Jabra Ibrahim Jabra
Encyclopedia
Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (Arabic: جبرا ابراهيم جبرا) was a Palestinian
author
of Syriac-Orthodox origin born in Bethlehem
at the time of the British Mandate. Educated in Jerusalem and, later, at Cambridge University, he settled in Iraq
following the events of 1948.
Poet, novelist, translator and literary critic, he has also translated some English works into Arabic
, including James Frazer
's The Golden Bough and some of the work of T. S. Eliot
. He has produced around 70 books consisting of novels and translated material, and his own work has been translated into more than twelve languages.
is to enlighten the Arab audience with the creative works of world known authors. Jabra's translated texts to Arabic, excluding the Shakespearians, were relatively limited. He translated Samuel Beckett
's Waiting for Godot
which had a vast impact on the theater in general, specifically on the frivolous theater genre
. This play had also aroused numerous intellectual questions regarding the positive and the metaphysical realities.
Jabra, being the first among Arab intellectual pioneers, supports modernity
. He is the only author to translate William Faulkner
's The Sound and the Fury
and in the introduction he concluded his point of view on Faulkner's complicated works. He deconstructed the novel
to make it more comprehensible to most audiences who find difficulties in understanding it. Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani
's All that's left to you was influenced by Jabra's translation of this novel. Jabra also translated 12 American and English novels and mounted them in one book named “July without Rain” including a glossary about each author. In addition, he had a great passion for prose dedicated to children, therefore, he translated two of the most famous literary works that of Oscar Wilde
's The Happy Prince and Other Tales, and French novelist La Fontaine's story collection. The common feature of Jabra's translated works is philosophical and creativity. Some other works that he translated are: Pre-Philosophy by Henry Frankfurt and Others; Sight and Insights by Alexander Elliot; The Author and His Profession by 10 American critics; The Life in Drama by Eric Bentley
; The Myth and the Symbol by several critics; Axel's Castle
by Edmund Wilson
; Articles by 14 American critics about poet Dylan Thomas
; Albert Camus
by Germen Perry; and The Tower of Babel by André Barot.
Yet, Jabra's massive contribution is dedicated to the translation of Shakespeare's works which are equivalent to that of Russian translator Boris Pasternak
's translation. Such works are that of Hamlet
s tragedy
; King Lear
, Macbeth
, Coriolanus
, the Tempest
, Twelfth Night and Sonnet 50.
Jabra not only translated Shakespeare's work but also exclusive studies and bibliographical works on these tragedies such as Jan Kott
's Shakespeare Our Contemporary, John Dover Wilson's What's happening in Hamlet and Janet Delone. Due to the fact that he referred back to previous incorrect fossilized translation, Jabra faced many problems during his translations. Although Jabra added notes in the beginning indicating these errors, he chose to keep the widespread incorrect translation such as that of Khalil Motran
's translation of Othello
s name to Ateel but changed insignificant errors such as the incorrect translation of the name Dedmona to Desdemona. Moreover, Jabra added notes explaining sentences that do not fit the general contest of the text such as Hamlet's mother's description of her son as a fat person. Jabra explained that during one of his plays, Hamlet took the role of a fat person who was Queen Elizabeth
's favorite role.
Yet Jabra could not escape critics such as Gali Shukri, a well known critic in the Arab world
, who implies that in some cases Jabra's translations were not so accurate. And Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus
criticizes Jabra for removing one of Othello's sentences “…the circumcised dog.” In Bolous's opinion, Jabra removed this line because it may provoke the Islamic community. In other cases, Boulus claims that Jabra can not present the Shakespearian spirit in the sonnets. The general reader may sense that Jabra's translation is closer to the English spirit when using parallel sentences whereas Boulus’ translation is closer to the Arabic Abbasite texts.
1. This text is translated from an Arabic text written by Palestinian poet Ahmad Dahbour. http://www.sis.gov.ps/arabic/roya/14/page10.html
1. Tammūz fī al-Madīnah. 1959. (Tammuz in the City)
2. al-Ḥurrīyah wa-al-Tūfān. 1960.
3. al-Madār al-Mughlaq. 1964.
