Book Chapter

Conclusion – The Prophet Today: The Novel in Distress

Kesrouany, Maya I

2018

Overview

And thus every translator is to be regarded as a middle-man [Vermittler] in this universal spiritual commerce [allgemein geistigen Handels], and as making it his business to promote/further this exchange [Wechseltausch]: for say what we may of the insufficiency of translation, yet the work is and will always be one of the weightiest and worthiest matters in the general concerns of the world. The Koran says: ‘God has given to each people a prophet in its own tongue!’ Thus each translator is a prophet to his people.Johann Wolfgang Goethe to Thomas Carlyle, 20 July 1827On 5 July 1945, in response to the forthcoming Arabic translation of La Porte étroite, André Gide (1861–1951) writes a letter to his Arab publisher expressing disappointment with his Arab audience. He has enjoyed the company of Arabs and Muslims, and ‘ne serais sans doute pas le meme, si je ne m’étais jamais … avoir gouté jusqu'a l'extase l’âpre brulure du désert’ (would definitely have not been the same had I not tasted, to the point of ecstasy, the bitter heat of the desert). ‘J'ai su dépouiller alors les revetements de notre culture occidentale et retrouver une authenticité humaine perdue’ (I then stripped the coatings of our Western culture and rediscovered a lost human authenticity), but the Arab world has not reciprocated. On 5 January 1946, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn replies, explaining that Gide has encountered not Islam but ignorant Muslims, committed to the ‘lettre que de l'esprit des textes’ (the ext's letter and not spirit). He comforts Gide: this Arab audience welcomes his message as it has already embraced the ‘maîtres de l'antiquité’ (masters of antiquity) – of course through Ḥusayn's translations.The seemingly clean conversation between two writers captures the confrontation between an uncritical orientalism and even more uncritical self-orientalism. The epistolary exchange suggests a distorted equivalence, between both the French writer and his admirer, and two literary sign-systems: the Arab Orient is ready to receive French knowledge, while the French world has peeled itself to find grounds for resemblance in an orientalist ecstasy under desert suns.

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