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Mesa Presidential Address 2010: A Translator’s Tale
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 March 2016
Extract
In preparation for this occasion, I have taken the opportunity to read a number of the addresses by my distinguished predecessors as presidents of MESA. I am aware therefore that it may be a somewhat unusual introductory gesture on my part to open my address with a few secret details about the process whereby I find myself standing in front of you all this evening.
When I was initially contacted about putting my name forward as a candidate for the presidency of MESA, I immediately responded, as I now recollect, “But I’m a literature scholar.” That admittedly feeble attempt was instantly rebuffed by a vigorous assertion of the fact that literature is a significant field within this organization, but would I please not launch into a disquisition on any of the mu‘allaqat, nor even of a novel by Naguib Mahfouz. Now, finding myself at the proverbial cross-roads, I decided to play what I thought would be my trump-card: “But I’ve only been cited on Campus Watch three times!” Yes, we know, came the response; that is pathetic, but you’ve still got some time. Just try a bit harder, can’t you?
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References
End Notes
1 Currie, Mark, About Time, Edinburgh University Press, 2007, p. 108.Google ScholarPubMed
2 Bourdieu, Pierre, The Field of Cultural Production, Columbia University Press, 1993, p. 159.Google Scholar
3 New York Times, Week in Review Section, 3 October 2010, p. 10.Google Scholar
4 As one book’s title, The Empire Writes Back (ed. Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth and Tiffin, Helen, London: Routledge, 1989, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, demonstrates, and of which Al-Tayyib Salih’s superb contribution to Arabic fiction, Mawsim al-hijrah ila al-shimal—in Johnson-Davies’s translation, Season of Migration to the North—provides a ready illustration.
5 Quoted in Venuti, Lawrence, The Translation Studies Reader, 2 nd ed., New York: Routledge, 2000, p. 49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 See Quelle politique à l’étranger? Le Monde (des Livres), 12 June 2009, p. 2.
7 Parks, Tim, America First? New York Review of Books, vol. LVII no. 12, 15 July 2010, pp. 32–34.Google Scholar
8 For a copy of the relevant sections of Engdahl’s original statement and a typical retort to it, see Sutherland, John, “A Prize Misjudgment”, The Guardian, 2 October 2008.Google Scholar
9 Walk, Palace (originally 1956), Palace of Desire (1957)Google Scholar, and Sugar, Street (1957).Google Scholar
10 Said, Edward, “Naguib Mahfouz and the Cruelty of Memory”, Counter Punch, 16 December 2001.Google Scholar
11 My translation from Les arabes et l’art du recit, Paris: Sindbad, 2009, p. 30.Google Scholar
12 For Booth’s letter, see Times Literary Supplement, 27 September 2007 Google Scholar. She observes that, “Perhaps the larger scandal…is that for some publishers and writers, literary translators remain derivative servitors rather than creative artists, a notion fostered by a long tradition within Euro-American letters of the writer as solitary genius and translation as a mechanical exercise (and now enhanced by the “star system” of today’s publishing business).”
13 Allen, Roger, Fiction and Publics: The Emergence of the ‘Arabic Best-seller’, The State of the Art in the Middle East. Middle East Journal, May 2009, pp. 8–12 Google Scholar. An online version is available at: http://www.mei.edu/Portals/0/Publications/state-arts-middle-east.pdf.