Lucia Avallone

Inaam Kachachi's novel The American Granddaughter provides an opportunity to reflect on the role of interpreters - exiles or locally enlisted - operating in war zones. Issues of both identity and mediation between the parties involved emerge, as well as conflict narratives. The resulting picture is not only reminiscent of the Iraqi disaster, but is also a painful depiction of dynamics repeated where essentially weapons are speaking. The story's protagonist, Zayna, faces returning to Iraq, where she is originally from, for a mission that labels her an enemy of her own people, but which will help her rebuild her identity with a new awareness.

In modern Egyptian literature realist narrators have often considered language variation as an instrument to represent social classes, religious affiliation, education levels, geographic and gender identities. The adoption of standard Arabic or Egyptian vernacular in dialogues, with code switching and mixing phenomena, sometimes has even transcended language reality having rather the aim of defining groups with their roles, social positions and specific cultural traits. Among the realist texts written in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, some show a dominant search for verisimilitude while others indicate a symbolic or ideological value of the authors’ choices. My contribution presents some findings of a study I am carrying out on literary works displaying one or the other stance, al-Arḍ (1953), by ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Šarqāwī, and al-Ǧabal (1959), by Fatḥī Ġānim, whose authors’ main purpose is to represent the harsh reality of rural communities opposed to the governmental unfair policies in the 1930s and 1940s, before the Revolution of July 1952.

This paper deals with the issue of language variation in contemporary Egyptian literature and highlights a number of written cases of exposure to diglossia and multilingualism. The interaction among varieties of the same language and the switching to foreign languages originate significant effects in writing, although to a lesser extent than in speaking. The research is based on a corpus of literary texts in which the composite and unstable reality of orality is reflected, namely two novels published in the first decade of 21st century: ‘Imārat Ya‘qūbiyān, by ‘Alā’ al-’Aswānī, and ’An takūn ‘Abbās al-‘Abd, by ’Aḥmad al-‘Ᾱydī. The first work shows the writer’s choice to represent the characters’ dialogues by adopting ‘āmmiyyah or fuṣḥā or intermediate varieties, according to discourse functions. The second one is an example of mistilingual and pluristylistic narrative in which the author uses code mixing and code switching to depict a milieu marked by the interference of endogenous or exogenous models. Both novelists use language resources which are available in a rich and complex linguistic situation and represent a complicated and stifling society: al-’Aswānī from a realistic point of view, and ’Aḥmad al-‘Ᾱydī with a postmodern sensibility.

Le società arabe moderne hanno visto partecipare attivamente ai loro cambiamenti narratori, drammaturghi e poeti. Il pensiero e le aspirazioni degli arabi nel farsi nazione sono stati veicolati da narrazioni che hanno descritto e rappresentato tanto le élite quanto le classi popolari, gli ambienti urbani o rurali. Sebbene spesso gli autori abbiano attinto a eventi e situazioni del presente o di un passato non lontano, sono state talvolta le epoche più remote a offrire materiale attraverso cui raffigurare l’individuo e il suo mondo, esprimendo concezioni della vita interiore e di quella civile. In una lunga serie di scambi e contaminazioni, temi elaborati dalle antiche civiltà sviluppatesi sulle sponde del Mar Mediterraneo e nei territori limitrofi hanno, infatti, reso possibile la formazione di un patrimonio culturale condiviso su più piani: intellettuale, estetico, morale e ideologico. Tratti del vivere sociale e individuale, manifestazioni materiali e spirituali di popolazioni diverse – dalla Mesopotamia al Vicino Oriente, all’Egitto faraonico e copto, alla Grecia, a Roma, a Bisanzio, alla civiltà arabo-islamica – si sono integrati per costituire un’eredità trasmessa anche alla cultura araba moderna. Gli echi di un passato storicamente documentato o mediato dalla letteratura scritta e dalla tradizione orale sono diventati motivi d’ispirazione nella creazione di nuovi racconti e nella riscrittura di antiche narrazioni. I miti, con e grazie al loro alto valore simbolico, hanno continuato a esercitare un proprio ruolo, esprimendo strutture fondamentali della psiche, dell’esperienza e del comportamento umano.

