ABSTRACT
Keywords. Bourdieu, Classical Arabic, Doxa, Egypt, Egyptian Arabic, Identity formation, Khalil Mutran, Moustapha Safouan, Othello.
In 1998, Moustapha Safouan, an Egyptian psychoanalyst living in exile, pub lished a translation of Shakespeare’s Othello in Egyptian colloquial Arabic (‘ammiyya).1 The translation, which was published more than eighty-five years after the Lebanese poet Khalil Mutran (1872-1949) published his iconic translation of Othello in 1912, challenged Mutran’s version of the Shakespearean
text in almost all respects. More importantly, it flouted the linguistic conven tions for the translation of tragedy adhered to by Arabic translators of theatre since the beginning of the translation movement in mid nineteenth-century Egypt and Greater Syria. With the exception of Nu‘man ‘Ashur’s colloquial translation of Othello, which he produced mainly for the stage and published in the Egyptian theatre monthly al-Masrah in 1984, no one ventured to pub lish a translation of a tragedy in pure ‘ammiyya since Muhammed ‘Uthman Jalal published his ‘ammiyya translation of three of Racine’s tragedies in 1893. The failure of Jalal’s translations of Racine’s tragedies, compared to the remarkable success of his ‘ammiyya translations of some of Moliere’s comedies, established a conventional practice for drama translators in Egypt for more than a century, i.e. the use of ‘ammiyya in translating comedy and fusha in translating tragedy. The fact that ‘Ashur’s version of Othello went almost unnoticed when it was published as a play script in 1984 confirmed this conventional practice.2
