Traduttore, traditore : translation is a treachery…

A few days ago, Mr Farouk Hosny, the Egyptian minister of Culture, announced the forthcoming translation into Arabic of various contemporary Israeli novelists like Amos Oz or David Grossman. Something which has not been done before, according to Gaber Asfour, the well-known literary critic who heads the Supreme Council for Culture because of exclusively legal problems: on one hand, dealing directly with an Israeli publishing house was absolutely impossible, due to the boycott, a motto particularly effective on the cultural scene, and on the other Egypt was not willing to publish such works without an agreement of the publishing house, thus enforcing the international agreements on the copyright.

Finally, a "smart" solution has been founded and the Egyptian will make the deal with… the European publishers of the Israelis writers! But if the novels are to be translated from European languages too, the Arabic versions of the works originally written in Hebrew will be real treacheries!

But it is not the only treachery which is suspected with this initiative, and many people in Egypt and in the Arab world think that the sudden love of the Egyptian official cultural bodies for modern Hebrew literature has something to do with Hosny’s campaign in order to be elected General Director of the Unesco.

Indeed, after a rather offensive “open letter” published in the French daily Le Monde by three well-known (at least in their country) French intellectuals calling President Sarkozy to act against somebody who had said that he was ready to burn Israeli books if they were to be founded in the Egyptian libraries, Farouk Hosny thought he had to give public apologize.

Something which has been understood as one more “positive sign” – or rather concession – made by the Arab candidate in order to facilitate an election, difficult to win in case of an Israeli opposition.

Indeed, the translation of Hebrew novels into Arabic is not the first manifestation of Faruk Hosny’s “good will”. Coming after previous initiatives (see previous post), it has been written in the Arab press that the Egyptian ministry of Culture was hoping very much an Israeli participation at the “Red Sea Festival”.

And now, according to this article published in the Lebanese Al-Akhbar, there are talks about the possibility of an official Israeli participation during the next Cairo book fair, a demand always rejected by the Egyptian since the signature of the Camp David agreements in 1978…

But the next book fair will in February 2010, when the election of the General Director of the Unesco is next October…

As usual, here is the link to the more developed post in French.

Waltz in Gaza

Ari Fomman took best Foreign Film at the Golden Globes Awards on January 11 with Waltz With Bashir, a personal documentary about Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982. The same day, as Tania Tabar’s article on Menassat reminds us, around 60 Palestinians died under the Israelis bombs in Gaza. And many more during the following days…

Tania Tabar follows mentioning that nearly 90% of the public opinion in Israel supported the war in Gaza (a statistic which does not include the “useless” opinion of the Palestinian citizens). How is this possible regarding the success, even in Israel, of an “antiwar film” like Waltz with Bashir, and compared to the thousands of Israelis who marched in the streets of Tel-Aviv as a reaction to Sabra and Shatila massacres? (Again, the 100 000 Arab Israelis who demonstrated against the war in Gaza in Sakhneen, one of the major Arab towns of Galilee, do not matter very much !)

A first explanation is the fact that Ari Folman’s film places the responsibility of the massacres in 1982 on the Phalangist militia and on Ariel Sharon who gave his green light” for the killing of civilians in the Palestinian camps of Beirut. Thus, the “naive young men (…) were only participating in a massacre because of the time and the place they happened to be” explains Tania Tabar, who also underlines that the “personal” narrative of Waltz with Bashir fails to provide a complete historical background which could explain why and how the Israeli state has been using for such a long time systematic violence against the Palestinian and Lebanese populations.

Waltz with Bashir ends with the animation suddenly shifting to real footage of the massacres which took place in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila in 1982, and with Palestinian ladies yelling and screeming at the camera [and the viewer] : “Where are the Arabs, where are they ?”

Since Waltz with Bashir is not a political movie, but a kind of personal testimony, accordind to Ari Folman's declarations, why did he choose such an ending? asks Tania Tabar.

Indeed, the question needs an answer. As an answer is needed to many others, today, “after” the war in Gaza, as many people ask : where are the Arabs? Where are they?

As usual, here is the link to the more developed post in French. Illustration : We are all Gaza. Demonstration in Beirut (Al-Akhbar)

Wandering Jewish Arabic Voices in Israel

We don’t hear very much about Antun Shammas, a Palestinian that many specialists considered as one of the best writers in Hebrew. But who has never heard about Samir Naqqash (سمير نقاش), an Israeli Jew writing in Arabic?

His family arrived in Israel when he was 13 years old, like many other Jewish families signing away their Iraki citizenship in order to emigrate to Israel, after bombings in Bagdag that could have been done by some sionist organisations willing to “encourage” the millenarian Jewish community in Irak to flee to Israel.

Samir Naqqash spent his whole life in search of a “better” exile, crossing the Lebanese border when he was 15 years old, then looking hopelessly for a more appropriate homeland in Iran, India, Turkey, Egypt after the Camp David agreements…

He died in 2004, after half of a century in his new homeland where he refused to give up his first language, the colloquial Arabic spoken by the Jewish people of Bagdad. His last novel, Shlomo the Kurd, myself and time, has been published by al-Jamal, an Arabic publishing house in Germany, a good summary of the literary destiny of an Israeli Jewish author writing in Arabic facing the Arab policy toward the Arab Jews and the contempt of the sionist state for the Arabic culture.

But not all the Iraki Jews living in Israel stuck to their native language. On the contrary, most of them use Hebrew, sometimes as a way to promote the Arabic culture through translations. Born in Irak in 1926, friend of the great Palestinian writer Emile Habibi, Sami Mikhail (سامي ميخائيل) has translated into Hebrew Nagib Mahfouz’s famous Trilogy.

His latest book, The pigeons of Trafalgar, offers a rather unusual dialogue with the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, assassinated in Beirut by the Mossad in the beginning of the 1970’ and author of the world-acclaimed Returning to Haifa. In his own novel, Sami Mikhail suggests another ending to this story of a couple of Palestinians going back to Haifa in order to enquire about the son they had lost there because of the war in 1948. After the death of her husband in a military operation, the mother of Khaldun/Dov – the Palestinian boy raised as an Israeli – refuses to abandon none of her children and tries to gather them around her in Cyprus.

Not surprisingly, some people have been upset by what they have called the “spoliation” (see previous post) of a Palestinian work but others were obviously interested to see how two voices, doomed to live in two different endless exiles, could, nonetheless, hold such a literary dialogue.

As usual, here is the link to the more developed post in French.