Arabic Novels in Translation

Copyright © 2009 Aleya Rouchdy, All Rights Reserved

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This post might not be related to the teaching of Arabic directly, but it is within the spirit of the blog.

Learning the Arabic language, or finding out how it is used to express the way people think, should also be of interest to readers of this blog.

In an article published in the New Yorker (1/18/2010), Claudia Roth Pierpont wrote about the translation of Contemporary Arabic Novels. She said, “We need to learn about the ways that people think and work and suffer and fall in love and make enemies and sometimes make revolutions….”

Contemporary Arabic novels will indeed teach us about contemporary Arab people, whether we read them in Arabic or in translation.

The author offers a detailed exposition of contemporary literary Arabic works, of their authors, and of the names of their translators. It is indeed worth reading. And, it would be of interest to any teacher of contemporary Arabic literature, of comparative literature, and definitely to teachers of Advanced Arabic.

Actually, the author’s following statement prompted me to write this post. She said “Arabic novels, while not yet lining the shelves of the local bookstores, have been increasingly available in English translations, offering a marvelous array of answers to question we did not know we wanted to ask.”

From my perspective as a linguist, I think that students of advanced Arabic language should read in abundance modern novels. Possibly, they will in the future become translators of further novels. There are still many other interesting novels to be translated.