Refiguring and Normalizing Urban Space: Naguib Mahfouz’s Awlād ḥāratinā and Its English, Polish, and Spanish Translations

Marcin Michalski^*

Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4550-905X

INTRODUCTION

In 1959, Naguib Mahfouz, then an acclaimed Egyptian writer with the well-known Cairo trilogy (1956–57) to his credit, published another novel, serialized in the respected and widely circulated newspaper Al-Ahrām. The novel, given the innocuous title Awlād ḥāratinā (Children of Our ḥāra, henceforth: Awlād), was soon to turn problematic, because it easily reads as an allegory of Judeo-Christian-Islamic history: the ḥāra with its inhabitants stands for the world and the main characters are identifiable with Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, represented as rather mundane, and God, embodied by the community’s ancestor, who eventually dies. All of this, combined with the number of the novel’s chapters being 114—as many as those in the Quran—made some circles, especially the Islamic al-Azhar University, consider the novel sacrilegious. Mahfouz himself was unwilling to see it republished. Consequently, it did not appear as a book until 1967, in Beirut; however, the author shared neither in its production, nor in the profits (Stewart, “Introduction” xviii).^[1] In 1988, when Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, the book, translated by Philip Stewart into English as Children of Gebelawi (1981), was among those cited in the Nobel press release. In Egypt, it was republished in 2006, just months after Mahfouz’s death.

The object of our interest here is the Arabic word ḥāra used in the novel’s title and recurring on nearly every page of this work. It denotes a specific topographical unit of the traditional Middle-Eastern, especially Egyptian, city. Although a number of analyses and commentaries from various perspectives have been devoted to Awlād (e.g., Abu-Haidar, El-Gabalawy, el-Ghitany, Roded, Khalifa, Zaki and Mohamed, to name just a few published in English), in none of them was due attention paid to the term ḥāra featured in its title. The allegorical value of the ḥāra standing for the entire humanity has been well recognized, but the topography of the city represented in the novel has not been adequately analyzed and problems related to the translation of the terms naming its parts raised little interest among scholars.

By way of introduction, let us consider how differently the term ḥāra has been translated:^[2]

(1)

a. wa-ḥāratunā, ḥārat al-Jabalāwī, aṭwal ḥāra fī l-minṭaqa (Awlād 75)
[and our ḥāra, the ḥāra of al-Jabalāwī, it the longest ḥāra in the area]

b. Gebelaawi Alley is the longest in the district (Stew. 99)

c. Our alley, Gabalawi Alley, is the longest in the whole area (Ther. 93)

d. Nasza dzielnica, dzielnica Al-Dżabalawiego, leży przy najdłuższej ulicy w tym rejonie (Dzieci 123)
[Our neighbourhood, the neighbourhood of Al-Dżabalawi, extends along the longest street in this area]

e. Nuestro barrio, el barrio de Gabalaui, es el más largo de losalrededores (Hijos 102)
[Our neighbourhood, the neighbourhood of Gabalaoui, is the longest in the area]

In these four translations, two types of equivalents can be distinguished, denoting two different components of built environment: one (English alley) refers to a topographical element typically conceptualized as having length, the other (Polish dzielnica and Spanish barrio, both of which I render as neighbourhood in this article) to one normally measured as a surface. In both English translations ḥāra is rendered as alley and characterizing it as long or longest seems natural. By contrast, length being a distinctive quality of barrio used in the Spanish version may sound surprising. In the Polish translation, the message has been modified: ḥāra is rendered as dzielnica, which itself is not characterized as longest but as extending along the longest street.

That ḥāra is a semantically complex term is also evidenced by dictionaries. In most Arabic-English, Arabic-Polish, and Arabic-Spanish dictionaries—to limit the sample to the languages covered by this study—the proposed equivalents of ḥāra show this twofold meaning:

Arabic-English dictionaries:

(i) “1. . . . quarter, district; neighbourhood . . .; 2. . . . lane; alley . . .” (Arts 204–05)

(ii) “quarter, part, section (of a city); . . . lane, alley, side street . . .” (Wehr 212)

Arabic-Polish dictionaries:

(iii) “1. dzielnica, kwartał 2. zaułek, uliczka . . .” (Danecki and Kozłowska 272)
[1. neighbourhood, quarter 2. narrow passage, alley . . .]”

