Seminar 14 March 2007
Professor Paul Starkey, the Department of Arabic, Durham University. More ...
Translating Arabic literature: problems and prospects
This presentation will review the translation of Arabic works into English, with a special focus on works of modern Arabic literature, from the translation of the first volume of Taha Husayn’s al-Ayyām in the early 1930s until the present day. It will survey the current state of publishing of such translations in the UK, USA and the Middle East itself; attempt to identify trends; discuss how and why the market for translations from the Arabic in the English-speaking world differs from that in continental Europe, and. consider to what extent the factors and difficulties identified by Peter Clark in his Arabic Literature Unveiled (2000) remain relevant today. The talk will draw on Paul Starkey’s own experiences in the field of Arabic-English translation, as UK representative on the European Cultural Foundation’s ‘Memories of the Mediterranean’ project between 1996 and 2001, and more recently as the translator of several contemporary Arabic novels.
Paul Starkey is currently Professor and Head of the Arabic Department in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University. He has published widely in the field of modern Arabic culture and literature. He was the author of From the Ivory Tower: a Critical Study of Tawfiq al-Hakīm (1987) and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature (Routledge, 1998). He is a regular contributor to BANIPAL and has published translations of a number of Arabic novels, including Rashīd al-Da’īf’s Dear Mr Kawabata (1998), Edwār al-Kharrāt’s Stones of Bobello (2004), Turkī al-Hamad’s Shumaisi (2004), and Mansoura Ez Eldin’s Maryam’s Maze (2007, forthcoming).
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