Before 1987, modern Arabic literature was an “unknown” on the English-literature landscape. When Naguib Mahfouz was awarded a Nobel Prize that year, it was as much of a shock to most anglophone book-watchers as it was to Mahfouz himself.
The American University in Cairo Press has said that, at the time, there was nary a translator qualified to bring the master’s books into English. They relied on group translations, sometimes of four scholars or translators checking one another’s work.
After 1987, publishers recognised that contemporary Arabic literature existed, and dribbles of Arabic books made their way into English. After September 2001, that dribble turned into a trickle. By now, it’s almost something of a small stream.
At a panel at the Shubbak Festival in London this morning, a group of us will give a talk about this “rise of Arabic literature in English”, and I expect disagreement about how to characterise this rise – whether it’s a positive or negative.
Iraqi novelist Sinan Antoon, who is also on the panel, has previously spoken about the western reader’s “forensic interest” in Arabic letters.
Others have criticised which books we read: Egyptian novelist Ibrahim Farghali has said that we translate the “wrong books”; Lebanese novelist Hanan Al-Shaykh has complained that we “don’t look hard enough” for the best Arabic literature.
Antoon is right: Many readers approach Arabic literature in English as though it were a corpse from which some intelligence might be gleaned. Farghali and Al-Shaykh are also right: some bad novels have been translated and some good ones overlooked.
Yet some of the books that have been translated are mind-bendingly fantastic. What I hope to talk about is how we read this rising tide of Arabic literature and whether we have the right tools to do it.
Some of the best novels have gone unread. Or, when they are read, much of their richness, subversiveness and charm goes unnoticed.
In some ways, reading all this Arabic literature in English has been like listening in on a foreign-language recording when one understands the words’ meanings, but not the allusions, nor the jokes, nor the underlying rhythms.
Some of this woodenness can be blamed on inadequate translations. But some of it falls to our historical blind spots. What makes a literature untranslatable is not the failure to find equivalents of any particular words. The endless listicles of “untranslatable” words – like backpfeifengesicht (German for “a face badly in need of a fist”) and bakku-span (Japanese for “a girl beautiful only from behind”) – may not have single-word equivalents, but they come with easily understandable translations.
Rhythm and rhyme can be more difficult to recreate, but what’s really hard to convey is the fullness of a literary tradition. Why did the original readers judge this work great? Did they look for the same things we value in English, or was it something completely different?
Also, literature builds on literature. You can hardly appreciate Wicked without a passing knowledge of Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz, and Moby-Dick is a lot thinner without access to a bit of Shakespeare and the Bible.
Novels take a position in a landscape of genres, motifs and other books. Just so, Youssef Rakha’s Sultan’s Seal, translated by Paul Starkey, is hard to understand if the reader lacks any relationship to classical Arabic letters.
Yet the Arabic and anglophone traditions are not as separate as they first appear. They share many moments of intersection. The romantic Arabic poetry of al-Andalus made its way, through Spanish, to English. Translations of Ibn Tufail’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan may have inspired Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and translations of 1,001 Nights certainly had a major, well-documented effect on the development of 19th-century English literature.
In turn, Robinson Crusoe was translated into Arabic in the mid-19th century, followed by Arsène Lupin and the Sherlock Holmes stories. Just as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was influenced by the Nights, he in turn influenced key Arab writers.
But there are also many unshared moments. John Updike, when he reviewed Abdelrahman Munif’s great Cities of Salt in The New Yorker in October 1988, was almost boorishly dismissive. Munif, he wrote, was “insufficiently westernised to produce a narrative that feels much like what we call a novel. His voice is that of a campfire explainer ...”
Without understanding the Arabic tradition – or even seeming to understand that there was an Arabic tradition – Updike couldn’t engage with Munif’s work.
If it’s read with a certain eye, one of the greatest 19th-century Arabic works, Leg over Leg (1855), could also be dismissed as “insufficiently westernised”. This isn’t because Ahmad Faris Al-Shidyaq wasn’t aware of life and literature in western metropolises. Al-Shidyaq, translator Humphrey Davies says, “satirises the western novel. He says that a woman, leaving her house at 10 o’clock in the morning, with the rain coming down hard, and returning two hours later with her little dog is a matter of immense interest to you”.
