Crusoe’s Babel, Missionaries’ Mistakes

This chapter discusses Robinson Crusoe, the differences between the original and its Arabic translation, and how it was used as a tool for conversion by the Church Missionary Society (CMS) to guide Eastern Christians to the right path of Protestantism by emulating Crusoe's direct and individual spiritual awakening. CMS missionaries took active steps to discourage cultural hybridity, even monitoring the translators in their employment for signs of the Catholic influence. The fantasy of purity and process of purification were part of the foundation of the missionary movement, making Crusoe's own myth of individualism and fantasy of autonomy its perfect ideological surrogate. The CMS hoped they would find inspiration in Crusoe's spiritual trials and error, as he moves from rebellion to punishment, repentance, and eventually religious conversion. The observations that emerge from setting these two versions of Crusoe's eating habits side by side might amount to a minor point but for the fact that observing Crusoe's autonomous actions on the island have played an important role in theorizing what have been called the formal and cultural institutions of the novel: individual subjectivity, formal realism, colonial accumulation, the labor theory of value, national identity, to name a few. Many translators of this period adapted or changed the source material. Regardless of the radical changes, translators praised importance of the original version and often lamented their inability to do justice to it. As the earliest surviving translation of a novel into Arabic, Qiṣṣat Rūbinṣun Kurūzī stands as an ideal starting point from which to understand the origins of the Arabic novel as they emerge from translation.

Errant Readers

This chapter discusses serialized translated novels. The Arabic novel made its own proper entry into the Arabic print sphere at this moment as a part of the uncertain reform project of print culture. Novels were published after and alongside a larger body of serialized translated novels that in fact occupied the greater part of the new audience's leisure reading habits. Over the course of the first decades of commercial print from the late 1850s to the late 1870s, serialized translated novels appeared in almost every type of Arabic periodical; for many readers, the word “novel” itself probably referred to these works and not the few original ones produced to compete with them. It was not just news translation that was central to the development of Arabic print culture; the translated novel, which appeared first and most prominently in serialized form, was often identified as part of periodicals' reform projects. At the same time that editors embraced translated fiction as a vehicle for their messages, however, their claim that these works served serious moral purposes was by no means indisputable. These novels' excesses were not always containable by the moral intentions of journal editors, who sometimes resorted to qualifications and elaborate interpretations in order to justify their publication. Print's civilizing reform mission, as uncertain as it was, had a primary object: the modern reading subject. Transforming the public into a reading public, and one that read properly, was the goal of many magazine producers who outlined ideal reading practices and modeled them through novels. And it was likewise a goal with an uncertain outcome.

The Melodramatic State

This chapter talks about what were considered bad books for bad readers. At the turn of the century, it was certainly not high-minded literary works that predominated in the Arabic literary marketplace. Rather, the market privileged thrilling and emotional works, the vast majority of which were in translation and which prioritized titillation and “scandal” over moral, civic, or religious progress. The new popular novels were accused of more than just portraying unrealistic foreign situations; more dangerously, they were seen as promoting unhealthy reading practices and cultivating excessive, nonrational emotions. Commentators worried about the prominent place of “bad books for bad readers” in the national literary market, and bad readers were above all figured as women readers. Bad books spoke to and — more frequently — about women. Translations redeployed excess popular emotion as political, and they do so in such a way as to test gendered national discourses, complicating some of the very New Woman ideas that elite writers were putting forth. The chapter reinserts these popular translated novels and their major figures — the oppressed wife, the bad female example, and the good criminal — into the national conversation and shows how they make social and political claims.

Invader Fictions: National Literature after Translation

This chapter discusses how translation has affected literature. When we assess criticism of translated literature as part of the larger national conversation about the novel's purpose, the formation of the national literary canon comes to resemble a process of negotiating the foreignness that lies within it and not solely a process of casting the foreign out. In doing so, we ascribe historicity to the formation of national literary history itself, reformulating not just the position of Arabic in an imagined world literary canon but also the modern Arabic literary canon. Translation helped to shape a category of national literature that belonged in turn to a comparative process. Reading the history of the novel in translation forces us to recast national literary histories, to read the nation in translation. To locate foreign literature within national literary history at the moment of its formation is only possible if one uncovers the impact that translations had on “original” writing, discourses and institutions of modernity, and reading practices. Understanding that history challenges us to read novels' depiction of even national environments or characters in the comparative critical context in which they were written and to see “national realism” as a mode that was canonized through comparative and translational methodologies and as perhaps the culmination of a history of translation.