5 - Self-image: Between “Decadence” and Renaissance

Summary

The Arabs in our time are very satisfied with the matter of culture. They are satisfied with the minimum of it, considering themselves having arrived at the highest levels of science, although they have never even knocked on its door.

– Buṭrus al-Bustānī

1. INTRODUCTION

In 1923, the Lebanese-Christian Mahjari poet Mīkhā’īl Nu‘ayma (1889–1988) called on Arab authors to concentrate on translating Western literary masterpieces into Arabic as a necessary step toward bringing Arabic literature into the ambit of world literature and the universal human spirit. Alluding to the urgent need for Arab culture to benefit from its contacts with the West, Nu‘ayma wrote the following in his “Fa-l-Nutarjim” (“Let Us Translate”), which was published in his book al-Ghirbāl (The Sieve):

We are at a stage of our literary and social evolution in which many spiritual needs have awakened which we did not feel before our new contact with the West. As we have no pens and brains that can fulfill those needs, let us then translate! Let us honor the status of the translator because he is an agent of acquaintance between us and the larger human family.

Nu‘ayma's call did not emerge in the Arab world or on the international scene ex nihilo. We can see similar calls in other societies, especially during the nineteenth century, when writers and scholars felt that their local culture should benefit from Western culture. For example, in A House of Gentlefolk by Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818–1883), we find the following at the beginning of chapter 33:

Panshin was the only guest. He was stimulated by the beauty of the evening, and conscious of a flood of artistic sensations, but he did not care to sing before Lavretsky, so he fell to reading poetry; he read aloud well, but too self-consciously and with unnecessary refinements, a few poems of Lermontov (Pushkin had not then come into fashion again). Then suddenly, as though ashamed of his enthusiasm, [he] began, à propos of the well-known poem, “A Reverie,” to attack and fall foul of the younger generation.