Although Leg over Leg is compared to Tristam Shandy, Al-Shidyaq’s digressions are philological, not topical, echoing Arabic literature’s long fascination with wordplay.
Still, even though Leg over Leg is markedly different from western novels, it has received some small recognition in English. It was shortlisted for the US’s 2014 Best Translated Book Award, thanks in part to Davies’s heroic translating. This connection between literary traditions is important in itself, but it also creates new paths to the appreciation of contemporary Arabic novels.
Leg over Leg was published as part of the Library of Arabic Literature (LAL) project, which aims to make accessible, enjoyable translations of premodern Arabic literature.
The LAL project, which brought out its first title in 2012, aims to change our relationship to Arabic literature. Its focus is on work published before Arabic literature’s 20th-century nahda, or “renaissance”.
But these translations, in turn, thicken our understanding of contemporary work. Just as we need Shakespeare and Austen to read contemporary English literature, we need a bit of Mutanabbi if we are going to feel the texture of Elias Khoury’s incredible novel As Though She Were Sleeping.
At a recent LAL workshop, novelist and scholar Marina Warner suggested that as we now say Chaucerian, we might learn to say Shidyaqian.
Just so: a true rise in Arabic literature needs to come not solely from the top, from the poetry and novels of the past few years, but from an engagement with the fullness of the Arabic literary tradition.
M Lynx Qualey is an editor and book critic with a focus on Arabic literature and translation issues. She edits the website arablit.org
NO OTHER LAND
Director: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal
Stars: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham
Rating: 3.5/5
Real estate tokenisation project
Dubai launched the pilot phase of its real estate tokenisation project last month.
The initiative focuses on converting real estate assets into digital tokens recorded on blockchain technology and helps in streamlining the process of buying, selling and investing, the Dubai Land Department said.
Dubai’s real estate tokenisation market is projected to reach Dh60 billion ($16.33 billion) by 2033, representing 7 per cent of the emirate’s total property transactions, according to the DLD.
PRISCILLA
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Ms Yang's top tips for parents new to the UAE
- Join parent networks
- Look beyond school fees
- Keep an open mind
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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Kumulus Water
Started: 2021
Founders: Iheb Triki and Mohamed Ali Abid
Based: Tunisia
Sector: Water technology
Number of staff: 22
Investment raised: $4 million
MATCH INFO
Europa League final
Who: Marseille v Atletico Madrid
Where: Parc OL, Lyon, France
When: Wednesday, 10.45pm kick off (UAE)
TV: BeIN Sports
The National's picks
4.35pm: Tilal Al Khalediah
5.10pm: Continous
5.45pm: Raging Torrent
6.20pm: West Acre
7pm: Flood Zone
7.40pm: Straight No Chaser
8.15pm: Romantic Warrior
8.50pm: Calandogan
9.30pm: Forever Young
In numbers: PKK’s money network in Europe
Germany: PKK collectors typically bring in $18 million in cash a year – amount has trebled since 2010
Revolutionary tax: Investigators say about $2 million a year raised from ‘tax collection’ around Marseille
Extortion: Gunman convicted in 2023 of demanding $10,000 from Kurdish businessman in Stockholm
Drug trade: PKK income claimed by Turkish anti-drugs force in 2024 to be as high as $500 million a year
Denmark: PKK one of two terrorist groups along with Iranian separatists ASMLA to raise “two-digit million amounts”
Contributions: Hundreds of euros expected from typical Kurdish families and thousands from business owners
TV channel: Kurdish Roj TV accounts frozen and went bankrupt after Denmark fined it more than $1 million over PKK links in 2013
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
The Bio
Hometown: Bogota, Colombia
Favourite place to relax in UAE: the desert around Al Mleiha in Sharjah or the eastern mangroves in Abu Dhabi
The one book everyone should read: 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It will make your mind fly
Favourite documentary: Chasing Coral by Jeff Orlowski. It's a good reality check about one of the most valued ecosystems for humanity
Nepotism is the name of the game
Salman Khan’s father, Salim Khan, is one of Bollywood’s most legendary screenwriters. Through his partnership with co-writer Javed Akhtar, Salim is credited with having paved the path for the Indian film industry’s blockbuster format in the 1970s. Something his son now rules the roost of. More importantly, the Salim-Javed duo also created the persona of the “angry young man” for Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan in the 1970s, reflecting the angst of the average Indian. In choosing to be the ordinary man’s “hero” as opposed to a thespian in new Bollywood, Salman Khan remains tightly linked to his father’s oeuvre. Thanks dad.