4. al-Riḥlah al-Thāminah. 1967. (The Eighth Journey)
5. al-Safīnah. 1970. (The Ship)
6. ‘Araq wa-Qiṣaṣ Ukhrā. 1974.
7. Ṣurākh fī Layl Ṭawīl. 1974. (A Cry in a Long Night)
8. Jawād Sālim wa-Nuṣb al-Ḥurrīyah. 1974.
9. al-Nār wa-al-Jawhar. 1975. (Fire and Essence)
10. Baḥth ‘an Walīd Mas‘ūd. 1978. (Searching for Walid Masud)
11. Yanābi‘ al-Ru’yā. 1979.
12. Law’at al-Shams. 1981.
13. ‘Ālam bi-lā kharā’iṭ. 1982. (A World without Maps) (with 'Abd al-Raḥmān Munīf)
14. al-Ghuraf al-Ukhrā. 1986. (The Other Rooms)
15. al-Bi'r al-ulā. 1987. (The First Well)
16. Malik al-Shams. 1988.
17. Yawmiyyat Sarāb ‘Affān: Riwāyah. 1992.
18. Shari‘ al-Amirāt : Fusūl min Sīrah Dhātiyyah. 1994.
English:
1. Hunters in a Narrow Street. 1960.
2. The Ship. Trans. by Adnan Haydar & Roger Allen. 1985.
3. The First Well: A Bethlehem Boyhood. Trans. by Issa Boullata. 1995.
4. In Search of Walid Masoud. Trans. by Adnan Haydar & Roger Allen. 2000.
5. Princesses' Street: Baghdad Memories. Trans. by Issa Boullata. 2005.
6. The Journals of Sarab Affan. Trans. by Ghassan Nasr. 2007.
Translations (English to Arabic):
1. Mas’at Hāmlit, Amīr al-Dānmārk. 1979. (Shakespeare's Hamlet)
2. Sūnītāt. 1983. (Shakespeare's Sonnets)
Palestinian people
The Palestinian people, also referred to as Palestinians or Palestinian Arabs , are an Arabic-speaking people with origins in Palestine. Despite various wars and exoduses, roughly one third of the world's Palestinian population continues to reside in the area encompassing the West Bank, the Gaza...
author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
of Syriac-Orthodox origin born in Bethlehem
Bethlehem
Bethlehem is a Palestinian city in the central West Bank of the Jordan River, near Israel and approximately south of Jerusalem, with a population of about 30,000 people. It is the capital of the Bethlehem Governorate of the Palestinian National Authority and a hub of Palestinian culture and tourism...
at the time of the British Mandate. Educated in Jerusalem and, later, at Cambridge University, he settled in Iraq
Iraq
Iraq ; officially the Republic of Iraq is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert....
following the events of 1948.
Poet, novelist, translator and literary critic, he has also translated some English works into Arabic
Arabic language
Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
, including James Frazer
James Frazer
Sir James George Frazer , was a Scottish social anthropologist influential in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion...
's The Golden Bough and some of the work of T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
. He has produced around 70 books consisting of novels and translated material, and his own work has been translated into more than twelve languages.
Translated works of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra1
The motive behind Jabra Ibrahim Jabra's translation project and literary criticismLiterary criticism
Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...
is to enlighten the Arab audience with the creative works of world known authors. Jabra's translated texts to Arabic, excluding the Shakespearians, were relatively limited. He translated Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
's Waiting for Godot
Waiting for Godot
Waiting for Godot is an absurdist play by Samuel Beckett, in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait endlessly and in vain for someone named Godot to arrive. Godot's absence, as well as numerous other aspects of the play, have led to many different interpretations since the play's...
which had a vast impact on the theater in general, specifically on the frivolous theater genre
Genre
Genre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...
. This play had also aroused numerous intellectual questions regarding the positive and the metaphysical realities.
Jabra, being the first among Arab intellectual pioneers, supports modernity
Modernity
Modernity typically refers to a post-traditional, post-medieval historical period, one marked by the move from feudalism toward capitalism, industrialization, secularization, rationalization, the nation-state and its constituent institutions and forms of surveillance...
