Early Arabic Shakespeare translations

This week I figured out which French translation was used by Tanyus Abdu, author of the first published Arabic Hamlet. (Hint: pick up John Pemble's very entertaining Shakespeare Goes to Paris (2005). Then spend three days at Widener comparing half a dozen 18th and 19th-c French translations.)

It's amazing no one has bothered to trace this before. It's common knowledge that the early Arabic adapters/translators of Shakespeare were mainly Syrian-Lebanese immigrants to Egypt who knew French better than English and had absorbed the neo-classical aesthetics of French theatre. It's even known that the earliest Arabic versions of Shakespeare were translated not from English but from French. (No surprise there -- same thing happened in Russian, in Spanish, probably in plenty of other languages. Paris, capital of the 19th century, etc., etc.)

But... doesn't this matter? Every critic and scholar I've seen notes the French mediation, then proceeds as though it never happened. They spill ink deploring or defending the "distortions" introduced by early adapters, especially Abdu and Mutran -- without considering which of these distortions (like Abdu's much-mocked happy ending!) were already present in their French sources. What a waste. Stop seeing it as a simple two-way exchange between Shakespeare and his Arab translator, and the literary argument about textual fidelity falls apart; even the Bourdieusian sociological argument (adaptation to the needs of Cairo's emerging middle-class commercial theatre audience, then pursuit of autonomous aesthetic standards, etc.) can be made in a considerably more complicated and fruitful way.

Brooklyn June 11

Brooklyn June 11 was a lot of fun. The audience was pretty big, and full of people who asked smart questions and seemed really to like the show. So did NYT's Ben Brantley. (And wrote a really perceptive review, I thought.)

Here is also my backgrounder, written in a big hurry at the Asia Society's request. Most of this will be news to no one who reads this blog. Except maybe this nugget:

In 1935, Egypt’s future president Gamal Abdel Nasser starred in a production of
Julius Caesar put on at his Cairo high school. He played Caesar as a liberating
nationalist hero who defeated Great Britain.

It's true! Check Georges Vaucher or Joel Gordon or any good Nasser biography.

Al-Bassam hits New York

Theatre preview capsule by Ben Brantley (NYT 6/5/09)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/arts/07weekahead.html
Winters of discontent occur in even the sunniest climes. The Kuwaiti-born director SULAYMAN AL-BASSAM has relocated Shakespeare’s demonic Richard III to the Middle East, and this bloodiest of monarchs apparently feels gleefully at home in his new surroundings. Part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s “Muslim Voices: Arts and Ideas” festival, “RICHARD III: AN ARAB TRAGEDY,” which opens Tuesday at the Harvey Theater, was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company as part of its 2007 Complete Works Festival. It has now arrived in the States (stopping off at the Kennedy Center in Washington this year) with its message of the utterly contemporary relevance of Shakespeare’s tale of a country raped and paralyzed by a charismatic sociopath. Mr. Bassam has written that “Richard III” has always fascinated him more as history than tragedy. The emphasis in his production, set in an unnamed Gulf emirate, is accordingly less on the psychology than the society of the crookback who would be king (who first appears under the name of Emir Gloucester, if you please). He is, Mr. Bassam says, “the twisted child of a demented history.” Arab music and ritual infuse this “Richard III,” which is performed in Arabic with English titles and seems guaranteed to summon images of the reign of Saddam Hussein and its chaotic aftermath. Tuesday through Friday, 651 Fulton Street, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, (718) 636-4100, bam.org; $25 to $45.
[Will I see BB at the show? Will be sure to keep you posted. -ML]

Village Voice previews Al-Bassam's RIII

Al-Bassam's Richard III: An Arab Tragedy will be at BAM in New York next week. Check out this brief piece by Alexis Sokolsky in their summer theatre preview. (I'm quoted!)

My review of CIFET

Just out in the new PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art
https://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/performing_arts_journal/v031/31.2.litvin.html

War Stories, Language Games, and Struggle for Recognition
Located on the Nile Corniche, the Semiramis Intercontinental Hotel reveals only a picture-window slice of Cairo. Guests of this year's Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theatre (CIFET) entered a security fortress: concrete barriers, bomb-sniffing dogs, metal detectors, and handbag searches. Inside, the cappuccinos were perfect; the sunset, through a double filter of pollution and tinted glass, looked magical. Some visitors wondered if this wasn't too sumptuous a place for the Egyptian Ministry of Culture to lodge the foreign guests it had invited for the festival's accompanying three-day seminar on "Challenges Facing the Independent Theatre and Threats to Its Survival." Having lived for a year (2001-2002) as a student in a rooftop flat in downtown Cairo, listening to a constant din of mosque loudspeakers and taxi horns, I appreciated the change of scene that came with being an invited seminar...

More in
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art - Volume 31, Number 2, May 2009 (PAJ 92), pp. 65-71
Volume 31, Number 2, May 2009 (PAJ 92) The MIT Press. 20th Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theatre , Cairo, Egypt, October 10-20, 2008.