(iv) “zaułek; uliczka” (Łacina, Sł. arabsko-polski 281)
[narrow passage, alley]

Arabic-Spanish dictionaries:

(v) “barrio . . .; callejón, calleja” (Corriente and Ferrando 275)
[neighbourhood . . .; alley, narrow street]

(vi) “barrio; . . .; callejón” (Cortés 274)
[neighbourhood; . . .; alley]

However, when the above-listed English, Polish, and Spanish words meaning “district,” “neighbourhood,” “quarter,” etc., are looked up in current English-, Polish- or Spanish-Arabic dictionaries, what one finds in most of them (e.g., Karmi 351, 856; Baalbaki and Baalbaki 359, 763, 945; Wahba 308, 901, 1197; Arts 1489, 1614; Łacina, Sł. polsko-arabski 181) is ḥayy or minṭaqa, not ḥāra; the only exceptions are the dictionary by Reda and that by Karmi, which give ḥāra as one of the equivalents of barrio (96) and quarter (1094), respectively. Similarly, when one consults these dictionaries for the Arabic equivalents of English, Polish, and Spanish words meaning “lane,” “alley,” etc., in most of them one finds zuqāq and darb, not ḥāra, an exception being the dictionary by Łacina, where zaułek is translated as ḥāra (beside zuqāq) (894). This lexical and lexicographic asymmetry, not to say chaos, suggests that in ḥāra we encounter a term denoting a specific cultural concept, closely connected with traditional Arabic cities, unknown to the lexical systems of Western languages. This is why some authors writing about this novel, or ḥāra in general, decide to leave this term untranslated (e.g., Somekh passim; Abu-Haidar passim). This solution is also adopted in the present article.

To demonstrate the kind of translation problems that the concept of ḥāra can generate and the ways in which they were dealt with in the four renditions selected for this study, I start by discussing the semantics of this term. Next, after a brief characterization of the translators and their works, I analyze how ḥāra, as used in various senses in the original edition, was rendered into the three languages—when necessary, with a focus on the connotations of its translation equivalents. A special case is that of the term ḥāra when used in opposition to ḥayy, denoting another topographical unit—a relation which Mahfouz creatively refigured in the novel. Although no statistical examination of particular translation solutions is intended in the present study, some generalizing statements about evident tendencies are ventured.

THE VARIOUS FACES OF ḥāra

Descriptive definitions of ḥāra help us to clarify the meaning of this term. It was registered by Arabic lexicography as early as the 8th century: in the famous first Arabic language dictionary by al-Ḫalīl ibn Aḥmad al-Farāhīdī, it is defined as “kull maḥalla danat min manāzilihim, fa-hum ahl ḥāra” (vol. 1, 378), which can be rendered as: any settlement clustered around people’s dwellings, and they (viz. the inhabitants) are (referred to as) “the people of a (particular) ḥāra.” This definition, repeated with modifications in modern Arabic-Arabic dictionaries (e.g., Masʻūd 289; ʻUmar, vol. 1, 579 and 593), is as vague as it is laconic (typically of classical Arabic lexicons). A more informative characterization can be found in a modern dictionary of Egyptian culture and traditions:

A ḥāra is an area on either side of a major street (šāriʻ) inhabited by a group of people bound together by shared ties. The major street consists of ḥāras, or lanes (darb), while a ḥāra consists of minor lanes (ʻaṭfa). The ḥāra is a unit of social organization superior to the family, as the family corresponds to one house, while the ḥāra is organized as a set of houses or families. The street is where the inhabitants of the ḥāra find space for business activities, the mosque, the furnace, and the market.

The residents of a single ḥāra are united by strong social bonds. They share funerals and weddings and meet at evening parties. Every person in the ḥāra knows the other. In the past, every ḥāra used to have a large gate with a watchman. In the middle of the gate, there was a small door that was used if someone arrived at night . . .—all this because of lack of security and the risk of nocturnal assaults. The large gate would normally be locked in order to prevent thieves from entering the ḥāra. The ḥāra was a source of pride for its residents, who identified with it, saying, “We are the sons/children of ḥāra (awlād al-ḥāra) so-and-so,” following the ancient tradition of taking pride in one’s tribe. . . . (Amīn 133, translation mine)

Highlighting two aspects—the spatial (area) and the social (unit of social organization)—Amīn’s definition becomes clearer when complemented with the explanation given in the dictionary of Egyptian-Arabic by Badawi and Hinds: “narrow lane, alley (traditionally constituting a small neighbourhood)” (231). In a paper devoted to the concept of ḥāra, Al-Messiri Nadim defines it as “a narrow alley, an ʻaṭfa as a narrower alley, usually branching from a ḥāra, and a zuqāq as an offshoot of an ʻaṭfa” (321). The term ḥāra also denotes “the larger unit” (ibid.), comprising the main alley, the thoroughfare, i.e. the ḥāra in the first sense—let us call it architectural—with all its labyrinthine ramifications,^[3] forming a residential neighbourhood.

