Langues étrangères et traduction dans le champ littéraire égyptien

Abstract

Literary studies only escaped from the nationalistic paradigm about twenty years ago. This nationalist paradigm dominated literature after the Enlightenment replaced a universal literary culture with a national one. For a long time, only comparative literature tried to find links between national literary traditions, not always very successfully. In the last two decades, the dominance of this nationalist paradigm became challenged by translation studies and postcolonial studies. While the first has stressed exchanges between literary traditions, the second has followed the emergence of a new literary space on a world scale, including not only the old colonial centers, but also the numerous peripheries. By substituting the concept of "Arabic literary space" for the notion of "Arabic literature", and thus including in it translations, one can reconfigure literary studies and tackle them more systematically. The concept covers not only translations from and to Arabic, but also works written by Arabs in other languages such as English or French, as well as the writings that introduce into Arabic literature themes and elements derived from other languages, whether colonial languages like English or French, or minority languages in the Arab world (Berber, Tuareg, Nubian, Kurdish, etc.). A final category could be the translation into Arabic ("bringing home") of works written in other languages by Arab authors. The article deals with Egypt, but its approach could be extended to the entire Arab world.