"In a Language That Was Not His Own": On Ahlām Mustaghānamī's Dhākirat al-jasad and Its French Translation Mémoires de la chair

Author: Holt, Elizabeth M.

Source: Journal of Arabic Literature, Volume 39, Number 1, 2008 , pp. 123-140(18)

Publisher: BRILL

Buy & download fulltext article:

Price: $35.00 plus tax (Refund Policy)

Abstract:

This paper argues that Ahlām Mustaghānamī's novel Dhākirat al-jasad (Memories of the Flesh) enacts a break with Algeria's Francophone literary past, multiply staging its affiliation with the Arabic language. The novel positions itself as part of an Algerian linguistic drama that, once translated into French as Mémoires de la chair, is problematically obscured. The press reviews of the novel's French translation serve to reveal, furthermore, that a French readership's familiarity with the significant corpus of Francophone Algerian literature mutes the legibility of the Algerian linguistic drama that Mustaghānamī's novel articulates in the Arabic original.

Keywords: MODERN ARABIC LITERATURE; FRANCOPHONE LITERATURE; ALGERIA; FRANCE; MAGHREB; NOVEL; TRANSLATION; POST COLONIAL STUDIES

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/157006408X310861

Publication date: 2008-01-01