M. Jalal's nineteenth century translations of French drama and fiction: Transformation and reception into the Egyptian literary tradition.

Abstract

Muhammad $\sp{\rm c}$Uthman Jalal was the prolific translator of a number of French literary texts during the period usually referred to as the nahda or cultural renaissance of Egypt in the nineteenth century. This dissertation examines his complete extant corpus, which includes the translation of works by La Fontaine, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Moliere, and Racine. Previous treatment of Jalal in the literature has been generally limited to brief mention of only part of his corpus, with more detailed treatment of only very few of his works. Jalal's works have been neglected in the literature largely because they are seen as part of the prelude to later more established and sustained literary developments. The present study focuses on these translations as important instances of the appropriation of works from a dominant, hegemonic culture in a manner that implicitly asserts a loosely 'indigenous' or 'regional' cultural identity and literary tradition in complex ways, at a time when translations and adaptations were providing most of the dominant literary models and innovative forces of the Egyptian Arabic literary tradition. Each translation is analyzed in terms of the features which Jalal used to familiarize and transculturate the French texts for reception into the nineteenth-century Egyptian context. These features are shown to include (1) the sustained use of Egyptian colloquial Arabic (ECA), (2) the incorporation of markedly ECA proverbs, idiomatic and other expressions, (3) the presence of explicit Egyptian cultural references, (4) the use of Arab cultural references, (allusions to places, historical figures, proverbs) which are not exclusively, or even primarily Egyptian, (5) the incorporation of Islamic cultural references, either in the form of Quranic citations or allusions, or mention of known Islamic figures and religious customs, and (6) the utilization of literary compositional forms known within the Egyptian/Arabic literary tradition, but somewhat modified in form and function as a result of their use outside of their traditional contexts. It is demonstrated that while each translation varies in terms of the presence and the density of these features, they all share a regionalist orientation that affirms and privileges an indigenous cultural and literary identity over that of a European 'other'.