In former times, the ḥāras were overseen, religiously and administratively, by a šayḫ al-ḥāra (“sheikh of the ḥāra”) and protected by strongmen called in Egypt futuwwa. Calling the ḥāra “one of the distinctive features of the Arabic city,” French Arabist Raymond characterizes such entities as follows:

They have a very consistent structure: there is one entrance point, which can be shut by a gate, and if necessary guarded; one main street, on to which alleys and cul-de-sacs are grafted. There are no specialised markets in these districts, only the suwayḳas [minor markets, translation mine] . . . where the many activities necessary to daily existence take place. The life of the district is that of a community that is quite closed in upon itself; it is open only toward the centre [of the city], where the local inhabitants undertake their activities and towards which the network of roads leads in a hierarchically organised scheme. (“MADĪNA” 552)

It is natural that the term ḥāra is used by way of metonymy to refer to all its inhabitants; as such, it connotes a sense of community and solidarity. As Raymond observes, the ḥāras “provided dwelling for a population that could hardly have exceeded around a thousand inhabitants (around 200 families), so that they lived there in a familiar environment, akin to a village where everyone knows everyone else” (“Organization” 63). This identificational facet of the notion of ḥāra has been signalled above in the quotation from Amīn’s dictionary.

In the social dimension, the word ḥāra, not unlike the English expressions the street or outdoors, denotes public space—understood as one offering free access and charged with various types of shared responsibility—as opposed to private space, home. However, what has primarily shaped the distinction between public and private space in Islamic societies is, in many ways, sex segregation. Public space can thus be perceived as male and private space as female, i.e. one in which women are safe from being seen by strangers, namely males not belonging to the kin group. In addition, Abu-Lughod, to whom I owe the above observation on the “public–male vs. private–female” parallelism, notes that “when it is impossible to achieve the physical and visual separation required between strangers,” the local neighbourhood is considered “an extention of the home and therefore the family” (“Islamic City” 168). In order to capture this, she proposes a third category—“semi-private space.”^[4] There, women can perform their daily tasks without having to “cover themselves as fully as they would have, had they been going into public space” (ibid.). This is, generally, the case with the poorer inhabitants of the city, who are unable to achieve complete gender separation.^[5]

Culturally and economically, the ḥāra is the part of a city where people live the old, traditional way, where religious and patriarchal values predominate, change is unwelcome, and poverty and ignorance not unusual. As such, these areas are opposed to more central and more modern parts of the city, with a regular grid of wider streets. We can find instances of this semantic facet of ḥāra in a book by the Egyptian literary critic Ġālī Šukrī devoted to Mahfouz, in which one reads phrases such as: “since he was a child in the ḥāra” or “the genius of the Egyptian ḥāra” (12, 22, translation mine).

One arrives thus at five uses, or meanings, of the term ḥāra, obviously overlapping in some contexts, relevant to our considerations: geographic (a neighbourhood), metonymic (its inhabitants), architectural (its main thoroughfare), social (public space), and cultural/economic.^[6]

THE ḤĀRA BETWEEN PARTICULARITY AND UNIVERSALITY

From the discussion in the preceding paragraphs ḥāra emerges as a culture-bound term.^[7] More specifically, it falls into the category of untranslatable termini technici referring to local creations of human culture, notions which the target language is incapable of expressing by means of its vocabulary. Such notions, even when explained or described in the target language, do not evoke in the minds of the recipients of the translation the same associations as the recipients of the original text tend to have (Wojtasiewicz 66–67, 71). Faced with such a situation, the translator can opt for some approximate equivalent in the target-language, i.e. an expression sharing some relevant semantic content with the original one and harmonizing with the norms of the target-language and target-culture. This domesticating strategy has been metaphorized by Schleiermacher as leaving the reader in peace as much as possible and moving the writer toward the reader (56), and summarized by Venuti as “an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to target-language cultural values” (“Strategies” 242). A subtype of the domestication strategy would be what Schreiber describes as a procedure in which the target-language norms are respected more than a norm-violating (“normverletzend”) source text, and which results in the levelling (“Nivellierung”) (294–95), or normalizing, of a text. The outcome is then an adaptation (“Bearbeitung”), not a translation (“Übersetzung”). Domesticating translation is usually a means of achieving fluency, transparency, idiomaticity, readability, or whatever we call it—an ideal extensively discussed and questioned by Venuti in The Translator’s Invisibility. Foreignization, the strategy situated at the opposed pole, consists, in simplest terms, in adhering in the translation process to the values of the source-language and source-culture, and making the linguistic and cultural differences visible in the target-text. “Such a translation strategy,” observes Venuti, “can best be called resistancy, not merely because it avoids fluency, but because it challenges the target-language culture even as it enacts its own ethnocentric violence on the foreign text” (Invisibility 24).

