City Literature in Abdu al-Aziz al-Makkali’s Poetry

World literature teems with the portrayal of famous cities throughout the world. This kind of literature is unanimously known as city literature. It does not merely describe and portray places, objects, and landscapes for their own sake, it, however, gives readers a revisionist perspective to look afresh and introspectively into self, history, and culture. This paper aims to shed light on a city that witnessed great changes throughout its history. It is called Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, and it is one of such world-famous and ancient cities about which interesting and rich literature has been written. Sana’a has been immortalized in the prose and poetry of local and international prolific and intelligent writers such as Abdu al-Aziz al-Makkali, a famous contemporary Yemeni poet. Sana’a is magnificently portrayed in different exotic images in al-Makkali’s collection of poetry entitled Book of Sana’a. The poet engages in a kind of dialogue with the city in a personal experience and unique particularity, but in the process, this particularity becomes cosmopolitan. Each poem is located in a particular space which gives the poet and reader alike a sense of the place, history, and culture, and an intense feeling of wider identification and empathy. Sana’a is anthropomorphically portrayed as a beautiful woman, sad woman, beloved lady, spirit, and city of heaven. It is fantastically depicted as a unique piece of artifact molded and designed by the hands of God. So, this piece of research attempts to analyze social and political imports and the different images of the city employed by al-Makkali in his poetic work: Book of Sana’a. As a theoretical framework, the paper adopts both historical theory of criticism as well as the formalist theory, so the analysis is focused on both context and text of the selected poems.

Intertextuality in Translating Romantic Folksong Hua’er Across Time and Space with English Love Poems

Hua’er, a peculiar type of folk song in Northwest China, can be translated by referring to English love poems to recreate analogous but fundamentally different intertextual relations in English. The intertextuality perspective of translation enables the translator to see the rendition not as a product but as one of the numerous interpretive possibilities. Seen in this light, translating romantic Hua’er is able to open up one of many dialogues with English language and culture. By analyzing pieces of romantic Hua’er which the author translated, this paper aims to explore ways of representing the original intertextual relations in the English cultural context through three specific situations where the intertexts within Hua’er are recreated in the receiving language. The three ways are reproducing by substitution for intertexts likely to remain unrecognized in English, retaining intertexts with distinctive Chinese characteristics and constructing intertexts in a new context familiar to English readers.

Strategies in Solving Equivalent-related Problems in Translation: Implications to Cross-cultural Understanding

Any translation practice is intended to produce a text which is equivalent in meaning with its source text. However, to arrive at such equivalence is not an easy task due to a number of differences between the source language and the target language. Therefore, finding the right equivalence is a problem often encountered by translators, especially student translators. Suggested by such problem, a study on equivalence problems and possible strategies to solve the problems is obviously necessary. This article aims at finding out the problems of equivalence encountered and the strategies to solve such problems applied by student translators in translating a historical recount text. This is a descriptive study taking 10 student translators as the participants who were asked to translate a historical recount text from English into bahasa Indonesia. The data were collected using Translog that recorded all the translation process done by the student translators. The results of the study were: (i) the student translators encountered five equivalence problems while translating a historical recount text from English into bahasa Indonesia; and (ii) to solve such problems, they applied six strategies (naturalization, borrowing, description, deletion, addition and generalization). The findings imply that the problems were motivated by the student translators’ lack of cultural understanding of the source language.

Plague and Literature in Western Europe, from Giovanni Boccaccio to Albert Camus

In medieval times the plague hit Europe between 1330 and 1350. The Italian novelist Giovanni Boccaccio, one of the exponents of the cultural movement of Humanism, in the introduction (proem) of his “Decameron” described the devastating effects of the ‘black plague’ on the inhabitants of the city of Florence. The pestilence returned to Western Europe in several waves, between the 16th and 17th centuries. William Shakespeare in “Romeo and Juliet” and other tragedies, and Ben Jonson in “The Alchemist” made several references to the plague, but they did not offer any realistic description of that infective disease. Some decennials later Daniel Defoe, in his “A Journal of the Plague Year” (1719), gave a detailed report about the ‘Great Plague’ which hit England in 1660, based on documents of the epoch. In more recent times, Thomas S. Eliot, composing his poem “The Waste Land” was undoubtedly influenced by the spreading of another infective disease, the so-called “Spanish flu”, which affected him and his wife in December 1918. Some decennials later, the French writer and philosopher Albert Camus, in his novel “The Plague”, symbolized with a plague epidemic the war which devastated Europe, North Africa and the Far East from 1937 to 1945, extolling a death toll of over 50 million victims. Those literary works offered a sort of solace to the lovers of literature. To recall them is the purpose of the present paper, in these years afflicted by the spreading of the Covid-19 Pandemic.

Disrupting Hegemony, Anticipating the Future: A Nietzschean Reading of God Dies by the Nile and Purple Hibiscus

El-Saadawi’s God Dies by the Nile and Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus have been widely and independently explored from varied perspectives. Such liberated critique is however surprising since the two texts can be found to have ethical and political confluence – the motif of the death of God. Drawing on the notion of travelling theory, this paper argues that the death of El-Saadawi’s and Adichie’s protagonists is a contestation and a disruption of the norm and a signification of the novels anticipatory sensibilities. The paper also examines how the different textual utilization of the motif of the death of God contributes to our understanding of the circulation of motifs in literary production and contextual interpretations. The paper makes a significant contribution to the scholarship on El-Saadawi and Adichie.

