LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

yasir suleimanfrom the murky arena of public politics in which national interests dominate. Inher contribution, Kirsten Urban explores how these themes are articulatedthrough the encounter of American international politics students withMahmoud Darwish’s poem ‘Indian Speech’ in translation. Using the NativeAmerican experience with the white man – represented by Columbus – as ametaphor, Mahmoud Darwish, the foremost Palestinian poet, injects thePalestinian national trauma into the North American sphere to render membersof the secondary audience more able to understand and empathise with what itmeans, and how it feels, to be a Palestinian coming face to face with Zionistnational ideology. In doing this, Mahmoud Darwish appeals to the humanity ofthe secondary audience whom he enlists, through translation, as members of his‘extended tribe’, a tribe that rejects injustice and accepts the responsibility ofhelping to put an end to it.The interaction between nation and literature in the Middle East is playedout through translation in another way. Hannah Amit-Kochavi explores this byreference to how the translation of Arabic literature into Hebrew was used,paradoxically, to construct, consolidate and promote a Jewish national identityin Palestine before and after the establishment of the state of Israel. In the earlystages of Jewish immigration to and settlement in Palestine, Zionist Jewishnation building, which was in the main an East European creation, soughtinspiration and authenticity for itself in the native Arab as a ‘practical model’that can replace ‘the miserable diaspora Jew with a brave one’ (p. 103). Literaturewas thought to provide access to this model, hence the early translations ofsome pre-modern Arabic literature to Hebrew. Translations of Palestinianliterature into Hebrew after the establishment of Israel were initially made forgovernment organisations to understand how and what the enemy within thinks.Later, translations were made for the literary market. Hannah Amit-Kochaviexamines the complex reception of these translations in the host Hebrew culture,which looked with surprise at the very existence of this literature and its highquality, a response that underlines the gulf between Israel and its neighbours. Inone case, Anton Shammas’ translation of Imil Habibi’s The Pessoptomist, thereception of the novel revealed ‘covert prejudice, as wonder was expressed at anIsraeli Arab’s (the translator) perfect mastery of Hebrew style’ (p. 106), theassumption being that only a Jew can achieve such mastery of Hebrew as theJewish language. To avoid giving credence to the suffering of the Palestinians,or at least to stunt its credibility, Israeli critics assimilated and compared thissuffering to that of the Jews. In this way, Palestinian suffering was, to use acommon expression, ‘lost in translation’.The point was made above that canon formation is always in a state ofbecoming. This opens up the possibility of reinterpreting canonical nationaltexts in a way that challenges and undermines their received or sanctioned— 10 —www.taq.ir