The local colours and flavours present in Mahfouz’s works, exemplified by ḥāra, intersect with this author’s international fame and universal reach which ensued from the Nobel Prize and led to his works being translated into many languages. As observed by Jacquemond, giving the Nobel Prize to Mahfouz, a Third-World author, was a continuation of “the integration of the literatures of the South into the world republic of letters” (126), initiated by the boom in Latin American literature. If there is such a thing as world literature, definable, following Damrosch, as “all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language” (4), Mahfouz’s novels undoubtedly belong to it. How all these Egyptian peculiarities are to be rendered into other languages is an obvious question which Mahfouz’s translators ask themselves: should they be, in one way or another, retained in the target-texts, or, rather, sacrificed at the altar of Mahfouz’s universality? In the subsequent parts of this paper, I will analyze how the authors of the four translations of Awlād dealt with ḥāra in light of the above observations on untranslatability, particularity, and universality.

Before discussing these issues, however, it seems fitting to briefly outline the translators’ profiles and to evaluate, at least generally, the quality of their work. Philip Stewart (United Kingdom) was the first to translate Awlād into a foreign language. He did it in 1962, while in Cairo, as an academic working for a PhD degree (not accepted by the university). Later, he “changed course completely, taking a further honours degree in forestry” (Ffrench) and dedicating himself to the sciences. Although his obituary (he died in 2022), published by his alma mater, states that “[h]is publications ranged from Arabic translations, forestry, economics and ecology to the history of chemistry, and poetry” (ibid.), digital library catalogues do not show literary translations from Arabic other than that of Awlād. Whatever the case may be, Stewart devoted a good part of his life to this text. His translation, published in 1981 with a small print run, was based on the 1959 “Al-Ahrām” text (the manuscript, which Mahfouz did not recuperate from the “Al-Ahrām” editors, is considered lost). During his work on Awlād, Stewart discussed with the author some more difficult expressions and “words and phrases” missing from this edition (Shoair 63–64). When the book was reissued in the USA, he seized the opportunity to introduce certain improvements. After 1996, when comparing the Beirut edition with the “Al-Ahrām” text, he discovered that certain words or sentences were missing in the former as well. He counted “961 discrepancies between the two texts, (not including the thousands of differences in punctuation. . . . In some two hundred cases the difference is significant even in translation, affecting who does what, with what or to whom” (Stewart, “Introduction” xviii).^[8] From this comparison he concluded that the Beirut edition was based on both the manuscript and the “Al-Ahrām” text, but was still incomplete. On these grounds he argued that his own revised translation into English is arguably “the only version in any language to take full account of both the original sources” (ibid.).

The second translator of Awlād into English, Peter Theroux (USA)—one of the three Theroux brothers, alongside Alexander and Paul—engaged in literary creation himself, and has translated over ten novels from Arabic, some by luminaries such as Elias Khoury (Lebanon) and Abdelrahman Munif (Jordan/Saudi Arabia). Following Mahfouz’s Nobel Prize, the American University in Cairo Press entrusted Theroux with a new translation because they failed to obtain the rights to use the translation by Stewart; the latter “thought that a world-wide re-launch of the book in the wake of the Rushdie affair was potentially dangerous for [himself], for Mahfouz, for [their] families and associates and for Islamic-Western relations” (Stewart, “Children”). Theroux claims, however, that the reasons for commissioning a new translation may have been financial (668). More interestingly at this point, Stewart, whose translation was praised by Theroux as a “perfectly adequate work” (ibid.), was very critical of his follower’s accomplishment. Not only did he remark that Theroux’s translation, being based only on the Beirut edition, does not reflect the author’s original intentions, but he also criticized his style (which “often does not sound like English”) and even pointed out that Theroux “reproduces mistakes that [he himself] made in [his] 1981 edition, amounting cumulatively to strong evidence of plagiarism” (Stewart, “Children”).^[9]

