Essay: Digital Approaches to Arabic Paratexts

Paratexts are any aspect of a text’s accompanying material. This includes titles, subtitles, prefaces, forewords, afterwords, notes, introductions, epigraphs, blurbs, book covers, and dust jackets. Look to the left to see the most frequent paratexts that appear in the Paratext and Power database.

Paratexts are not the sole creation of authors; they are, rather, co-produced by translators, publishers, agents, and, importantly, paratext writers. Readers often deem paratexts as inconsequential to their understanding of a certain work or text. This essay hopes to offer a different perspective by showing how paratexts matter in our consideration of literature. Paratexts carry out a major function in addressing readers’ expectations because paratext writers often cater to these expectations. For example, aratexts are crucial sites of tracking the changes made in translation from Arabic to English and other European languages, exposing various ways that culture and language are domesticated and/or foreignized.

This project documents the history and activity of Arabic literary translation since the early 1900’s. As is clear from this graph, an uptick in translating modern Arabic literature did not begin until after World War II.

After World War II, Western interest in Arabic literature coincided with shifting U.S. politics and foreign policy in the Arab world. Paratexts materialized hand-in-hand with a growing corpus of Arabic literature in translation and these developments have evolved in relationship to geopolitical events like the 1967 war, the Iranian revolution, the first Gulf War, 9/11, and other events. While U.S. foreign policy otherizes the Arab world, interest in Arabic literature is often guided by imperialist and militaristic interests that seek to “understand” literature about Arabs and Muslims for national security purposes.

Starting in the mid '80s and well into the '90s, literary publications translated from Arabic to English and other European languages see an even greater increase than previous years, as can be shown from this graph based on the Paratext and Power database.

In the last few decades, literary translation from Arabic has seen an unprecedented boom, with new titles sometimes appearing every month. This boom marks a significant shift from an “embargoed” Arabic literature that Edward Said lamented in the early 1990s, when a New York publisher declared Arabic a “controversial language.” While the number of translations has increased in recent years, Waïl Hassan cautions that interest in Arabic literature is still the result of “incalculable, and sometimes contradictory, repercussions of conflicts in the Middle East, which can in no way be dissociated from US foreign policies there since World War II.” In short, the controversial history of Arabic literature in the US is due in large part to how interest in Arabic language and culture is driven by an “instrumental imperative”— one that is directly linked to national security wherein Arabic, as Hassan argues, “remains ancillary and tangential to the intellectual agenda of a globalized comparative literature.”Thus, in short, the translation of Arabic literature into English remains heavily politicized. This politicization can be mapped through paratexts, and through paratexts like glossaries that exist as “thresholds” between the Arabic language and the target culture it is being translated into.

Glossaries can be thought of as imprints of what the English-language reader will not understand, and are repositories of concepts for which the English-language reader is believed to require explanation. Even the most comprehensive glossary will contain a finite number of words; thus, the question of what is included and excluded from the glossary reveals assumptions about what will be familiar or foreign to the English reader. By looking to glossaries, we can begin to uncover and analyze the lexical entitlements and appropriations, as well as assumptions, that collect around translations of Arabic fiction in English and English-language fiction by Arab writers. By elaborating the codifying effect on the transfer of meaning from Arabic to English, where the paratextual and the translational converge, it becomes possible to track the reproduction of lexicons variously characterized as familiar or foreign.

Top 9 countries where authors reside.

Top 5 countries where translators reside.

Paratexts indicate the limitations of the English language as much as they speak to the constraints inherent in translating Arabic. As a literary fixture of Arabic literature, paratexts are warehouses of what the English reader’s expectations. These range from unfamiliar, even arcane historical forms of information far from the realm of the everyday, to terms associated with “high” or formal registers of Arabic, to terms associated with Arabic at its most quotidian or colloquial. The paratext is a crucial site of translational struggle, in which the impossibility and necessity of translation collide in the interpretive work of textual translation. Beyond their functionality, even utility as a taxonomical force, paratexts are a technology wielded by a complex mediating network that produces literary effects and further, a technology that functions in process alongside translation.