Book Chapter

The Hero at Home: Muḥammad al-Sibāʿī and Thomas Carlyle

Kesrouany, Maya I

2018

Overview

The nineteenth century was known to them [the Egyptian writers] as the school of al-nubūʾa [prophecy] and al-majāz [metaphor or allegory] … [that] school counted among its leading lights such names as Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Shelley, Byron, and Wordsworth. It was succeeded by a similar school which brought ‘reality’ and ‘allegory’ together – the school of Browning, Tennyson, Emerson, Longfellow, Poe, Whitman, Hardy, and others … A great deal from the spirit of these men pervaded the writings of the Egyptian poets who sprang up after Shawqī and his colleagues; but it pervaded them not because these poets were imitators or had no literary identity [of their own] but because it was a spirit common to the inclination of the whole era.Al-ʿAqqād, Shuʿarāʾ MiṣrUnlike Muṣṭafā al-Manfalūṭī, Muḥammad al-Sibāʿī took translation very seriously. Born in Cairo in 1881, he was one of the most dedicated students of Madrasat al-muʿallimīn (Teachers’ College), established in 1889, a landmark of the British colonial education system in Egypt, where students studied more English than Arabic literature. Graduating in 1904, al-Sibāʿī became a prolific translator of English literature and thought, his translations including Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (Riwāyat Yūlyūs Qayṣar) (n.d.), Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes (al-Abṭāl, 1911), Macaulay's Essay on Addison (1852) (Maqālat Macaulay ʿan Addison) (1910–11), Herbert Spencer's Education (al-Tarbiya) (1908), Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (Riwāyat dhāt al-thawb al-abyaḍ) (n.d.), and Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (Qiṣṣat al-madīnatayn) (1912). The translation of Carlyle became a canonical text of the colonial school's curriculum while the translation of Dickens was made a required text in secondary school education in 1912.Al-Sibāʿī practised faithful translation, and by supposedly adhering closely to original texts, intended translation to initiate a cultural renaissance in Egypt. In his translations and original works, al-Sibāʿī sought the most apt Arabic expression for the English one and used classical Arabic, taḍmīn (inserting Arabic poetry) and sajʿ (rhyming prose) to give his literature cultural legitimacy.

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• ISBN: 9781474407403, 1474407404