Translation of Ice, a novel by Sonallah Ibrahim (Seagull Books, 2019) (original) (raw)
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The Soviet Union in two Arab novels
RUDN Journal of Studies in Literature and Journalism
The study aims to analyze the representation of the Soviet Union in two Arab novels, “Ice” (2011) by Egyptian Sun‘allah Ibrahim and “Time of the Red Reed Pipe” (2012) by Kuwaiti Thurayya al-Baqsami. Within the vast expanse of the Arab “emigrant” literature one can find relatively few works of fiction that have to do with the USSR despite the fact that in the 1960-1980s thousands of Arab students studied in the country. Among a couple dozen Arab writers who wrote some fiction about the USSR very few spent more than a couple of months in the country, and their works, as a rule, present idealized and rather superficial images of the Soviet Union. Unlike these authors, Sun‘allah Ibrahim and Thurayya al-Baqsami spent in the 1970s quite a long time in Moscow in the status of ordinary students, and for this reason their novels present a much more realistic picture of the Soviet Union. Without any noticeable warmth towards their Soviet hosts, the writers consider many negative features of S...
Fellow Travelers? Two Arab Study Abroad Narratives of Moscow
Illusion and Disillusionment Travel Writing in the Modern Age, 2018
UNCORRECTED PROOFS from this volume: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674984479 Illusion and Disillusionment Travel Writing in the Modern Age, edited by Roberta Micallef. ILEX Books (distributed by Harvard University Press), 2018. In Arabic literature the study-abroad travelogue, known as a “riḥla” narrative, dates from at least the twelfth century. It reemerged as a central genre in Arabic literature starting in the 19th century, as Arab writers started to chronicle their experiences of studying in the West: first France, then England and eventually also the United States. A barely studied subset of Arab study abroad memoirs concerns the flow of Egyptian, Syrian, and other Arab intellectuals who studied abroad in the USSR or its satellites between 1964 and 1990. This essay examines the multiple literary and cinematic accounts produced by two such travelers who were roommates while studying at the Soviet film institute VGIK: Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim and Syrian filmmaker Mohammad Malas. These traces – in total, two novels, a memoir, a film made in Moscow, and an annotated film script – remind us of a recent past when the intellectual world was configured differently, when Russia played a significant role (as it now seeks to do again) in channeling the political aspirations of Arab peoples. Yet they also reveal a cross-cultural fact: the extent to which modern intellectuals’ influences are self-sought and self-processed. For although their scholarships were enabled by Soviet and Arab state cultural policy, what Ibrahim and Malas got from the experience was deeply personal. Neither man ever worshipped Russian literature, let alone Soviet ideology. Instead, it seems, each filtered his Moscow experiences through the prism of his friendship with the other, his prior reading, and his concerns back home.
Raqṣ ʿalā al-māʾ: aḥlām waʿrah (Dancing on Water: Difficult Dreams, 2006) by Maḥmūd al-Bayyātī is among a number of Arabic post-Cold War exile novels that invite critical reflection on the loss of exilic belongings tied to the Soviet world. In the novel, an Iraqi poet, who has recently arrived in Sweden from Prague, Czechoslovakia following the collapse of the Soviet Union, finds a wallet containing a large sum of money. The poet (and narrator) re-imagines his new exile in Sweden through his search for the owner of the wallet and through the related question of how to distribute the money. As the narrative unfolds, the search begins to resemble the act of circling and pacing (ṭāf, yaṭūf ), a concept that frequently recurs in the novel. Ṭāf invokes both the haunting of the narrator’s past exile and political affiliations, and ṭawāf, the ritual circling around an empty center. Read alongside Derrida’s Specters of Marx the novel offers a compelling reflection on a critical juncture of Arabic literature. By comparing Raqṣ ʿalā al-māʾ to two other post-Soviet Arabic literary narratives of exile, Iqbāl Qazwīnī’s Mamarrāt al-sukūn (Zubaida’s Window: A Novel of Iraqi Exile, 2005) and Muḥammad Makhzangī’s Laḥaẓāt gharaq jazīrat al-ḥūt (Memories of a Meltdown: An Egyptian between Moscow and Chernobyl, 2006), this article considers the multiple ways that literary narratives have made exile and Marxist political affiliations objects of mourning. The spectral qualities of Raqṣ ʿalā al-māʾ subvert many of the post-Cold War narratives on national identity and the death of Marxism that the narrator confronts and, in the end, produce an ambiguous yet engaging reflection on migration and exile in contemporary Europe.
