Paratextuality plays a key role in cultural stereotyping and ideological framing of the translated texts and pre-positions the reader by setting certain expectations (Baker 2006). They also serve as a tool of adaptation (Genette 1997), superimposing certain interpretations of the author’s intentions and ideologies. Here, George Orwell’s Animal Farm is an optimum example. The rising interest in its Arabic translation, especially in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings bears on the politicized readings of the text, as manifested in the paratextual elements accompanying its translations. The present study investigates the role of paratextual renderings of Animal Farm in mainstreaming ideological frames and cultural stereotypes about the narrative. Drawing on Genette (1997), we close-read peritexts of the Arabic translations and probe potential paratextual functions. So far, sixteen plus Arabic translations of the novel have been published. This recent translational influx reflects, besides literary and cultural significance of the novella, an increasing interest in reading it as symbolizing the recent socio-political change. As a process where content transfer and transform(ation) overlap, translation involves an inevitable degree of bias (Venuti 2012). Orwell’s novella was largely appropriated by Arabic translators as a political manifesto, to the disregard of its other literary and cultural valances. For Arab readership, Animal Farm belongs to a long line of allegorical tales, not so much different from works like Kalila wa Dimna (The Panchatantra), where the political largely prevails over the literary. The present study thus draws on Lefevere (1992), Genette (1997), Kress and van Leeuwen (2006), Van Dijk (2003), and Baker (2006) in exploring paratextual elements as potential sites for translatorial/editorial intervention, ideological framing, and cultural appropriation of the translated text. It investigates the use of paratextual elements as sites for contestation of agency and validity, and also for interpretive foreclosure in ways that suppress/miss potential layers of meaning in the novella.
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This article traces the manifestations of the newly adapted artistic form of “calligraffiti,” or the synthetic braiding of poetry and graffiti on what became known as the “walls of protest” in post-2011 Egypt. This new mode of writing/drawing answers to the immediacy of an unprecedented revolutionary moment in Egypt and rewrites Egyptian history in peculiar artistic instantaneity. The image-text discursive dynamics of this hybrid form of expression enhance our understanding of the 2011 Egyptian uprising, enabling us to explore the potential of revolutionary impulse for stretching new artistic forms. This article therefore engages calligraffiti as a means to expand the scope of the literary, and specifically the poetic, to involve the visual dimension as coupled with the conceptual (linguistic). In this border- and genre-crossing artistic mode, Arabic poetry and graffiti meld as a revolutionary form of self-expression that defies local and international hegemonic, patriarchal regimes. Calligraffiti serves not only as a means of registering a revolutionary moment in Egypt or of celebrating the epiphany of the uprising, but more importantly it stands as a cultural and literary tool developed and used by Egyptian artists to represent the revolutionary artistic self and galvanize dissent during a highly contested moment in Egypt’s history. The article thus traces the ways that the calligraffiti of Egyptian artists like Bahiyyah Shihāb (Bahia Shehab) and ʿUmar Fatḥī (Omar Fathy), ʿAmmār Abū Bakr (Ammar Abo Bakr), Ganzīr (Ganzeer), Al-Mushīr (El-Moshir) and ʿAlāʾ ʿAwaḍ (Alaa Awad), are enmeshed with the poetic lines of Amal Dunqul, Pablo Neruda, and Yāsir al-Manawahlī (Yasser el-Manawahly) on the artistic canvas of muralled Egyptian revolution.
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