The author of the Polish translation, Izabela Szybilska-Fiedorowicz, is one of the most competent and prolific translators of modern Arabic literature into Polish, although only occasionally active in this field since 2013. Apart from Awlād, her translations from Arabic include four novels, among which three are by Egyptian authors (Salwa Bakr, Miral al-Tahawy, and Alaa Al Aswany); she has also translated books from English dealing with the Arab world. Finally, not much can be said about the five translators of Awlād into Spanish, namely D. G. Villaescusa, P. M. Monfort, I. Ligorré, C. de Losada, and E. Abelleira. Apart from Hijos, no trace of them can be found in the digital catalogues of Spanish university libraries or in the search engines, which makes one wonder whether these names are real or pseudonymous.

Space constraints preclude discussion of the quality of the translations under analysis or their reception in respective countries. However, summary research reveals that the reviews, at least those available online, have been positive and tended to commend the book’s allegorical and universal nature as well its timelessness.^[10] As a rule, the reviews are not concerned with the issue of faithfulness, which is usually the case when translations from “exotic” languages are discussed in non-specialized publications. At any rate, all of the four texts deserve to be judged as fine in terms of correct language and fidelity.^[11]

It cannot be doubted that the authors of the four translations under analysis were well aware that ḥāra is not an unproblematic word. This is illustrated by Stewart’s explicit justification of his decision in his “Translator’s Introduction” to render it as alley:

Hara is translated as “alley,” and it is worth insisting on the fact that this is correct. Several learned critics have imagined that it means “quarter” or “district,” and one has even claimed that it is the whole of the old city. Any attentive reader will agree that in this book “alley” is right; it is a single thoroughfare (chapter 67), short enough for someone at one end to follow what goes on at the other (chapter 104), and narrow enough for conversation to take place across it (chapter 97). Its people live in appartments [sic] opening on to the stairways to the central courtyards of tenement-houses. These form two facing terraces, and their flat roofs provide alternative routes from one end of the Alley to the other (chapters 33, 60, 83). (xix)

Something to the contrary can be found in the Introduction which leading Polish Arabist and translator Jolanta Kozłowska wrote for the Polish edition: “The word ḥāra used in the title, rendered as dzielnica in the Polish translation, denotes in contemporary language a lane, a street, an alley (‘uliczk[a], ulic[a], zaułek’). The author uses this term interchangeably with ḥayy, which nowadays means a neighbourhood (‘dzielnica’)” (7, translation mine). This disagreement on terminology results from ḥāra being not only a culture-bound term, but a polysemous word as well. In the course of this article, however, it will be shown that this is not where the translator’s problems with ḥāra in this novel end. For the time being, let us observe that out of the five meanings of ḥāra distinguished above, four (1–4) are actualized in Awlād. In the subsequent paragraphs, I will examine how its translators have tried to express these meanings in their languages and how the picture of the Egyptian (and more generally Middle Eastern Arabic, but finally also Mahfouzian) city has been refigured in translation.

GEOGRAPHIC SENSE AND METONYMIC USE

It seems justified to begin the discussion of the equivalents of ḥāra in its geographic sense, roughly corresponding to English neighbourhood or district, with its occurrences in neutral contexts, i.e. those with no reference to its being distributed along a street or being long itself. The regular equivalents in the four versions (also used in the titles—except for Stew.) are alley (Stew. and Ther.), dzielnica (Dzieci), and barrio (Hijos). These two general ways of conceiving of the ḥāra, one as a street-like entity and the other as a neighbourhood-like area, seem to be equally justified. Complications arise whenever the longitudinal shape of the ḥāra is referred to, with its beginning, called maṭla‘ (literally: “starting point”), ra’s (literally: “head”), or nihāya (literally: “end”), and many ends, or cul-de-sacs. Translating ḥāra as dzielnica or barrio would sound unconvincing in such contexts since neighbourhoods do not tend to have one identifiable beginning. Therefore, the Polish and Spanish translators depart from their regular practice and opt for an equivalent denoting a street, as illustrated in (1) earlier in the article and (2):

(2)

a. ašāra ilā l-bayt al-kabīr ‘alā ra’s al-ḥāra (Awlād 7)
[he pointed to the Great House at the head of the ḥāra]

b. wskazuje na Posiadłość na końcu ulicy (Dzieci11)
[he points to the Estate at the end of the street]

c. señala hacia la Casa Grande, al comienzo del callejón (Hijos 9)
[he points to the Great House, at the beginning of the alley]