To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture by Eleonory Gilburd
Common Knowledge, 2020
In examining the reception of Western imports in the Soviet Union, I have drawn on a vast array of commentary from citizens, including 1,100 letters from viewers and readers to central institutions and cultural figures and more than 6,000 entries in comment books from art exhibitions. The letters include responses to the new cultural exchange policies, translated prose, radio programs, travelogues, and Western films in the context of Soviet ones and vice versa. The authors of these letters were teachers, librarians, doctors, engineers, and students. Students comprised nearly 30 percent of respondents to radio concerts of the French singer and actor Yves Montand in 1954-1956. Most of them were studying pedagogy and engineering. Secondary school teachers and engineers made up another 18 percent of letter writers. Among Ilya Ehrenburg's 206 correspondents about modern art, one hundred listed their professions. The majority (41 percent) were engineers and teachers (24 and 17 percent, respectively). Others were doctors, bookkeepers, and agronomists. They graduated from five-year colleges and specialized institutes of, for instance, forest management in Briansk, metallurgy in Magnitogorsk, water transport engineering in Leningrad, and construction in Odessa. Overall, of 550 letter writers who specified their jobs, the intellectual elite-writers, artists, filmmakers, translators, professors, doctoral students, researchers, and foreign affairs specialists-comprised a minority of just 12 percent. By contrast, teachers and engineers made up 23 percent, or twice as many. Only 9 percent of 550 letter writers with known occupations were workers. Letter writers were primarily urbanites; among the letters I examined, those from the countryside typically were penned by village teachers, librarians, bookkeepers, and agronomists. The letters in my sample came from across the Soviet Union. Out of 808 letter writers who supplied their addresses, Muscovites and Leningraders accounted for 40 percent. Their share was lower among respondents writing about cinema (27 percent), translated lit er a ture (29 percent), and international affairs (27 percent). Moscow and Leningrad were home to the country's most prominent theaters, film studios, museums, libraries, and universities. Not surprisingly, these population-dense Appendix: Assessing Responses to Cultural Imports
Intimate Foreign Relations: Racist Inclusion in the Soviet Dormitory Novel
Comparative Literature, 2023
Visualizing Soviet internationalism as a student dormitory, this essay identifies a new transnational subgenre, the Soviet dormitory novel, and analyzes four examples: Nazim Hikmet’s Life’s Good, Brother (Turkish, 1964); Ismail Kadare’s Twilight of the Eastern Gods (Albanian, 1978); Sonallah Ibrahim’s Ice (Arabic, 2011); and Yurii Andrukhovych’s Moscoviad (Ukrainian, 2000). These works each depict a different decade and come from different locations on the concentric map of Soviet influence: the Afro-Asian world, Eastern Europe, and the non-Russian USSR. Together, they reveal some shared formal features of the dormitory novel and some unintended consequences of Soviet internationalism, including the various racisms it rejected but helped perpetuate.
Since the advent of the cinema, films started playing an important role in promoting knowledge about different countries and peoples. Taking the film Утомленные Солнцем (Burnt by the Sun) as a case study, the authors aim to describe translation strategies for transadapting cultural realia in their own Arabic dubbing script, and to look at them from the perspective of the translation norms that are operational in the Arab society. For the analysis of strategies of transadapting cultural realia into Arabic, the researchers use the taxonomy developed by Pedersen (Pedersen, 2005). They also employ the concept of norms by Toury (Toury, (1995/2012)) since these norms take into account cultural and social constraints of the community, which have an impact on the translator's choices. The results of the study show that mostly source text-oriented strategies were used for transadapting the Soviet Russia cultural realia, with the exception of the realia belonging to the category of linguistic culture. It is true, however, that the norms operating in the Arab society and the constraints of the dubbing and subtitling modes can impact the translator's choice to a large extent.
"The Hero in the Madhouse: The Post-Soviet Novel Confronts the Soviet Past"
Slavic Review, 2004
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