PROTA: The Project for the Translation of Arabic
Roger Allen, University of Pennsylvania

IN 1993 I taught an NEH summer seminar for high-school teachers on the Arabic novel in translation. As I went through the listing of translated novels that are available in the 1990s and also made a choice from translations of other genres as back-up materials, I became newly aware of the wealth of material that we now have available. To be sure, it is not of the size and variety that is available for many other literary traditions, but there are now sufficient published novels and anthologies of poetry, drama and short-stories to devote entire courses or at least significant segments of them to individual genres and themes. I could not help thinking back to the start of my teaching career in 1968.

During my first semester in this country it was suggested that, along with the language courses I was offering, I could also prepare a new course on modern Arabic literature in translation. The translations by E.H. Paxton and Hilary Waiment of the first two volumes of Taha Husayn’s al-Ayyâm (London, 1932; Cairo, 1943), Aubrey (now Abba) Eban’s translation of Tawfîq al-Hakîm’s Yawmiyyât nâ'ib fî al-aryâf (London, 1947), Desmond Stewart's translations of al-Sharqâwî's al-Ard (London, 1962) and of Fathî Ghânim’s al-Rajul al-ladhî faqada zillahu (London, 1966) and Trevor Le Gassick’s pioneering translation of Mahfûz’s Zuqâq al-midaqq (Beirut, 1966) were a promising start, although they also showed a clear focus on Egypt at the expense of other Arab nations. Denys Johnson-Davies had already published a collection of Mahmûd Taymûr’s stories (Cairo, 1949) and had just added to it another excellent and well translated selection culled from all over the region (London, 1967). Curiously, in poetry the situation was considerably less promising, the major source being Arberry’s collection, Modern Arabic Poetry (Cambridge, 1967). The realm of drama was an almost complete tabula rasa; al-Hakîm, the doyen of the genre, had been rendered into French and was thus available to the more enterprising students, but in English his oeuvre was represented by Yâ tâli al-shajarah, once again the work of Johnson-Davies (London, 1966). As this summary shows, the offerings were not only sparse but in most genres provided a less than representative sample of the creativity of the Arab world. I still retain the duplicated volume of translations that I undertook in an attempt to adjust the various imbalances as I saw them at the time.

The 1970s saw an undoubted improvement in the situation; not that commercial or even university presses suddenly decided that there was “a market” for Arabic literature, but rather that enterprising presses such as Bibliotheca Islamica and Three Continents Press decided that works from the literary tradition of such a large area of the world should be a subject of interest to the scholarly reading public and, it was hoped, to a still broader market. As specialists in, and especially translators of, Arabic literature now find themselves presented with numerous publication opportunities, we should not forget the invaluable role which these small presses played in keeping the limited repertoire of translated works available in what we might term the “pre-Nobel era.”

Towards the end of the 1970s the Project for the Translation of Arabic (PROTA), began to take shape. The Director of the Project, the renowned Palestinian poetess and critic, Dr. Salmâ Khadrâ al-Jayyûsî, was invited by John Moore, the Director of Columbia University Press, to prepare a large anthology of modern Arabic literature. Dr. al-Jayyûsî’s wide experience in teaching Arabic at Western universities had made her well aware of the situation with regard to translations that I have described above. She was discontented not only with the amount of translated works available, but also with the methodology used in the translations, that being a direct result of the status of the translators themselves who were, more often than not, university teachers with other research, teaching, and administrative duties.

The decision to embark upon the anthology project for Columbia University Press and obtaining funds for that purpose from the Iraqi Ministry of Information and Culture represent the starting point of PROTA. It established as its goal “the dissemination of Arabic culture and literature abroad.” An Administrative Board was established to help the Director with the many tasks that lay ahead, and a large number of translators in the US, Britain and the Arab World began the process of translating the works that would make up the new anthology. Their versions were carefully rendered by creative writers of English literary genres into a readable and idiomatic style. When finally submitted, the work was so vast that a decision was made to divide it into two: one devoted to poetry, the other to narratives. When the poetry anthology, Modern Arabic Poetry, edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi, was published by Columbia University Press in 1987, it was immediately recognized as a major contribution to modern Arabic literature studies in the English-speaking world. The reviewer in World Literature Today said that it “establishes new standards of sensitivity, accuracy, and readablity,” (World Literature Today 62 (1988): 327-8.) while Middle East International suggested that it offered “the finest available translations of a literature now ripe for rediscovery.” (Middle East International 324 (30 April 1988): 23.) This anthology, like its equally large fictional peer that is in press, is a critical selection of works, and not everyone has been happy about the selection in terms of inclusion and exclusion; I at least work on the assumption that no anthology can (or, probably, should) satisfy everyone. However, such is the representation of regions, schools and themes incorporated within this collection and such is the “readability” of the resulting poems that the plaudits it has received are certainly justified.