Language and culture in standard Arabic and Egyptian vernacular translations Lucia Avallone The translation of theatrical works in which dialects are present is a delicate process of mediation requiring a careful valuation of formal and communicative textual aspects. For mediating between two different universes the translator must firstly choose whether to transmit the original text language variation-through the strategies available in the target language-or whether to ignore it, transferring the script into the standard target language. Accordingly, both the source oriented and the target-oriented translations are possible and produce results worthy of being examined, from the perspective of a wide interdisciplinary area including linguistic and cultural studies. Arabic versions of Italian theatrical and narrative works, originally characterized by the use of dialects, show a variety of solutions to the problems arising while translating, which are interesting for reflecting on the general decision-making process of translation and on the language choices adopted in a given target culture. My contribution aims to present the outcomes of a comparison between the original text of Filumena Marturano (1946), one of the comedies written by the Italian dramatist Eduardo De Filippo, and both the standard Arabic translation (2006) and the Egyptian vernacular script of its stage representation (1998). In the source text there are many Neapolitan vernacular expressions, as dialect is a major feature in typifying characters and environment, but the translations resort to a general neutralization of the foreign culture, through standardization or homogenization with the Egyptian culture.

The article deals with the study of President Sādāt’s speech at the Knesset, highlighting some strategies adopted to convince his audiences of the logic and necessity to initiate a peace process in the Middle East. We have chosen to assume some categories and methodological tools taken from the New Rhetoric and the Critical Discourse Analysis, aiming to describe the rhetorical techniques for building the audience’s interest, displaying the speaker’s image, and the language choices considered more appropriate to achieve the goals of persuasion.

By writing The Committee (1981) Sonallah Ibrahim constructs a short novel in which the theme of “secret” is crucial. Step by step he portrays the protagonist’s society adding elements to a story that appears out of the ordinary and ends in the absurd. The relationship between writer and reader is in fact based on a gradual and incomplete disclosure of the knowledge that the former seems to want to reveal to the latter. The fundamental mechanism in the texture of the story is keeping identities and purposes secret, concealing possible truths but at the same time launching the protagonist in an exhausting search of clues and traces which are key issues in the modern Middle East history. The effects that certain events and situations have had and continue to have on the lives of Egyptians are associated with the enigmatic trials that a mysterious committee prescribes for an ordinary citizen. While the protagonist performs these tasks, images of a convulsive urban reality, marked by the policies undertaken in the Egypt of the seventies, run through the eyes of the reader, and an oppressive space takes shape. My contribution offers an interpretation of the novel which highlights the concept of secrecy in relation to the possible existence of a second reality, alongside the more obvious one (Simmel 1906), the maieutic strategy employed to arrive at the unveiling of the meaning, and the narrative structure regulated by a double direction process, on one hand the concealment and on the other the fragmentary revelation of information that apparently leads to the mystery’s solution, advancing and retreating with respect to the “essential secret” (Todorov 1971).

Every language has a repertoire of insults, swear words, and curses which speakers can draw from. When canonical curses do not seem fit for purposes, individual creativity coins new ones, adding ironic elements to traditional and crystallized utterances. So, the divine, by which many curses are inspired, can be abandoned to draw on profanity, searching for agents, objects, and actions of the curses in ordinary human life. But what happens in literature, which is one of the highest expressions of human creativity? The characters of literary texts, like their real counterparts, swear, insult, and wish bad luck. Often, and for a long time, these speech acts have been considered taboo by most Arab authors. The wider freedom of how to speak, given to the characters in the 2000s, allows the occurrence of a large amount of curses and swearing, borrowed from both the vernacular and standard Arabic but also invented. They are incisive elements in the texts, nevertheless they could be destined to remain linguistic and rhetorical exercises, like the ones contained in the novel ’An takūn ‘Abbās al-‘Abd (2003), by ’Aḥmad al-‘Āydī, that this article aims to study basing its arguments on syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic perspectives.

