Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad as a case study of consecration, annexation, and decontextualization in Arabic–English literary translation

Abstract

Differences in culture, language and context alter the reading experience, meaning and textual relations of modern Arabic literature in translation, which raises questions about the relationship between the Arabic and translated canon. Drawing on Lawrence Venuti, Pascale Casanova and Abdelfattah Kilito, I explore translation as consecration, annexation, and decontextualizationin order to illustrate the issues involved in Arabic-English literary travel and to move the scholarly debate on Arabic-English translation beyond questions of strategy and domestication. Through textual and paratextual analysis of the English translation of Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein fi Baghdad(2013/2018), I show how even a highly translatable modern Arabic text undergoes multiple semantic and symbolic shifts as it transfers into English. Bringing these findings together with observations on the wider Arabic literary translation environment, I argue that modern Arabic literature in translation is its own canon, deserving of independent study, whose hybridity can teach us much about the dynamics of cultural encounter, effects of literary capital, and the discursive and semantic disjunctions between English and Arabic culture and literature.