The specs
Engine: 4.0-litre flat-six
Torque: 450Nm at 6,100rpm
Transmission: 7-speed PDK auto or 6-speed manual
Fuel economy, combined: 13.8L/100km
On sale: Available to order now
MATCH INFO
Sheffield United 2 Bournemouth 1
United: Sharp (45 2'), Lundstram (84')
Bournemouth: C Wilson (13')
Man of the Match: Jack O’Connell (Sheffield United)
The specs
Engine: Four electric motors, one at each wheel
Power: 579hp
Torque: 859Nm
Transmission: Single-speed automatic
Price: From Dh825,900
On sale: Now
Farasan Boat: 128km Away from Anchorage
Director: Mowaffaq Alobaid
Stars: Abdulaziz Almadhi, Mohammed Al Akkasi, Ali Al Suhaibani
Rating: 4/5
Skewed figures
In the village of Mevagissey in southwest England the housing stock has doubled in the last century while the number of residents is half the historic high. The village's Neighbourhood Development Plan states that 26% of homes are holiday retreats. Prices are high, averaging around £300,000, £50,000 more than the Cornish average of £250,000. The local average wage is £15,458.
More on animal trafficking
The specs
Engine: 6.2-litre V8
Transmission: ten-speed
Power: 420bhp
Torque: 624Nm
Price: Dh325,125
On sale: Now
Batti Gul Meter Chalu
Producers: KRTI Productions, T-Series
Director: Sree Narayan Singh
Cast: Shahid Kapoor, Shraddha Kapoor, Divyenndu Sharma, Yami Gautam
Rating: 2/5
Company profile
Company name: Suraasa
Started: 2018
Founders: Rishabh Khanna, Ankit Khanna and Sahil Makker
Based: India, UAE and the UK
Industry: EdTech
Initial investment: More than $200,000 in seed funding
The rules on fostering in the UAE
A foster couple or family must:
- be Muslim, Emirati and be residing in the UAE
- not be younger than 25 years old
- not have been convicted of offences or crimes involving moral turpitude
- be free of infectious diseases or psychological and mental disorders
- have the ability to support its members and the foster child financially
- undertake to treat and raise the child in a proper manner and take care of his or her health and well-being
- A single, divorced or widowed Muslim Emirati female, residing in the UAE may apply to foster a child if she is at least 30 years old and able to support the child financially
Start-up hopes to end Japan's love affair with cash
Across most of Asia, people pay for taxi rides, restaurant meals and merchandise with smartphone-readable barcodes — except in Japan, where cash still rules. Now, as the country’s biggest web companies race to dominate the payments market, one Tokyo-based startup says it has a fighting chance to win with its QR app.
Origami had a head start when it introduced a QR-code payment service in late 2015 and has since signed up fast-food chain KFC, Tokyo’s largest cab company Nihon Kotsu and convenience store operator Lawson. The company raised $66 million in September to expand nationwide and plans to more than double its staff of about 100 employees, says founder Yoshiki Yasui.
Origami is betting that stores, which until now relied on direct mail and email newsletters, will pay for the ability to reach customers on their smartphones. For example, a hair salon using Origami’s payment app would be able to send a message to past customers with a coupon for their next haircut.
Quick Response codes, the dotted squares that can be read by smartphone cameras, were invented in the 1990s by a unit of Toyota Motor to track automotive parts. But when the Japanese pioneered digital payments almost two decades ago with contactless cards for train fares, they chose the so-called near-field communications technology. The high cost of rolling out NFC payments, convenient ATMs and a culture where lost wallets are often returned have all been cited as reasons why cash remains king in the archipelago. In China, however, QR codes dominate.
Cashless payments, which includes credit cards, accounted for just 20 per cent of total consumer spending in Japan during 2016, compared with 60 per cent in China and 89 per cent in South Korea, according to a report by the Bank of Japan.
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