In 1994, after a failed attempt on his life, Mahfouz underwent a period of physical rehabilitation and entered the final phase of his literary career. His last work, a collection of dreams composed while his physical difficulties made writing impossible thus compelling him to dictate his last work, marked the writer's abandonment of the complex structure of the novel for short and fragmentary narratives. This paper proposes some reflections on Mahfouz’ passage to the new literary genre, the choice of an essential and rapid style, and the offer of a deep private portrait. In this context, reminiscence and oneiric experience are considered as significant expressions of the writer's aesthetics where time had an essential role in determining plots and forms and in a philosophical research which only halted with his death. In addition, Mahfouz’ late work is showed in relation to its precedents in classical and premodern Arabic literature and as a prelude to the rebirth of the very short narrative of the 2000s.

Egyptian cultural orientations in the late 19th and early 20th century pointed towards the North shore of the Mediterranean. Study missions, journeys aimed to acquire knowledge and technical skills, and diplomatic delegations posed cultural, political, and economic elites in direct contact with the modern European ideas and achievements. At the same time an opposite migration interested the main Egyptian cities, widening foreign communities. As evidence of that time and those societies, passed into history as cosmopolitan, many traces including literary works remain. With this contribution I intend to propose a reading of the age through the oeuvres of authors who participated in the controversial relationship between Egyptians and Europeans, sometimes creating an idealized image of confluence between different cultures, in a context that, more realistically, saw Egypt subject to Western colonialism.

Ǧabrā Ibrāhīm Ǧabrā, poet, novelist, painter, translator, literary and art critic, was one of the most significant figures in the Arab cultural landscape of the twentieth century. A Christian Palestinian exile in Iraq, he expressed the different aspects of himself through different means, each one supporting the other in a continuous creative effort. Author of short stories, novels and poems, he introduced into the Arabic culture works of Shakespeare, Beckett and Faulkner, and participated in the creation and development of the Arab Modernism both in literature and in painting. Member of the Baghdad Modern Art Group, he addressed the topic of identity, shaping a verbal and figurative aesthetics of the exile experience and the nation-building in an existentialist perspective, and promoting a progressive activism that has recovered the roots of civilization and tradition and was opposed to a quiescent traditionalism as one. Through a re-reading of what he produced dealing with various fields, this article aims to map the creative paths of Ǧabrā.

In the process of formation of modern Egypt contributions from cultures other than Egyptian were considerable. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries continuous flows of immigrants from Western and Middle-Eastern countries occurred. They were originated by a number of reasons, but all of them shared a common research of a safe place to work and thrive in. The governmental xeno-phile policies and the favourable economic conditions in the country allowed the setting up of large colonies and the professional integration of foreign specialists in public and private activities pivotal for the development of modern Egypt. The European model dominated in the reforming work started by Muhammad 'Ali, moulding the new ruling classes. At the same time a lively cosmopolitan society grew, leaving its mark in several fields of social, economic and cultural life. This age, long more than one hundred years, ended in a revolution that returned Egypt to the Egyptians, but did not erase its material and ideal legacy.

The first decade of the new millennium represents a crucial change for Egyptian civil society and its means of expression. This paper presents a brief overview of some new narrative forms developed in those years that were a prelude to the movement of revolt against Mubārak and his establishment. Short and long tales adapted from blogs, graphic and postmodern novels related to the web environment suggest that the free public cyberspace hosts voices of new cultural trends and is a workshop for literary creativity.

Pubblicato nel 2002 dallo scrittore egiziano ʿAlāʾ al-Aswānī, Palazzo Yacoubian è uno dei romanzi più rappresentativi della società egiziana alla vigilia delle Primavere arabe. Lo studio di Lucia Avallone ne analizza forma e contenuto, mettendo in evidenza le scelte linguistiche operate dall’autore per raffigurare la comunità cairota. Romanzo corale, scritto nel solco della grande narrativa realista, le sue storie esemplificano aspetti contraddittori e conflittuali del vivere egiziano, qui interpretato in relazione all’uso delle varietà linguistiche standard e vernacolari che l’autore adotta nel dare voce a personaggi di diversa estrazione sociale e culturale.