Sometimes, however, for instance in (3) and (4) below, it is alley, the term denoting a street-like entity, that may sound less than fluent or unnatural when taken out of the context of the novel:

(3)

a. innanā abnā’ ḥāra wāḥida, wa-jadd wāḥid (Awlād 130)
[we are sons of one ḥāra, and one ancestor]

b. we’re all sons of one Alley and one Ancestor (Stew. 181)

c. we all share one alley and one ancestor (Ther. 166)

(4)

a. a-lā tūjad kūdiya fī l-ḥāra? (Awlād 168)
[Isn’t there an exorcist in the ḥāra?]

b. Isn’t there an exorcist down the Alley? (Stew. 236)

c. Couldn’t you find an exorcist in the alley? (Ther. 216)

In English, Polish, Spanish, and many other languages, it is usual for speakers to identify with a neighbourhood, a district, rather than with a street or an alley. Likewise, one does not expect an alley to be an area large or individuated enough to have its own exorcist. The readers of the English translations, then, have to get used to this identity-creating and individuating potential of the alley as they become acquainted with the universe represented in the novel. It would be difficult to imagine a more vivid example of foreignizing translation as regards ḥāra in Awlād.

As far as the metonymic use of ḥāra to refer to its inhabitants is concerned, the translators consistently resort to the terms which they have adopted for the translation of ḥāra in the geographic sense, e.g., “the Alley slept” (Stew. 246), “Dzielnica już spała” [“The neighbourhood slept already”] (Dzieci 285) (apart from cases in which they use general terms like English people and their Polish and Spanish equivalents: ludzie and gente). This terminological consistency only corroborates the notional architecture of the city represented in each particular translation.

There is, however, one place in Awlād where one of the translators into English—Theroux—departs from the use of alley as the equivalent of ḥāra in the geographic sense. As a result of a series of internal conflicts, a number of the inhabitants of the ḥāra emigrate to create their own settlement, which is also referred to as ḥāra, more specifically, al-ḥāra al-jadīda, “the new ḥāra.” As if feeling that “founding a new alley” would sound somewhat atypical, Theroux domesticates this phrase into “the new neighborhood” (Ther. 330). But even Stewart, rather than being satisfied with the most obvious equivalent (“the new alley”), reads al-ḥāra al-jadīda as a proper name—an interpretation not at all suggested by the Arabic fragment, which has no capital letters—and additionally uses quotation marks to present the reader with “the ‘New Alley’” (Stew. 364).

It is a puzzling choice of Theroux’s to render ḥāra jadīda, “a new ḥāra” in this sense (Awlād 253), as “a new civilization” (Ther. 329). One can only guess that he saw—wanted to see?—in this place of the original text the Arabic word ḥaḍāra “civilization,” similar to ḥāra graphically and phonetically. Admittedly, it makes sense in this context, but does not seem to have been intended by Mahfouz. I mention this case not only as a curiosity, but also as another piece of evidence showing that the renderings of the Arabic term ḥāra in the geographic sense are by no means consistent and often hardly reflect the original meaning.

ARCHITECTURAL AND SOCIAL SENSE

As already mentioned above, the thoroughfare along which the ḥāra as neighbourhood extends is also referred to as ḥāra (alternatively darb or sikka). In some passages of Awlād, even when its longitudinal dimension is not hinted at, it is clear that ḥāra denotes not the whole neighbourhood, but this more limited area where, for instance, people can gather. This meaning is clearly reflected in translation equivalents such as English road (e.g., Stew. 167) and street (e.g., Ther. 153) and their Polish and Spanish correspondents: ulica (e.g., Dzieci 198) and calle (e.g., Hijos 174).

Since the area of the ḥāra qua street is considered public space, the term itself can be metonymized in this sense, as opposed to private space, home. At this point, it should be remarked that the concept of the ḥāra as (extended) (semi-)private/female space introduced by Abu-Lughod does not seem to be instantiated in Awlād. This is probably due to the fact that nearly all events depicted in the novel take place within the ḥāra qua neighbourhood, with which no outer world (the rest of the city/world)—thus, no public space—contrasts. Instead of being one of the two opposed terms, Mahfouz’s ḥāra itself can be divided into public space and private space. In the novel, however, the latter is referred to not by means of the usual term bayt, “house, home,” but rather rabʻ (and its plural rubūʻ), a specifically Cairene term denoting a tenement-house with a shared courtyard. Although this particular type of lodging constituted the majority of the houses in the neighbourhood (Awlād 75), it seems that the opposition ḥāra vs. rab‘ has not been recognized by the translators as relevant, and has often been lost in translation, for instance by way of omission:

