points.of.crossing

Tageldin, Shaden M. Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt. Berkeley: University of California, 2011.

PDF edition HERE. (Zip file password: archive)

‘If attraction, assimilation, even love are dominant refrains in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Egypt’s literary and cultural response to a colonizing Europe, why is this so? How do the emergence and the persistence of this ideology of “love” challenge the domination/resistance binary of empire and postcolonial studies? And given the centrality of translation in modern Egypt’s cultural encounter with the West, how might translation be connected to this ideology of “love”? These are central questions that I engage in this book. Disarming Words explores why the colonized tend to “love” their colonizers as often as they hate them and how seduction haunts both empire and decolonization.’

“As Palestinian poet and journalist Mahmoud Darwish puts it in the preface to Poésie: La terre nous est étroite: ‘The translator is not a ferryman for the meaning of the words but the author of their web of new relations. And he is not the painter of the light part of the meaning, but the watcher of the shadow, and what it suggests.’”

- As quoted in Translation in Practice (downloadable here)

“There is a widely held view that anything said or written in one language can easily be transferred into another. People who do not engage with movement between languages can, I suppose very logically, see no reason why there should be any difficulty in transposing thoughts, ideas, and facts into other languages. I have always held to the view posed by Edward Sapir that different languages represent different world views, that it is not simply a question of rephrasing when one moves into another language but reformulating that is rethinking.”