TY - JOUR
TI - Recovering the Self from the Other: Arabs and Islam in Contemporary Arabic Translations of European Literature
AU - Michalski, Marcin
TI - Recovering the Self from the Other: Arabs and Islam in Contemporary Arabic Translations of European Literature
AB - 
	When a work of European literature is translated into Arabic, the language of a predominantly Islamic culture, terms referring to Arabs as a people or Muslims as a religious community, the name of Muhammad as the Prophet of Islam, etc., cease to be foreign and exotic, to become local and familiar. The present analysis of contemporary Arabic translations of Dante’s La Divina Commedia, Cervantes’ Don Quijote and Scott’s Ivanhoe, shows that these elements are not always simply returned to their native culture if the original text represents them in a negative, Eurocentric way, which can even be considered blasphemous by Muslims, but are subject to more or less significant ideologically motivated transformations. Instead of straightforward restitution to the native culture, what takes place is a kind of annexation of texts which consists in replacing the negatively portrayed “Other” by a positively, or at least neutrally, represented “We.” Such manipulations may be explicit, i.e. signalled in footnotes, or tacit. In some cases, anti-Islamic passages become even sympathetic towards Islam when translated into Arabic. In this way the authors of Arabic translations liberate the texts from the dominating Western perspective and adapt them to their own vision of the world. What appears as manipulation and censorship from the “Western” point of view may be perceived in an entirely different manner inside the Arabo-Islamic culture, for instance as a correction of obvious factual errors.
VL - Numery anglojęzyczne
IS - Special Issue 2018 – (Post)colonial Translation
PY - 2018
SN - 1425-6851
C1 - 1689-1864
SP - 160
EP - 176
DO - 10.4467/16891864ePC.18.008.9830
UR - https://ejournals.eu/czasopismo/przekladaniec/artykul/recovering-the-self-from-the-other-arabs-and-islam-in-contemporary-arabic-translations-of-european-literature
KW - translation
KW - manipulation
KW - domestication
KW - Arabic
KW - Arabs
KW - Islam