(5)

a. wa-ḫarajū ilā l-ḥāra wa-l-rubū‘ tatajāwab bi-l-ṣuwāt (Awlād 263)
[and they went out into the ḥāra while the rab‘s echoed with clamour]

b. and went out into the road or the courtyards (Stew. 378)

c. and went out into the alley and courtyards (Ther. 342)

d. wylegli na ulice i podwórza (Dzieci 429)
[went out into the streets and courtyards]

e. el griterío atronaba casas y patios (Hijos 376)
[the clamour thundered through houses and courtyards]

In this example, all translations, departing quite far from the Arabic text, fail to convey the original message that even those who remained in the rabʻs—i.e. the women, who generally tended to stay indoors (private, female space)—were protesting.

ḤAYY AND ḤĀRA—A RELATIONSHIP REFIGURED

The term ḥayy (plural: aḥyā’) is the commonest Arabic dictionary equivalent of words such as English neighbourhood/district, Polish dzielnica, and Spanish barrio, i.e. those denoting a larger part of a city individuated in some way. The ḥayy al-Ḥusayn and ḥayy Ḫān al-Ḫalīlī (commonly spelt in English as Khan el-Khalili) are examples of the traditional central ḥayys of Cairo (nowadays also tourist attractions). They are composed of a number of ḥāras and would never be referred to as ḥāra themselves. A topography structured in such a conventional way is the setting of the initial (1–23) chapters of Awlād, which narrate events prior to the creation of “our ḥāra.” In the Polish and Spanish versions, ḥayy in the initial chapters is translated in the same way as ḥāra throughout the book: as dzielnica and barrio, respectively (for example Dzieci 33 and Hijos 27). Consequently, the distinction between the superordinate ḥayy and the subordinate ḥāra is lost. This is the result of the decision to generally use the terms dzielnica and barrio as translations of ḥāra. In the English translations, ḥayy is rendered as district (e.g., Stew. 20) and neighborhood (e.g., Ther. 22), which adequately contrasts with alley for ḥāra: the distinction between the superordinate and subordinate units is clear.

In the topography of the initial chapters, the ḥayys are, as is the custom, composed of ḥāras. For instance, expelled from the Great House into the outer world, Adham strays into one of the ḥāras (Awlād 39), perhaps part of his own ḥayy. However, this is where the conventional use of the terms ḥayy and ḥāra ends in the novel. The ḥāra founded on a wasteland outside the Great House expands (end of chapter 23) and develops into a world of its own, itself divided into ḥayys. The two terms, ḥāra and ḥayy, are strictly distinguished by Mahfouz (cf. Kozłowska 7), as seen explicitly in the example below:

(6)

a. fa-yafriḍ nafsahu futuwwa ʻalā ḥayy min aḥyā’ al-ḥāra (Awlād 76)
[and imposes himself as a protector on some ḥayy among the ḥayys of the ḥāra]

b. making himself the strongman of one of the sectors of the Alley (Stew. 100)

c. imposing himself as a protector on a neighborhood somewhere in the alley (Ther. 94)

d. uzurpując sobie rolę futuwwy—obrońcy któregoś terytorium dzielnicy (Dzieci 124)
[usurping the role of a futuwwa—protector of some territory of the neighbourhood]

e. se nombraba a sí mismo jefe de uno de los sectores del barrio (Hijos 103)
[proclaiming himself the chief of one of the sectors of the neighbourhood]

Theroux’s decision to render ḥayy as neighborhood in (6c) results in the rather awkward idea of “a neighborhood somewhere in the alley.” There are also other expressions of this kind: “make the rounds of the alley’s neighborhoods” (Ther. 254) or “alley with its feuding neighborhoods” (Ther. 270). All of them make the surprised reader wonder: can an alley have neighbourhoods? In the following section, I will venture the hypothesis that such a surprise might in fact have been Mahfouz’s intention.

