented in contradistinction with the author’s subsequent intellectual development, hijacked by dominant trends in post-colonial studies, by local nativists not to speak of cultural and social parvenus in the Arab World objecting to the way the Arabs and Muslims are ‘represented in the West’. It should be added that the book is rarely read, it forms part of a certain ‘common sense’, especially in the academic world in Europe and the United States.
The couple knowledge/power resumed the book. The result: a warped relationship between knowledge and power in the colonial process. Knowledge of the colony and the colonized was assumed to be a precondition of the colonial act, whereas it usually was subsequent to occupation by the force of arms, by violence and bloodshed, displacement of populations, ethnic cleansing and genocide. Knowledge, would come later to help legitimize colonialism, inform the colonial process much more than prepare it. On the other hand, the term ‘power’ presented as the main characteristic of colonialism was one of the earliest uses of the Politically Correct, an anaesthetic term use to mask or moderate a process built on force and violence.
I would like here to situate Orientalism in relation to the intellectual development of its author and to place Edward said himself in time and place in the Arab context.
2.Edward Said’s intellectual development proceeded contrapunctually – as he would have liked to say- in three moments.
His ground-breaking critique of Orientalism is but the first moment. A re-reading of the book, forty years after its publication, confirms the work more as a critical history of a discipline than the vaunted theoretical exercise with the concept ‘knowledge/power’.
a)Orientalism records the birth and development of a discipline, which claims monopoly over interpreting and representing the East, to Westerners and Easterners alike, intimately linked to and contaminated by the interests, strategies and policies of Euro-American imperialism. Said equally links the discipline to the discoveries, theories and concepts of the social and natural sciences of its time, noting the highly partial and selective manner in which these were chosen. Important western schools of thought – such as Historicism, Marxism, New History, and others – were rarely taken into account.
However, Said’s encyclopedic documentation is not restricted to the production of the academic discipline itself; it engages authors, politicians and belles-lettrists who have made a large contribution to the Western creation of The East. His brilliant and trenchant arguments reveal a number of dogmas that dominated Orientalist discourses. They are: i) essentialism: East and West are two fixed and mutually exclusive essences not without hierarchy (one is rational, developed, humane, the other spiritual, irrational, underdeveloped and inferior); ii) generalization: each particular part of the Orient tells about the whole Orient and vice versa; iii) stereotyping: e.g., Arabs and Muslims are irrational; pre-Newtonian (the real world almost completely internal to the Oriental observer) etc.; iv) the Orient is unchanging; v) the Orient is unique: there is only one religion, one Islamic society; one Arab mind, one Arab psyche, one Arab-Islamic culture, etc.; vi) culturalism: Orientals are defined and determined by their culture, generally reduced to their Muslim religion (Said, 2003a:24-48).
In conclusion, Said leaves us with two warnings, rarely given the importance they deserve and the place they occupy in the author’s mind: one is his warning against the ‘modern Orient… participating in its own Orientalizing’; the other emphasizing that ‘the answer to Orientalism is not Occidentalism.’ (Said, 2003a: 328)
The two warnings cannot be reduced to one. To be Orientalized here implies the internalizing by Orientals of the dominant Orientalist discourses. Occidentalism, on the other hand, is seen by Said as a set of reactive notions that accept the basic East-West essentialist divide while at the same time revaluating the weaker and subservient partner in the persisting and reconstructed imperialist relations of domination and control. In other words, whereas Orientalism brings a major contribution to the legitimacy and hegemony of imperialism, Occidentalism has the opposite effect: its incapacity to produce adequate knowledge about its object and the imperialist West or its acceptance of Orientalist representations and notions – weakens the liberation struggle of the peoples and societies concerned, or delivers them to neo-imperialist domination.
Finally, this is also the occasion to say how much reducing Edward Said to Orientalism and to his writings on Palestine, in the Arab World, had deprived us of his rich intellectual production in the fields he mainly taught and wrote about: literature and music criticism.
b)Culture and Imperialism (1994), opens the second moment in Edward Said’s thought. Here the divide is no more East and West but South versus North. The book is mainly a critique of Occidentalism, that is, of the various ideologies by which the colonized in the three continents have waged their struggles against colonialism in the 1950s onwards.
By that time, Said had already taken his distances from Foucault whom he criticized for “neglecting the role of economics, the role of insurgency and rebellion in the societies he discusses” (Said, 1983: 244). Colonialism, he asserted, is also and primarily about “control of overseas markets, raw materials, cheap labor, and highly profitable land” (Said, 1994: 13-14). In addition, Said critiqued occidentosis – the tendency to blame all ills on the West- and rejected conspiracy theories (be it said that real conspiracies by colonial powers are more phantasmagoric than the flights of the imagination of conspiracy ‘theorists’!)
Nuanced in his critique of nationalism, Said joins Frantz Fanon in calling for the transformation of national consciousness -in post-colonial societies- into social consciousness, in order to achieve the transition to liberation. However, it is nativism that appears to Said as the most problematic aspect of Occidentalism:
“…to accept nativism is to accept the consequences of imperialism: the racial, religious and political divisions imposed by imperialism itself. To leave the historical world for the metaphysics of essences like negritude, Irishness, Islam or Catholicism is to abandon history for essentializations that have the power to turn human beings against each other” (Said, 1994: 276)
As if to leave no room for any misinterpretation of his position, in his posthumously published Humanism and Democratic Critique, Said makes the point to declare that he agrees with the James Clifford’s critique of Orientalism. The American historian and anthropologist had written that the book “relapses into the essentializing modes it attacks’ (Said, 2003b, p 8-9). Finally, the couple East-West, with its domination, hegemony and resistances, is subsumed in a call for the ‘discovery of a world not constructed out of warring essences’.