Al-Bassam's RIII plays in the Gulf

Sulayman Al-Bassam speaks to The National (Abu Dhabi) ahead of the UAE performance of Richard III: An Arab Tragedy. http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090319/ART/799109576/1042/SPORT

Some nice bits:

I think one of the good things about the piece is that you don’t need to
know Shakespeare to appreciate it. I think a lot of people in the Arab world
have never come across Richard III,” says al Bassam.

Really? It would be interesting to ask an audience member who has never heard the plot of Shakespeare's Richard III what s/he got out of Al-Bassam's play. I think it would lose a lot of its depth without the York/Lancaster background.

Richard III: An Arab Tragedy is hardly the first reimagining of Shakespeare’s
popular play. The Elizabethan tale of unbridled power lust has been set in Nazi
Germany, in a crime-ridden American ghetto and even rendered in Japanese
animation, or manga, as a graphic novel. This, however, is the first time that
Richard III speaks in Arabic while in the contemporary Arabian Gulf, and al
Bassam worked with a number of writers and a poet who specialises in Bedouin
verse to get the cadence of the English adapted into Arabic. He says his focus
was capturing the rhythm, if not the word-by-word translation, of Shakespearean
verse.

The claims for the novelty and cultural representativeness of this adaptation have been scaled down over the past two years, I'm glad to report.

Because of its bilingual presentation, Richard III: An Arab Tragedy can seem
at times to be two plays in one. “For the Arab audiences, they are much more
tuned into the comedy of the piece and there is a quite comic element. So
the satirical elements come out a lot more clearly when we play to Arab
audiences,” says al Bassam. “Some of the western audiences, because of their
unfamiliarity with the culture that is being presented, they are a little
bit shy of laughing.”

This is a great point. They're shy (and so they should be! Isn't this hesitation before laughing at stereotypes of the other exactly what our post-Saidian culturally sensitive university teaching strives to inculcate?), and they can't always distinguish what's meant as satire from what's meant as straight documentary presentation of cultural facts. Which is not their fault. But it's a fact.

Hard not to feel that Sulayman has gotten a lot savvier about the way the same piece plays to different audiences. Well, 35 performances in nine (or is it more?) countries would do that for you.

Call for Papers - Arab Shakespeare in Prague, July 2011

Rafik Darragi and I are co-convening this seminar at the next WSC. Co-conspirators welcome. Prague should be lovely... Please send a 250-word abstract by August 1, 2009 to mlitvin@bu.edu.

CALL FOR PAPERS
9th World Shakespeare Congress
Prague, July 17-21, 2011

Seminar: Shakespeare on the Arab Stage

In many Arab countries, top directors and playwrights have appropriated Shakespearean characters and/or plots to produce original theatrical works. Their plays range from parody and pastiche to metatheatrical reflection, political satire, and even tragedy. Such work is now gaining prominence in the West as well as in the Arab world. For instance, an Iraqi dramatist’s adaptation of Hamlet received a rehearsed reading at the 8th World Shakespeare Congress in 2006. The same year, an “Arab” version of Richard III was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, later touring to several European countries and the United States.
Building on the enthusiasm and questions sparked by the Arab Shakespeare panel at the previous World Shakespere Congress (Brisbane, 2006), this seminar will explore the diverse dramatic adaptations of Shakespeare that have flourished in the Arab world in recent years. Participants are invited to:

• Analyze one or more Arab/ic productions or adaptations of Shakespeare plays (19th- or 20th-century or contemporary).
• Consider the production and/or reception contexts of one or more Arab/ic Shakespeare appropriations.
• Contribute to a discussion that aims to develop a typology or map of Arab Shakespeare appropriation more broadly. Given the perfectly naturalized status of Shakespeare’s plays in some Arab theatre cultures and their “foreigner” status in others, what generalizations about “Arab” Shakespeare should be made or avoided?
• Help pinpoint some relevant paradigms for theorizing this young but growing sub-field of Shakespeare studies. In particular: is “intercultural appropriation” a fruitful theoretical approach at all?

Background
Until recently, scholars of “worldwide Shakespeare appropriation” have known little about such work. For decades, the Arab world went largely unnoticed in the numerous edited volumes on “intercultural” or “foreign” Shakespeare; Arab scholars at international Shakespeare conferences were a rare sight. When scholars in the West did bring “Arab Shakespeare” to their colleagues’ attention, they presented it almost as a novelty. (Sometimes they did not hesitate to draw easy laughs by invoking the old joke that Shakespeare was really a crypto-Arab, “Shaykh Zubayr.”) Only in the past few years has this situation begun to change, with well-received studies on and productions of Arabic Shakespeare-related plays. This seminar will celebrate that change and build on it, asking what the study of Arab Shakespeare can bring to the study of international Shakespeare appropriation more broadly.