Maya Kesrouany, Assistant Professor of Modern Arabic Literature at NYU Abu Dhabi, hadn’t been extensively exposed to Arabic literature beyond what she studied in school until she began writing her master’s thesis at the American University of Beirut. Surprisingly, for someone who studies Arabic literature, her undergraduate career focused on the British and French canon. As an English Literature student, Kesrouany “became fascinated with the novel but wasn’t really so involved with the Arabic novel.”

Much like the translators she studies in her research, Kesrouany navigates the relationship between the European form of the novel and the Arabic tradition. As part of her work for her master’s thesis, she discovered the Lebanese author Elias Khoury and his novel “Yalo” — “which is one of my favorite books,” she interjects — and could see resonance with American author William Faulkner’s work, particularly “The Sound and the Fury.”

She saw similarities in how human beings from Reconstruction Mississippi to late 20th-Century Beirut “tell stories of war,” and what the form of the novel — as opposed to other forms such as poetry and nonfiction — could offer.

Investigating this topic in Lebanon, a country that does not have an “official history,” is extremely relevant. Kesrouany’s work revolves around how the novel can impact and influence societies. She began to see translation as “change and influence rather than the more straightforward [process of converting from] one language into another.”

In 2006, while she was conducting research for her PhD in Comparative Literature at Emory University, she came across 19th- and 20th-Century translations done of French and British literature into Arabic by Syrian immigrants and Egyptians. And she was hooked.

While her PhD dissertation dealt with translations done in Beirut and Palestine in addition to Egypt, her book "Prophetic Translation: The Making of Modern Egyptian Literature" focuses on translations done in Egypt. Kesrouany specifically draws upon the translations of four famous scholars: Mustafa Lutfi al-Manfaluti, Muhammad al-Sibai, Muhammad Husayn Haykal and Taha Husayn. As she writes in the monograph, their translations are “moments of unrealised reformist aspirations and utterances that resist, even while pretending to copy, the logic of narrative representation” and “bridge memories of a pre-colonial literary fantasy with the aspiration of producing literary texts that could recall Arabic as a truth-language.” Clearly, the central ideas of Kesrouany’s book are complex; however, what might be most striking to the lay reader is her use of the term “prophetic.”

Why prophetic translation? Firstly, these translators were Islamic scholars, writing about the Prophet Muhammad and Islam. The translators Kesrouany focuses on presented and positioned themselves as prophets. They possessed a “cultural vocation of bringing modernity,” and communicated a political message. Their original linguistic choices were also akin to the Quran’s language. Lastly, they reconcile the European Romantic tradition, “which believed itself to be prophetic,” and the classical Arabic tradition, “in their own practice of translation as adaptation.”

Despite these translators being prophetic figures, they are far from necessarily honorable. Upon mentioning to Kesrouany a quote about trust and translation by George Steiner, “All understanding, and the demonstrative statement of understanding that is translation, starts with an act of trust,” she breaks into a smile, quickly followed by a giggle. “I don’t trust them at all,” she says.

“They’re manipulators. […] they completely demolish the original,” Kesrouany adds.

Mustafa al-Manfaluti, one of the translators — or as she calls them “my people” — completely adapted the European works, often not citing the original work, and so didn’t engage with translation as a “friendship with the original.” On the other hand, the translator Taha Husayn did attempt to establish a connection with the origin of the text; for example, he exchanged letters with André Gide, a French author whom he translated.

Nonetheless, Kesrouany warns, with a slight grin on her face, that “this relationship of trust […] is laced with the potential for betrayal. […] It’s a pact that is always going to be broken; at some point it can be broken.” Husayn trusted Gide’s playfulness with drama and the impact its translation would have on his world. However, Husayn did not trust Gide’s words. The relationship between Husayn and Gide is therefore nuanced: rather than Husayn simply borrowing words from Gide — a process associated with the colonized-colonizer power dynamic — Husayn focused on the form in which Gide writes.

This liberty in translation may stand in contrast with the typically principled connotation of prophet; but Kesrouany is not so concerned with the rectitude of the translators as their dynamism. She did not trust “her people.” Instead, she trusted that they cannot be trusted: they change positions, oscillating between different stances. “That’s what people do,” she says, “and I find that to be very enriching.”

However, this subjectivity may seem disconcerting if one considers the purpose of translation to connect cultures and establish shared appreciation for a text. When asked whether she thinks the translators had that intercultural goal in mind, Kesrouany argues that they did the opposite, “highlighting the differences between the places [Europe and Egypt] in a rich way.”

In fact, two of the translators — Muhammad Husayn Haykal and Taha Husayn — are accused of being colonialist. Their critics saw Haykal and Husayn as placing Western culture on a pedestal, vis-à-vis the Egyptian culture. From their pronouncements, Haykal and Husayn are undeniably self-Orientalizing; however, Kesrouany argues that their translations are evidence that they had a much more nuanced understanding of the relationship between East and West.

Further, some translations betray the culture that produces the original text; some of the translations contain very clear “in-your-face” critiques of British and French cultures. These translations found themselves in a power struggle, with the European culture being more powerful than their own, and therefore, for Kesrouany, the translators sought to “have a conversation” with the foreign European culture to understand it and see how they can borrow from that which is not theirs without effacing that which is theirs. Therefore, the translation projects that her four translators participated in had a different purpose from translation nowadays, which is to bridge gaps between cultures.

“Some translations are literal — that doesn’t mean that they’re good,” she says, smiling, “or that they’re bad.” But she agrees that no matter how literal a translator tries to be, writing in a different language creates different connotations, references and imaginations.

Referencing the translation from Arabic to English, Kesrouany believes that Arabic, especially classical Arabic, does not get enough exposure. One issue she identifies is Arabic’s difficulty, “everyone says it’s so difficult to translate,” she says. But she continues, “and that’s not incorrect, but so is Chinese, and it’s fared better,” identifying a second problem: the politics and a “lack of desire to engage with the tradition.”

While modern Arabic texts come in familiar forms such as the novel — and so are much easier to engage with and translate into other languages — classical Arabic texts come in alien forms, making the texts more difficult to confront and so engage with. She says, “Edward Said once called Arabic literature “embargoed literature,” and I would agree.”

Kesrouany makes a point to contextualize her theoretical spiel. She references Mounir Baalbaki’s translation to Arabic of Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities.” Baalbaki — who also wrote “Qamus Al-Mawrid,” an Arabic-English dictionary — saturates the translation with footnotes, attempting to “contain” the original meaning. But he simply cannot achieve that, for the English and the Arabic don’t exist in the same way; the historical memory of the French revolution, for instance, is not the same across cultures.

For Kesrouany, good translations embrace the fact that the language cannot be contained. Good translations enrich the new language, and inform the original as well.