Found in translation

Avid Prospect readers will remember our September report that Kalima, a new foundation dedicated to Arabic translation, was stepping up to stem the woeful shortfall of books translated into Arabic. Now their first 100 choices have been announced – and the list offers a fascinating insight into how western culture might be ‘translated’.

One must remember this selection is somewhat distorted by the fact that a number of foreign books do already exist in Arabic - (so, for example, Kalima have chosen Milton’s Paradise Regained, as the more celebrated Paradise Lost has already been translated). Nevertheless, what has been chosen, and what hasn’t, is still worthy of some attention.

Kalima have drawn from 16 languages, although over half the titles are in English. Seventy-one are contemporary works (defined as post-second world war), 10 are ancient classics, and 19 are modern classics (ranging from Chaucer to John Maynard Keynes). There are 32 in the literature category, 25 in science, 13 in law, social sciences and education, 11 on philosophy and psychology, 10 on history geography and biography, 5 on arts, games and sports and 5 classified as ‘general reference’.

Top of the pile and the first to hit the bookshelves will be: Il Sego (Umberto Eco), The Halo Effect (Phil Rosenweig), The Future of Human Nature (Stephen Hawking), Kafka on the Shore (Hariki Murakami) and The Arab Roots of Capitalism (Gene Hack).

Evidently compiled to promote as broad a cultural understanding as possible - Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon provides a handy overview of literature - there are nonetheless some elements of the ‘western’ literary field that have been emphasised more than others in this selection. Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup – a tale in which a young, white South African woman falls in love with an immigrant and adapts to life in the strict Islamic culture of his native country – is on the list. Unsurprisingly, Salman Rushdie is not.

Kalima’s chief executive Karim Nagy hopes their initiative will bring about a “translation revival” and put Arabic readers “back in touch”. “The rest of the world enjoys a wealth of domestic and translated writing – why should the Arab world be any different?” he asks.

A pertinent question indeed. A real “translation revival” requires two-way traffic, yet, as we have already pointed out, fewer than 50 Arabic books a year are currently translated into western languages. If anything this should be a start of a dialogue. As globe-trotting Yann Martel so floridly puts it: “With Kalima as our camel, let us trade again with the Arabs in the greatest of all goods: words and ideas.”