The Diasporic Narrative: Identity Crisis in Ghasan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun

This study examines Ghasan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun as a representative novella of the Palestinian identity crisis among the Palestinian refugees in the aftermath of the Nakba in 1948. Kanafani’s emplotment of this identity crisis is couched in a diasporic narrative that lays bare a double plot, one before 1948 and another following it. The narrative split reveals a sharp contrast between the present state of the characters on their journey to Kuwait, the promised land, and the past as revealed in their reminiscences of homeland. The paradisaic images of homeland are woven with images of Hellish existence under the scorching sun of the desert. This double narrative is indicative of the split psyche of the characters which is symptomatic of an identity crisis. Their pursuit of a way out of this conflicting state ends with a collective, tragic disillusionment; they end up dead and thrown on a garbage heap without even a proper burial place. Kanafani weaves the different mini narrative threads into one tragic denouement since his novella is not about the fate of individual characters but that of a nation. The silence of the characters prior to their death is a Kanafanian prophecy of the future of the Palestinian Cause after it has lost its power of speech and ended, like the characters, dead on the garbage heap of history.

Our skin is trouble: Racial discourse in Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi is Dead, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Wole Soyinka’s ‘Telephone Conversation’

The recent incident in Minneapolis, United States, where George Floyd, an African-American man, was manhandled by a police officer has brought about the resurgence of racial awareness as championed by the Black Lives Matter Movement. The concept of race has shaped the lives of so many generations and continues to do so in the 21st century. Racial segregation as well as the public hysteria on racism has had so much influence on societies and has led to discrimination and racial slurs across races. Using Critical Race Theory, this study examines racial discourse in Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi is Dead, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Wole Soyinka’s ‘Telephone Conversation’. The analysis of the discourse reveals racial tendencies in the description of the black race through white-black (Self/Other) binary (racial segregation), race-based discrimination and animal metaphors. The paper contributes to scholarship on racial discourses and foregrounds the function of language in depicting the racial orientation of characters in literary texts.

The Mythopoetics of Atogun’s Fight Against Political Corruption in Nigeria: A Comparative Analysis of Taduno’s Song and Orpheus Myth

The aim of this paper is to examine the correlation between the Orpheus Myth and Atogun’s novel Taduno’s song through the lense of mythopoetics. It also aims at analysing the manner in which the eponymous hero fights against political corruption in particular in Nigeria. The study is important because it enables us discover the ways in which Atogun adapts the Orpheus myth and marries it to his own strategy of fighting corruption so as to address the contemporary political situation in his country, Nigeria. The primary data for this paper is the novel Taduno’s song and the Orpheus myth. Secondary data in the form of works and papers on myth and mythmaking as well as on political corruption have been reviewed and used to support arguments in this paper. A close reading method has been used to analyse words, expressions, situations and contexts in the primary sources in terms of themes and style. The secondary sources have mainly been used to adduce evidence in support of arguments in the paper. The study establishes that Atogun adapts the Greek myth to the Nigerian situation in order to bring the contemporary political situation of his country to the fore. This is because the Orpheus myth encapsulates universal themes that allow it to be adapted to the present century. The study also concludes that evidence from the narrative indicates that in addition to stronger institutions, Africa also needs stronger, morally principled, courageous and selfless citizens who can rise against political corruption anywhere it rears its ugly head in the continent.

A Historical Quest for Little People (Hobbits) in English and Chinese Literature

Written records on little people (Homo floresiensis) or ‘Hobbits’ are legions in either occidental or oriental history, let alone the excavation finding of a 1.06 meter (3.6 feet) 30-year-old adult female at Liang Bua cave on the remote Indonesian island of Flores in 2003. In English and Chinese literature, there are indeed no meagre narratives of little people, let alone the records found in the Chinese historical documentation and Buddhist scriptures as early as 770 BC. The main thrust of this qualitative research is to examine the little people in literature believed to be a different species or new human by comparing English and Chinese mythologies, literary creations with historical documentations and current archeological findings in light of historical research—an approach which identifies social and cultural history drawing from three main sources, namely, primary, secondary and oral tradition where accessible.

The Invisible Presence of OBC: A Literary Voice

This paper analyzes the writing on OBC literature to contribute, presumably in a bit of way, toward opening up a dialogue among them regarding what constitutes meaningful literary efforts and selecting OBC literature because OBC has not much mattered yet, not in the aura of postcolonial, cultural, and subaltern studies. In order to initiate a dialogue about the undersideof the literary world, the term OBC literature appears as one of the mechanisms for producing social, political, and educational consciousness in society. The existence of this consciousness, shaped by the backward commissions, is easily understood for the constitutional facts of pre andpost-independence societies. To investigate the conditions of socially and educationally backward classes and the difficulties in which they labour for years, the variants of Other Backward Classes from history remain the same in order to establish a favourable literary voice for their marginalization and oppression.