5 minutes

Around the world in 80 books

Dr..

Kamal Abdul Malik

April 15, 2022

Professor David Damroche, Head of the Department of Comparative Literature and founder of the Harvard University Institute for World Literature, and chief editor of the Encyclopedia of World Literature, in which she participated with two entries on Arabic literature in the Ottoman and Modern Era (the encyclopedia title is: Literature: A World History and its publication date next July), explains In the first entry on Arabic literature during the Ottoman period, there is a view that it was not an era of decadence, as many Arab researchers and orientalists assert.

As for the second entry on Arabic literature written in Arabic and French, as in North Africa, it presents a refutation of the hypothesis that literature is a “mirror,” “reflection,” or “window” on a particular culture and society. One might read Egyptian or American literature in the hope of gaining a better understanding of society and culture. Egyptian or American, and therefore Naguib Mahfouz’s novels can be assigned to history or political science courses so that students are introduced to a specific period in Egyptian history, its societal values ​​and norms.

In the spring of 2020, Professor David Damroche found his travel plans turned upside down, due to the coronavirus.

But Damrosch was able to quickly turn the disappointment into a remarkable achievement, when he embarked on a literary journey around the world without leaving his home.

Each week of the first epidemic summer, Damroche explored a different city, country or region through five books in his publication Around the World in 80 Books, which borrows the organizing principle of Jules Verne's book Around the World in 80 Days.

In his wanderings among books and novels, Damroche found all kinds of references to epidemics and diseases, in reference to the narrations of Boccaccio's "Decameron" and Gabriel García Márquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera".

He also found writers facing conflict, war, and other topics charged with conflicting emotions.

These issues are alive in culture today, he said.

He stressed that the project's interests are always literary.

He asks how the book creates the city?

How does the city create the book?

What are the effects of war and conflict?

These are the ways in which literature beats the world, and the world appears in literature.

Damrosch defines world literature as all literary works that spread outside their culture or their place of origin, either in their original language or in translation.

He added that the opportunity for world literature to spread is through translation, which may be the only option, considering that we live in a golden age of translation, and that one of the principles he identified for his choice of work is that it should be available in print with a wonderful translation.

As for the Western translations of our Arabic literature, we must pay tribute to the most successful and influential in world literature, and we mean the tales of the Thousand and One Nights, since it was discovered by the French researcher Antoine Galland, and published a translation of it at the beginning of the 18th century (1704) spread in a few years in the languages ​​of Europe the spread of fire in the wildfire.

Overnight it became an essential part of European culture.

After that, many English translations appeared, the most famous of which was the translation of Edward Lane, Richard Burton, and others, and they had an impact on the path of fiction in the Western world, painting and classical music such as “Scheherazade” by the Russian musician Rimsky-Korsakov, and of course Western films, especially animated films for children.

But Arabic literature had to wait until the eighties of the last century, and precisely in 1988, when the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, then it seemed that Arabic literature had been recognized as an active member of the World Literature Association.

*Visiting scholar at Harvard University

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