Naguib Mahfouz: A Western and Eastern Cage of Female Entrapment ...

It is, however, the idiom which the translators use uniformly for every character and every situation” (188). Translations from Arabic to English present more than such problems with idiomatic expressions. One of the major obstacles for translators defeats them entirely—namely, according to El-Enany, “the high, religious content of everyday spoken Arabic—something without parallel in modern secularized English” (188). For instance, a word such as inshallah—meaning “if God wills it”—is used in almost every conversation between Muslims. Through the years, the term has lost meaning through overuse, and today, as a result, many Arabs claim that people use the term as an excuse for being late or for not having kept a promise. Instead of taking responsibility for being late for a meeting or an engagement, it is common to mouth the words, ‘God has willed it’—that is the reason for the tardiness. There exists an “omnipresence in the Arabic tongue,” asserts El-Enany. In a regular Arabic greeting such as salam allaykum, the greeter uses the word of God as a blessing on the one being greeted. This is reciprocated with allaykum asalam, another blessing using God’s name. The religious nature of the Arabic language poses major problems for accurate translations. These problems are compounded by the “dismissive attitude toward Arab cultural politics,” notes Hosam Aboul-Ela in “The Writer Becomes Text” who cites two situations. First, John Rodenbeck voices his complaint that “the trouble with most modern Arabic literature is that it’s always about politics.” Second, Edward Said relates a conversation in 1980 when “upon asking a powerful New York publisher why he had ignored Said’s suggestion that he commission new translations of Naguib Mahfouz’s master- works, the publisher responded that ‘Arabic is a controversial language’” (qtd. in Aboul-Ela, 341).

When discussing translation problems, it should be noted that non-Arabic researchers may be discouraged from writing a competent textual analysis of Mahfouz’s works because of limitations posed by translation issues. For instance, there is no access to non-English sources, and the only way to read any of Mahfouz’s original novels requires the ability to read Arabic. Many of the critical works on Mahfouz have yet to be translated into English although most of his novels have been—with various degrees of success.