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

Abstract

The Arabic term ḥāra denotes a specific topographical unit of the traditional Middle-Eastern, especially Egyptian, city. Variously translated into English—e.g., as lane, alley, but also quarter, district, neighbourhood—it belongs to the category of culture-bound terms. This article presents an analysis of its use in the novel Awlād ḥāratinā (1959) by the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006), in which it plays a crucial role, and of how it has been rendered in four translations into English, Polish, and Spanish. The difficulty which the translators had to negotiate when dealing with ḥāra lies not only in its cultural specificity, but also in its polysemy: five semantic facets of this term are distinguished in this study (geographic, metonymic, architectural, social, and cultural/economic), of which four can be found in the novel. A number of occurrences of ḥāra in these four senses and their equivalents used in the four translations are discussed in terms of their semantics and connotations. Special attention is paid to the non-canonical use of this term to which Mahfouz resorted in order to refigure the topography of the Egyptian city and to give the novel an allegorical dimension. In translation, this meaningful alteration is reverted and literary space normalized back into a conventional shape. The analysis shows how the translators have domesticated the literary representation of urban space to suit Western notions, normalizing it in certain cases, but in some others have opted for foreignizing solutions.