View Cart “Amputated Tongue: On the Potential for Change in a Political Act of Translation” has been added to your cart.
  • Placeholder

    The Political Syntax of the Absentees: A Translator’s Reflection on Stella Maris

    Stella Maris, by Elias Khoury, is the follow-up novel to My Name Is Adam: Children of the Ghetto, Volume I, but the two novels can be read out of sequence, since they do not follow a linear narrative. Each is made up of multiple layers of space and time, entwined with the history and biography of Adam Danoun, as they move in a time machine-like fashion between past and future, and parallel worlds. 

    Free!
  • Placeholder

    The Prophet Nahum’s Prophecy of Doom to His Manservant Mordekhai-Hai in the Year 1941

    Free!
  • Placeholder

    Thirst

    Free!
  • Placeholder

    This Is al-Lydd/This Is Palestine

    I delivered this talk at a meeting organized by youth groups in the city of al-Lydd and held at the Communist Party’s club on Friday night, July 13, 2018, on the seventieth anniversary of the occupation of al-Lydd, and one of the biggest massacres of the 1948 Nakba War, and the expulsion of the overwhelming majority of its residents, and the internment of those who remained in a ghetto enclosed by a barbed wire fence. 

    Free!
  • Placeholder

    What Is Anticolonial Translation? The Form and Content of Binational Resistance in Maktoob

    This essay examines translation as an anticolonial literary form in the context of contemporary translation theory and activist translation practices in Palestine/Israel. Analyzing the impact of colonial paradigms on language, culture, and translation, it demonstrates that Arabic-to-Hebrew translation practices have been used to both instantiate and challenge existing colonial structures. With a focus onMaktoob, the first Palestinian-Jewish translation collective, it goes on to analyze the methods used by progressive translation groups to resist racism, occupation, and colonialism and to democratize the Israeli cultural sphere over the past seventy years. It argues that Maktoob’s unique contribution to this tradition emerges from its commitment to a systemic decolonization of the processes surrounding translation. Binational, bilingual translation, the collective’s working model, combines content-based approaches with formal, linguistic, and structural innovations in translation processes. The explicit aim of this model is to erode colonial effects such as Orientalism, cultural erasure, ethnoseparatism, literary theft, and the linguistic division between Arabic and Hebrew, and to establish a model that promotes democratic cultural participation among Jews and Palestinians. The essay demonstrates the continued influence of cultural decolonization on contemporary literary production and offers new insights into what this means for translation theory and practice.

    Free!
  • Placeholder

    Guest Editors’ Note: From the Neoclassical to the Binational Model of Translation

    Literary translation—whether a branch within comparative literature, linguistics, hermeneutics, or elsewhere in the academic disciplinary maze—has grown and developed mainly in accordance with the European neoclassical tradition. The previous issue of JLS was dedicated to the critique of the neoclassical model’s supposed transparency and impartial representation of the original source, allegedly trying to reach a “fluent” translation of the original.

    To cope with translation from Arabic to Hebrew under the conditions of the present time, the Translators’ Circle in Maktoob proposes a pragmatic model of translation that transcends the comfort zone and is open to negotiation and a dialogical process of movement and wrestling in a dynamic relationship of dialogue. Although the model is fraught with practical, economic, and empirical difficulties, and is not necessarily pragmatic, it relies on the philosophy of pragmatism, according to which translation is not only a textual achievement but also action in the real world, which seeks to overcome the elements of alienation and degeneration of the individual, nationalistic portrait of translation. The translation turns from a metatext, which is placed behind the text and whose function is to explain and illuminate, into a social text, as a basis for communication and for expression of collective consciousness. In other words, and paraphrasing Ferdinand de Saussure’s notion that language should be studied in and for itself, we argue that translation is not only a thing in and for and of itself but also a communication tool, a byproduct of a comprehensive political process. To this end it expands the concept of intertextuality from hermeneutics to sociology. That is, intertextuality is not just an encounter between textual units, as is commonly the case in the fields of hermeneutics, linguistics, and literature, but also an interactive sociological mechanism based on encounter and reciprocity between people.

    Free!