From Publishers Weekly:
The Arabian Nights (also known as One Thousand and One Nights) is a collection of centuries-old stories originating in the Arab world that has traveled far and wide and had an enduring influence on global literature. The captivating tales tell of merchants, treasures, voyages, and adventure, and of thieves, slavery, lust, and violence, all tied together by the storyteller Scheherazade, the princess who famously uses the power of these narratives to delay her own death sentence. This masterpiece of the Islamic Golden Age has been a pervasive force in the cultural imagination, creating a reference point for “Arabian” storytelling that has endured for generations, and is in many ways still the best-known work of Arabic literature.
Yet in my view, the secret to Arabian Nights’ fame is not only in the interweaving plots, fantasies, and illusions of its narratives but also in the fact of its retelling. These tales passed from storytellers and travelers throughout history and around the world, surfacing in texts from Chaucer to Shakespeare, before being published in French in the 18th century and rewritten by authors and scholars in many languages ever since. When we speak of the Arabian Nights and its success, we are celebrating not only the power of exceptional storytelling but the power of translation.
The Arab world is a mosaic of countries and creativity, yet perceptions from the outside are all too often filtered through the lens of current affairs: discussions of conflict, politics, and natural resources can come together to present a distorted picture of the region. But as the director of a leading prize for Arabic writing, I am acutely aware that the ideas, innovation, and myriad voices coming out of this part of the world are multifaceted, diverse, and deserving of an audience.
Over the four years I have been director of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award, I have had the pleasure of witnessing the honoring of some of the finest pieces of modern writing in Arabic literature and the humanities. However, many of the honored authors—such as Hussein Al Mutawwa, Ahmed Al Qarmalawy, Abbas Beydoun—are not known outside the Arab world.
. . . .
In recent years, literary prizes have become drivers of translation, recognizing the urgent need to celebrate Arabic literature of quality and ensure it is shared with the world. In 2018, we launched the Sheikh Zayed Book Award Translation Fund, in recognition of the active role of translation in fostering cultural communication and in promoting the diversity of Arabic literature internationally. By providing grants for foreign publishers to translate our winning titles, we are able to share stories that represent the differences in our culture, history, and experience but that transcend cultural differences to locate what is universal.
Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly
Saudi Aramco is the worlds largest oil company. It operates completely in English. It was founded by five American companies in the Thirties, but they were 100% bought out in the Eighties. Until the very recent partial IPO, it was 100% owned by the Saudi government.
You couldn’t order an Arabic word processor without permission from a VP. I never saw a single Arabic keyboard.
I would love to see more work in translation, from the Arab world and elsewhere.
Amazon’s First Reads has been featuring a translated book practically every month.
Scandinavian mysteries on occasion, stories about surviving WWII and the post war era are common. A couple of french titles have made the program.
Those are “free”.
For pay they have thousands.
No sure I have seen any from arab lands but I recall a couple of turkish and iranian titles in First Reads.
Apropos of turkish writers, there was a recent piece here extolling the rise of turkish telenovelas as proof of diversity ascendant and “new voices”. I practically hurt myself laughing. Obviously the author hadn’t actually seen any such. Or ads for them.
The operative word is telenovela, not turkish. The cast is uniformly light caucasian, the depicted world purely secular, and the themes are old school mexican telenovela: poor but honest young girl, troubled rich boy from a corrupt crime-linked family. Gritty domestic violence and runaway wives are a common innovation. This should surprise nobody because the shows are produced as domestic substitutes for the ever popular mexican telenovelas (especially the glitzy ones filmed in Florida) and have found a market as a cheaper substitute outside Turkey. Nary a hint of the increasingly islamist culture of Turkey.
The point is any translated book (or dubbed TV series) to make its way west will be expected to have commercial appeal to western audiences. Or, worse, what the author thinks will appeal to western audiences. Writing to market. Don’t expect deep insights into the native cultural mindset.
FWIW: anybody interested in sampling dubbed Turkish telenovelas can watch the free wia NBCUniversals TELEMUNDO.
The website of their Puerto Rico station live streams their daily programming.
Viewable anywhere, apparently.
I was surprised to see it this early but it trends are that cable TV will be fading over time and the local afiliates will be forced into live streaming like this. CBS is already setting up a bunch of streaming apps for their local news operations. Two thirds of the US is already watching streaming video and that is before STARLINK. Content disruption is accelerating beyond publishing.
We might start by looking at how much is actually published in the Arab world. And nobody deserves an audience.
I have read (second-hand) that as many books are translated into Spanish each year as have been translated into Arabic from the ninth century to the present day. (The source for this statement is said to be a U.N. report on human development in the Arab countries; if so, it is unlikely to reflect any bias against Arabs on the part of the authors.) It almost looks as if the Arab literati are not part of the world’s literary conversation and don’t want to be. Why should the world listen to people who won’t listen back?
Mind you, it doesn’t help matters that ‘Arabic’ is no longer a single language, but a congeries of dialects, some not mutually comprehensible, connected only by a common substrate of Classical Arabic as found in the text of the Koran. Never mind translating Arabic works into English; as far as I know, they are not often translating them between dialects of Arabic. At the moment, if Arabs want to engage with cultures outside their own borders, they have to do so in a foreign language. This is true whether they are readers or writers.
In fact, a major reason why so few modern books are translated from Arabic to English may be that many of the best Arab writers are writing in English to begin with, because that’s the easiest way to reach the whole Arab audience.
I remember that UN report. And I agree, this isn’t a problem that Western literati are going to solve, because it’s rooted in the Arab world. The home-grown Sheik Zayed Award could be one solution to the translation problem, and I wish the OP luck.
But I suspect you’re correct that Arab writers are likely just skipping to the “write in English” step rather than going with the “wait for the translation” step. Likely that will prove to be the more effective option.
Wikipedia has a (semi-dated) ranking.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_per_year
Saudi Arabia is listed at under 3000. Jordan barely 500.
If you expand it to “islamic world”, you get Malaysia at 15,000 in 2015. Down from 20,000 in 2013.
The problem with these kinds of listings is they don’t distinguish. Textbooks and entertainment are counted equally.
My suspicion is that the bulk of translation into arabic are textbooks.
I doubt there is much demand in those lands for western litfic about the midlife crisis of english lit professors or coming of age in 60’s Broooklyn. Might as well be fantasy about aliens near Arcturus to them.