c)Secular humanism marks the third moment of Edward Said’s thought. Beyond the East-West and the North-South divides, is his vision that men who make their own history and, following Vico, and that the real world is the main object of knowledge. His collection of lectures Humanism and the Democratic Critique now situates him within the humanist tradition. But, recognizing that humanism is often associated with conservative elites, Said posits the idea “that humanism might or could be a democratic process producing a critical and progressively freer mind” (Said, 2004: 16)
But, never oblivious of the basic contradictions and inequalities within humanity, Edward Said now settles his accounts with the identitarian and culturalist tendencies that have flourished since he wrote his Orientalism, and often used some of its notions and concepts. He writes in On Late Style what could be considered his legacy “…identity is the process by which the stronger culture, and the more developed society, imposes itself violently upon those who, by the same identity process, [my italics] are decreed to be of a lesser people. Imperialism is the export of identity” (Said, 2006:85) In the same work, he lauds the French writer Jean Genet as a ‘dissolver of identities” (Said, 2006: 82)
3. Orientalism as Translation
In more than one instance, Edward Said refers to Orientalism as a school of translation and interpretation (Said, 2003a: 203; 222) which not only pretends to speak in the name of Orientals, who presumably ‘cannot speak themselves’, but also claims to possess the only ‘authoritative translation’ of everything Oriental for its compatriots, or even for Orientals themselves. The whole of Edward Said’s endeavor in Orientalism can be seen as a set of arguments proving that the discipline does not translate. Bound by its Euro-American centrism, by interests and power, it is incapable of performing the simple task of putting into one language the words, terms, idioms, syntax and structures of the other. It radically alters the meaning and structure of the ‘other’ and converts the Oriental ‘text’ into something else (Said, 2003a:67)
In effect, Edward Said himself can be looked at as a translator in more than one sense.
First, here is an Arab writing in English. The whole biography of Edward the author can be resumed in this linguistic duality. The Algerian writer Leila Sebar, daughter of an Arab school director and a French school teacher, who writes in French and never learnt Arabic, says in her L’Arabe comme chant secret, “I translate Algeria, I translate my father into my mother’s tongue” (Sebar, 2007: 72) Similarly, Said spent all his adult life translating Palestine into English, which happens to be the language of the colonizer he learnt at school in Egypt where the family settled after their flight from Palestine, occupied by the Zionists.
But Said treats the English language the same way as the major anti-colonialist writers have done: by subverting the language and outbidding the ‘natives’ in their own language. Writing in the language of the colonizer becomes an act of defiance and resistance in itself. Edward Said, the writer and literary critic, might well be called a ‘vertical invader’ of the West, in the sense John Berger uses to describe the art of that southern ‘invader’ of northern Europe, Pablo Picasso.
Second, Edward Said’s work is one of translation in terms of his relationship to the Arab World. The shock that brought the Arab American professor of literature to look into the work of the Orientalists was the defeat of the Arab armies by Israel in the six-day war of 1967 and the consequent occupation of the whole of historical Palestine in addition to Sinai and the Golan Heights. Edward’s decision to study Arabic, a language from which he had been alienated inside his family and in the colonial schools of Egypt, was his immediate reaction to that traumatic event. Said did not further pursue this endeavor, but the attempt to re-translate his English into his mother tongue was there.
Third, Edward Said situated himself within the tradition of the self-critical Arab intellectuals of the post-1967 period. His ‘translation’ work was to put the intellectual travails of the post-1967 Arab World into the conceptual language of Fanon, Gramsci, Williams, Poulantzas and others. From that time on, Edward Said-the-public-intellectual was in the making.
Let us say here that Vico’s self-knowledge, which founded Edward’s humanism, was coupled with the self-criticism, imposed by the military debacle of June 1967. Edward Said’s everyday intellectual activity and political writings, and much of his practical critique were directed against the autocratic and dictatorial Arab regimes for their failure to resist imperialism and Zionism. His critique of Orientalism, Zionism and imperialism went hand in hand with his critique of the ideologies of their victims, the Palestinian and Arab liberation movements. Notably, his break with the PLO leadership on the Oslo accords in 1993 (which he brilliantly termed ‘the peace of the weak’) was a critique of the misreading by a national liberation movement of US and Israeli strategies. Said did not spare Arab intellectuals from criticism either, as was the case with those who supported Roger Garaudy’s revisionist writings on the Holocaust (Le Monde Diplomatique: August-September 1998).
Fourth, Edward Said was an indefatigable writer ‘translating’ to his fellow Arab compatriots US strategies and suggesting were and how they should be countered. He patiently analyzed the mechanisms of decision-making in the US with the advent of the neo-conservatives of the Bush administrationto power and the rising influence of the Christian fundamentalists. He did not fail however to insist on the great potential of the American protest movement against the war in Iraq. One of the last messages of a man who saw himself as both Arab and American was his call, at the Commencement celebration at the American University in Beirut (AUB), for devoting more time and effort to study American society and state in the Arab World, rather than simply teaching Arab students textbooks designed for American students.
This is where the critique of Orientalism finally joined the critique of Occidentalism.
References
Umberto Eco, Dire Presque la Meme Chose, Expérience de traduction, 2003
Edith Grossman, Why Translation Matters, 2010.
Le Monde Diplomatique, August-September 1998.
Edward W. Said: Orientalism, 1978.
– The world, the Text and the Critic, 1983.
– Culture and Imperialism, 1994.
– Out of Place: A Memoir, 2001.
– Humanism and Democratic Critique, Introduction by Akeel Belgrami, 2004.
– On Late Style. Music and Literature Against the Grain, Foreword by Mariam C. Said, Introduction by Michael Wood, 2006.
– Leila Sebar, L’Arabe comme chant secret, 2007.