ABSTRACT
Using critical discourse analysis, this chapter examines Hanan Al-Shaykh’s Innaha Lundun Ya ‘Azīzī (2001) and its English translation Only in London (2001), to answer three main questions: how does Al-Shaykh negotiate her position as a British-Arab author who writes in Arabic about Arabs but who has become mainstreamed in the West? How does she navigate her way as a female subject at the intersection of local and transnational dominant discourses on women, in a context overdetermined by a range of deep-impacting factors ranging from the geopolitical climate and (Anglo-American) readers’ expectations, to publishers’ strictures and marketing strategies? Finally, how was the novel further refracted during the process of (re)translation? Analysis reveals a tension between the author’s will to challenge misconceptions, on the one hand, and her need to hold the attention of her Anglo-American readers by addressing them in familiar aesthetics, on the other. It also shows that this tension is resolved in translation through a substantial reduction of the discursive heterogeneity present in the original. The chapter argues that this resolution comes at the expense of the author’s agency and that Al-Shaykh, whose voice has been mainstreamed through translation, appears to lose much of her voice in the process of translation.
