Rewriting measure for measure in Arabie : violation or interpretation ?

Abstract EN

In spite of the barriers of language, place and time, Shakespeare has been regarded by translators as a literary repository.

This paper is based on the argument that in their attempt to communicate the essence of Shakespeare’s art in a form linguistically and culturally acceptable to their target readers, translators have experimented with a variety of strategies in order to promote what Laurence Venuti in his seminal article, “Translation, Community and Culture”, terms “the utopian dream of common understanding between foreign and domestic cultures” (486).

Venuti distinguishes between two translation strategies, namely a fluent strategy as opposed to a resistant one.

In the Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, he explains that a fluent strategy acculturates the source text (ST) by opting for “a domesticating method” which involves “an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to target-language cultural values” (20).

In contrast, the aim of the foreignizing method is “to restrain the ethnocentric violence of translation” by preserving the linguistic and cultural differences of ST (20).

Venuti, thus, calls this translation strategy “resistancy” (24).

With a view to challenging the general assumption that a fluent strategy acculturates and hence does injustice to the source text, this paper attempts to study three Arabic translations of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure., a ‘problem’ play which has been avoided by Arab translators until quite recently--the text being considered as “resistant”.

It was first translated in 1966 as part of a project led by The Arab League for translating the classics by Ibrahim Zaki Khorshid, a renowned writer, man of letters and translator.

This was followed in 1993 by the translation of Farouk Abdel Wahab, an Egyptian academic and noted translator of contemporary Arabic literature who taught at the University of Chicago from 1975 until he died in 2013 and who has translated a number of Shakespeare’s plays and Pirandello into Arabic.

Finally, the most recent translation was done in 2013 by Mohamed Enani, Professor of English Literature at Cairo University, a well-known poet and dramatist and a proficient translator who has translated most of Shakespeare’s plays.

To name just a few: The Merchant of Venice (1988), Julius Caesar (1991), Henry VIII (1996), Shakespeare’s four tragedies, Richard II (1998), Twelfth Night (2007), Antony and Cleopatra (2007),Richard III (2007), The Merry Wives of Windsor (2008), Much Ado About Nothing (2009), All’s Well that Ends Well (2009), and Measure for Measure (2013).