Translator and Translated Twice Removed: Multilingual Selfhood in Rabih Alameddine's An Unnecessary Woman

This article analyses the novel An Unnecessary Woman (2013) by the American-Lebanese writer Rabih Alameddine from the perspective of multilingual selfhood, echoing Borges's vision of ‘writing as translation’ as it expands to considerations of literary translingualism. The narrator/protagonist of the novel, Aaliya Saleh, is a translator whose main occupation is translation into Arabic from the existing English and French translations: from literary West into East. The significance of the author's creative choice of what is referred to as a twice-removed translator is explored with the following questions: How, while navigating between two languages, cultures, and identities, is the multilingual individual experiencing the balancing act between the ‘translation’ and the ‘original’? To what extent are characters, generated by writers' translingual imagination, indeed creative (re)incarnations of the author's fragmented self? Is there such a thing as the fidelity to an original' for an immigrant (the author)? What can we learn about this translingual polyphony of voices when it comes from the area of political conflict and deepening economic/humanitarian crisis?

‘All at Sea’: Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, and the Unknown German

On July 10, 1940, amidst fear of Nazi invasion, a prison ship, of sorts, left Liverpool, England, crammed full of over two thousand male ‘Enemy Aliens’ – Germans, Austrians, and some Italians. They were herded together, below deck, with all hatches sealed. Some were prisoners of war, some were passionate Nazis, but most were Jewish refugees. Among them was Walter Benjamin's estranged son, a young man of 22 years, Stefan Rafael Schoenflies Benjamin. Soon after boarding, however, the authorities mistakenly recorded his surname as Benjamini. ‘All at Sea’, John Schad's critical-creative piece, recounts events around ‘the unknown German’ on the vessel, playing richly on, and with, recognition effects around what is (un)familiarly known about Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, and various kinds of connection between them and other figures from the period.

The Orphanage

‘The Orphanage’, by Peter Hertz-Ohmes, is a creative piece extracted from a longer work of the same name currently in completion. Voice and the play of memory are key aspects of a text richly concerned with the politics of exile, disaffiliation and naming.

Cutting, Reading, Re-Membering: Parade's End's Elliptical History …

This essay reads Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End materially, to claim that Ford's radically ‘modernist’ style worked to refigure history on the basis of the literary mark. Ford's innovative use of the material elements of writing allows his readers to approach history as materialistic historio graphy – a key idea for Paul de Man – that reads writing as marks and traces independent of fluctuating ideological abstractions. In Parade's End, Ford's narration avoids extra-textual context-building, instead sticking as tightly (and often bewilderingly) as possible to the interiority of a character's consciousness. Notably, this technique interacts with the material world in a similar way to de Man's approach to reading. This allows Ford to stage the ‘writing’ of history, where trace-chains are constantly refigured as material inscriptions, taken up and made sense of anew. The essay first interprets Ford's attitude to history as a creative act, ironised by his protagonist Tietjens’ belief in the certainty and self-evidence of unified historicism. It then describes the ‘elliptical’ structure of one of the novels’ key scenes, where Tietjens is forced to learn the unfinishable nature of history–especially via written forms (like the ellipsis itself) that do not speak. Finally, it directs its attention to the tetralogy's conclusion, ‘voiced’ by a mute narrator, that inscribes the potential for meaning to always remain in an unpredictable future. This ‘theotropic’ force cuts through Ford's novels, and in doing so gestures to the ellipsis from which all reading has, always-already, been re-membered.

Aural Aesthetics: The Poetics of Sound and Meaning in the Qurʾān

This article explores the aural aesthetics of the Qurʾān. It observes different ways in which the acoustic qualities of the Qurʾān reflect meaning and considers how the rules of reciting the Qurʾān function in communicating Qurʾānic guidance. Through examining a number of Qurʾānic verses that exhibit a noteworthy conflation of sound and meaning, the article attempts to shed light on the role of Qurʾānic sound patterns in Qurʾānic exegesis, and argues that paying attention to the acoustic value of words and sentences can open up further interpretive possibilities.