I have alluded above to the question of translation methodology, a topic about which there is a substantial theoretical literature. Much of that literature is concerned with the processes of translation between languages and cultures that are fairly contiguous. While many of the principles that such works expound are clearly applicable to the context of Arabic and other literatures of the non-Western world, they tend to assume the existence of a cadre of professional literary translators who, at least in the case of Arabic, do not exist (with the possible exception of Denys Johnson-Davies). I would suggest that, in such a context, debate over the use of one or more people in the translation process becomes less relevant in a situation in which many of the practitioners have to spend much of their lives in other pursuits. To the built-in virtues of utilizing the skills of a creative writer in crafting the final version of a translation is thus added the practicality that the first translator, while providing an “intertext” version that will be, one hopes, an accurate rendering of the original text, may not possess the stylistic and esthetic skills with which to create a polished final product. This principle has governed the decision of PROTA that its translations will be the work of a first and second translator; the poetry anthology described above, for example, lists them separately. While there will always be debate about the relationship between the translation and the original— translation is, after all, an act of considerable interpretation, there can be little doubt as to the readability of the resulting texts, as the comments about the Poetry anthology make clear.

Using these methods PROTA has been able to publish a large number of books, both anthologies and individual works. Among anthologies, The Literature of Modern Arabia (Salma Khadra Jayyusi, ed. London, 1988; Austin, 1990) and Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature (Salma Khadra Jayyusi, ed. New York, 1992) are large and notable additions to the corpus of translations from two significant regions of the Arab World. An anthology of modern Arabic drama is in press with Indiana. Smaller anthologies contain collections of poems by the Tunisian Abû al-Qâsim al-Shâbbî (Tunis, 1987) and the Syrian Muhammad al-Mâghût (Washington, 1991) and also of short-stories and novellas by Ghassân Kanafânî (Austin, 1990) and Liyânah Badr (New York, 1993). The Project has also published individual novels by Emil Habîby (New York, 1982), Sahar Khalîfah (London, 1986), Yûsuf al-Qa îd (London, 1986), Hamza Bogary (Austin, 1991), Ibrâhîm Nasrallâh (New York, 1993), Hannâ Mînah (Austin, 1993) and Zayd Dammâj (New York, 1994). Currently in press is an anthology of the poetry of Nizâr Qabbânî.

Towards the end of the 1980s, PROTA was invited to participate in two very significant cultural events. The first was the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dr. al-Jayyûsî and I were both involved in the preliminaries to the announcement of the award, and she attended the ceremony itself. Since both of us have described our experiences in Naguib Mahfouz: From Regional Fame to Global Recognition (Syracuse, 1993), I will not go into detail here. The second event was the celebrations surrounding the commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the events of 1492. Dr. al-Jayyûsî had for some time been planning a scholarly endeavor that would celebrate the glories of Andalusian culture in an appropriate and international fashion. It was thus a felicitous coincidence that at the same time the Aga Khan Foundation was contemplating an event to celebrate the successful completion of a project to renovate an Arab mansion in Granada. An academic conference on Andalusian culture was approved to mark the opening of the house as a center for Islamic Studies. Dr. al-Jayyusi organized the event with a view to converting the presentations at the conference into a volume of studies on al-Andalus. The event itself was attended by the King of Spain, the Aga Khan and many other dignitaries. The volume that resulted from the conference is an enormous achievement from every point of view. Published by E.J. Brill in the Handbuch der Orientalistik series (Leiden, 1992), it is fully 1,100 pages in length and costs some $275. In spite of that fact, the first two print-runs have been exhausted, and a paperback edition is planned. The enormous success of this project and its accompanying volume has resulted in requests for other projects of a similar nature: one on Hellenism and Islam is in preparation, and others on the Islamic city and Jerusalem are under consideration. In the more literary realm, a conference on the literature of the Maghrib is planned for 1995, to be published thereafter as a volume of essays.

In the space of a single decade, PROTA has initiated and supervised the publication of a body of translated works, and more recently of studies, that constitute a significant addition to our repertoire of sources in English for the Arab world and, in particular, its literature. Its success is an abiding tribute to its founding director, whose vision and dedication ensure its continuing vitality.

PROTA-sponsored Translations

Badr, Liyânah. A Balcony Over the Fakihani: Three Novellas. Brooklyn: Interlink Books, 1993.

Bogary, Hamza. The Sheltered Quarter: A Tale of Boyhood in Mecca. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1991.

Dammâj, Zayd Mûtî. The Hostage. New York: Interlink Books, 1993.

Habiby, Emile. The Secret Life of Saeed, the Ill-fated Pessoptimist: A Palestinian who became a Citizen of Israel. New York: Vantage Press, 1982. [Now out of print]

Jayyusi, Salma Khadra, ed. The Literature of Modern Arabia. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1988.

Jayyusi, Salma Khadra, ed. Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.

Jayyusi, Salma Khadra, ed. Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.

Kanafani, Ghassan. All That's Left to You: A Novella and other Stories. Austin, TX: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 1990.

Khalifah, Sahar. Wild Thorns. London: Al-Saqi Books, 1986.

Mâghût, Mûhammad. The Fan of Swords. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1991.

Mina, Hanna. Fragments of Memory: A Story of a Syrian Family. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1993.

Nasrallâh, Ibrâhîm. Prairies of Fever. New York: Interlink Books, 1993.

Qu'ayyd, Mûhammad Yûsuf. War in the Land of Egypt. London: Al-Saqi Books, 1986.

Shâbbî, Abû al-Qâsim. Mudhakkirât. Tunis: al-Sharikah al-Wâtanîyah lil-Nashr wa al-Tawzî, 1977. [Translated as Songs of Life]