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Abstract
In this autobiographical article, the celebrated Egyptian theatre critic, scholar and Shakespeare translator Mohamed Enani reflects on some of the challenges - and some of the unexpected felicities - of translating Shakespeare's complete sonnets into Arabic.
Keywords: Arabic translation, Mohamed Enani, Shakespeare, sonnets
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A puzzle: why should all translators the world over and down the centuries translate verse into verse, while we Arabs, who boast a rich tradition of verse, use prose to render Shakespeare's sonnets? After many decades in which Shakespeare's Arab readers and translators paid relatively little attention to the sonnets, the past generation has brought a flurry of efforts. About six translations of the sonnets, each nearly complete, have appeared since the 1980s.1 Each one tries to reproduce the form of the sonnet, translating some many times, like sonnet 18, and omitting others, such as the notorious 135 and 136. But they are mostly in prose, with the exception of the last (my own, 2016).
In the days of the Apollo School (1932-1934), verse was rendered in verse and readers expected translated poetry to sound poetic in Arabic. However, Egyptian translators of the sonnets, especially Badr Tawfiq, who had been an army officer before acquiring a working knowledge of English, helped to re-establish the practice of translating verse into prose. In the hands of a gifted writer, that practice could produce readable translations, when the rhythm of the prose is attractive enough to compensate for the loss of metre and rhyme. However, Tawfiq was a mediocre poet in Arabic, and his prose translation of the sonnets seemed to tell his readers that there was nothing to be gained aesthetically from reading the sonnets.
Twenty-first-century translators have produced more accurate sonnets than Tawfiq's error-riddled version. Among these was Ismat Walley, a lecturer in English at Alexandria University, in 2005. Syrian-born UK-based scholar Kamal Abu-Deeb produced his own version of the sonnets, with an extensive introduction and notes. The basic problem persisted, however, as the reading public was called upon to believe that Arabic prose was in fact English poetry.
Dr Na'eem 'Atiyyah, a brilliant translator from Greek, put it succinctly: why spend three days translating a poem into verse, when you can do it in...