Part II - East, West, and World Literature

Summary

We are at a stage of our literary and social evolution in which many spiritual needs have awakened which we did not know before our new contact with the West. As we have no pens and brains that can fulfill those needs, let us then translate! Let us honor the status of the translator because he is an agent of acquaintance between us and the larger human family.

– Mīkhā’īl Nu‘ayma

I will discuss in this part of the book four cases of one-sided interference from Western culture into Arab culture, relying on the theoretical conceptions formulated during the 1980s and 1990s. Interference can be defined as “a relation(ship) between literatures, whereby a certain literature A (a source literature) may become a source of direct or indirect loans for another literature B (a target literature).” What may move, be borrowed, taken over from one culture to another is not just an item of repertoire, but also a host of other features and items:

The role and function of literature, the rules of the game of the literary institution, the nature of literary criticism and scholarship, the relations between religious, political, and other activities within culture and literary production— all may be modelled in a given culture in relation to some other system. It would therefore be inadequate to reduce interference to just the seemingly more visible level of the text or even of the model(s) behind it. I say “seemingly” because in many specific cases of interference in the history of literatures, once one looks elsewhere, other pertinent phenomena become no less “visible.”

As for the channels of interference, they are multiple and various, depending chiefly on whether interference is direct or indirect:

In the case of direct interference, a source literature is available to, and accessed by, agents of the target literature without intermediaries. They know the language of the source literature and may have better access to its resources than in the case of the second type. In this second type, interference is intermediated through some channel, such as translation.