ABSTRACT
Ibrahim role of mediating between different people and civilizations by “living through” Hugo was a connective one which could only be experienced by Hafez in its own time. The reason was due to decallage on two levels: the first between words of the nineteenth century in French and Arabic, and the second between levels of literary/political awareness of Hugo’s readerships and the Arabic readerships of Ibrahim several decades later. Ibrahim’s modes of translation initially appear akin to a politics of translator-writer “simpatico” described by Venuti, as a translator’s shared sense of “common sensibility” with the author increasing “the fidelity of the translated text to the original” —but considerably reconfigured and reconfigurable by the politics of the Nahda and Ibrahim’s own experience of language and translation. In other words, the personal ideology of the translator should not exclude emergent readerships in Egypt in dire need of new relevant ideas in order to imagine differently.