DISCUSSION

The usual Arabic expression reflecting the hierarchical relationship between the concepts ḥāra and ḥayy is ḥārāt al-ḥayy^[12] (“the ḥāras of the ḥayy”), not aḥyā’ al-ḥāra (“the ḥayys of the ḥāra”), as is the case in (6). In Awlād, the initial conventional meaning of ḥayy ceases to be actualized at some point, and “our ḥāra,” historically part of a ḥayy, now itself divides into ḥayys. The typical urban space is thus refigured into an unfamiliar one, and the topographical labels become semantically altered. This new topographical terminology is too consistently used in the novel to be the result of terminological carelessness on the author’s part. It seems that Mahfouz wanted to demonstrate in this way that the ontological status of the ḥāra is not a standard one. As a result, the notion of ḥāra acquires new dimensions—those of a city, of a universe. It is no longer an alley or a small neighbourhood, and the reader of the original text is very often reminded of the fact through such new topographical terminology.

This refiguring of space and alteration of nomenclature invalidates the meticulous terminological adjustments made by the translators when dealing with ḥayy and ḥāra in the novel’s initial chapters. The labels have to be rethought. Indeed, in the chapters from 24 onwards, the translators’ regular choices for ḥayy as part of the ḥāra are those exemplified in (6): English sector (Stewart) and neighborhood (Theroux), Polish terytorium (“territory”), Spanish sector.

Theroux’s choice—neighborhood—aside, the remaining solutions seem felicitous inasmuch they do not strike the reader as incongruous. In Venuti’s terms, they are fluent: an alley can conceivably be divided into sectors in English, dzielnica into terytoria in Polish, and a barrio into sectores or barriadas in Spanish. At the same time they are not adequate since they result in a loss of incongruity present in the norm-violating (“normverletzend,” to use Schreiber’s terminology again) original version. As far as the division of the ḥāra is concerned, these three translations offer a picture that has been domesticated, normalized, subjected to Nivellierung, or levelling.^[13] Theroux’s foreignizing choice is the most felicitous in terms of reflecting the incongruity found in the original text and suggesting that what is being described is not just a conventional alley.

It also seems that the use of terms meaning neighbourhood and street to render ḥāra in its usual sense can be considered in terms of foreignization and domestication. Dzielnica (Dzieci) and barrio (Hijos) are instances of domestication, assuming that these terms foreground that aspect of ḥāra which secures fluency in the target-texts, i.e. is easily understood and normally used in similar contexts in the Polish and Spanish cultures. The use of alley, i.e. the term conveying the meaning of street, by Stewart and Theroux, is foreignizing in many contexts, because it has a sense of the foreign, as examples (3) and (4) show. Thus, Stewart’s aforementioned explanatory note on ḥāra/alley was not only self-defence; it was also meant to help absorb this estranging effect.

CONCLUSION

The initial idea for this article was to also examine the use of the terms ḥāra and ḥayy and their translation equivalents in other prose works by Mahfouz, such as Bayn al-Qaṣrayn (1956; English Palace Walk, 1990, by William Maynard Hutchins and Olive E. Kenny), or the entire Cairo trilogy. This could not be carried out due to space limitations. For the time being, suffice it to say that the use of these terms in the Cairo trilogy, in Ḫān al-Ḫalīlī (1945; English Khan al-Khalili, 2008, by Roger Allen) and Zuqāq al-Midaqq (1947; English Midaq Alley, 1966, by Trevor Le Gassick)—to name only the earliest and most famous novels, all set in the traditional Cairene ḥāras and ḥayys, but in which ḥāra and ḥayy play no conspicuous part as lexemes—is utterly conventional. The same holds true for the later collection of stories, Ḥikāyāt ḥāratinā (1975, literally: The Stories of Our ḥāra), again featuring “our ḥāra” in the title and in the narratives, which is, however, lost in its English translation by Soad Sobhy, Essam Fattouh, and James Kenneson, titled Fountain and Tomb (1988). A promising path for further exploration could be an analysis of how the terms ḥāra and ḥayy have been translated into other languages, with some versions already demonstrating interesting modifications in their titles. For instance, that of the French translation by Jean-Patrick Guillaume, Les fils de la médina (The Sons of the Medina, 1991), uses a term absent from the novel’s vocabulary: médina refers to the old (and touristic) parts of an Arab—but primarily Maghrebi, or even more specifically, Moroccan^[14]—town or city. As a result of this decision, the reader’s associations gravitate towards the region of the former French colonies in North Africa. Thus, it can be assumed that a study of other language versions of Mahfouz’s novel might not only demonstrate a given translator’s inclination towards conceiving of the ḥāra as a street or a neighbourhood, but could perhaps also reveal less expected lexical shifts, resulting in texts that offer a refigured topography of the Middle-Eastern, or Egyptian, city.