. He is the only author to translate William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
's The Sound and the Fury
The Sound and the Fury
The Sound and the Fury is a novel written by the American author William Faulkner. It employs a number of narrative styles, including the technique known as stream of consciousness, pioneered by 20th century European novelists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Published in 1929, The Sound and...
and in the introduction he concluded his point of view on Faulkner's complicated works. He deconstructed the novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
to make it more comprehensible to most audiences who find difficulties in understanding it. Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani
Ghassan Kanafani
Ghassan Kanafani was a Palestinian writer and a leading member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He was assassinated by car bomb in Beirut, allegedly by the Mossad.- Early years :Ghassan Fayiz Kanafani was born in 1936 in the then Acre , British Mandate of Palestine...
's All that's left to you was influenced by Jabra's translation of this novel. Jabra also translated 12 American and English novels and mounted them in one book named “July without Rain” including a glossary about each author. In addition, he had a great passion for prose dedicated to children, therefore, he translated two of the most famous literary works that of Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
's The Happy Prince and Other Tales, and French novelist La Fontaine's story collection. The common feature of Jabra's translated works is philosophical and creativity. Some other works that he translated are: Pre-Philosophy by Henry Frankfurt and Others; Sight and Insights by Alexander Elliot; The Author and His Profession by 10 American critics; The Life in Drama by Eric Bentley
Eric Bentley
Eric Bentley is a critic, playwright, singer, editor and translator. He became an American citizen in 1948, and currently lives in New York City...
; The Myth and the Symbol by several critics; Axel's Castle
Axel's Castle
Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 is a 1931 book of literary criticism by Edmund Wilson on the Symbolist movement in literature.-Contents:...
by Edmund Wilson
Edmund Wilson
Edmund Wilson was an American writer and literary and social critic and noted man of letters.-Early life:Wilson was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. His father, Edmund Wilson, Sr., was a lawyer and served as New Jersey Attorney General. Wilson attended The Hill School, a college preparatory...
; Articles by 14 American critics about poet Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas
Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 January 2008. who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself...
; Albert Camus
Albert Camus
Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...
by Germen Perry; and The Tower of Babel by André Barot.
Yet, Jabra's massive contribution is dedicated to the translation of Shakespeare's works which are equivalent to that of Russian translator Boris Pasternak
Boris Pasternak
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Russian language poet, novelist, and literary translator. In his native Russia, Pasternak's anthology My Sister Life, is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language...
's translation. Such works are that of Hamlet
Hamlet
The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or more simply Hamlet, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601...
s tragedy
Tragedy
Tragedy is a form of art based on human suffering that offers its audience pleasure. While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of...
; King Lear
King Lear
King Lear is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. The title character descends into madness after foolishly disposing of his estate between two of his three daughters based on their flattery, bringing tragic consequences for all. The play is based on the legend of Leir of Britain, a mythological...
, Macbeth
Macbeth
The Tragedy of Macbeth is a play by William Shakespeare about a regicide and its aftermath. It is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy and is believed to have been written sometime between 1603 and 1607...
, Coriolanus
Coriolanus (play)
Coriolanus is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1605 and 1608. The play is based on the life of the legendary Roman leader, Gaius Marcius Coriolanus.-Characters:*Caius Martius, later surnamed Coriolanus...
, the Tempest
The Tempest
The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610–11, and thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone. It is set on a remote island, where Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place,...
, Twelfth Night and Sonnet 50.
Jabra not only translated Shakespeare's work but also exclusive studies and bibliographical works on these tragedies such as Jan Kott
Jan Kott
Jan Kott was a well-known Polish critic and theoretician of the theatre.Born in Warsaw in 1914, Kott moved to the United States in 1966 and lectured at Yale and Berkeley. A poet, translator, and critic, he was also one of the finest essayists of the Polish school...
's Shakespeare Our Contemporary, John Dover Wilson's What's happening in Hamlet and Janet Delone. Due to the fact that he referred back to previous incorrect fossilized translation, Jabra faced many problems during his translations. Although Jabra added notes in the beginning indicating these errors, he chose to keep the widespread incorrect translation such as that of Khalil Motran
Khalil Motran
Khalil Motran , nicknamed "The Poet of the Two Countries", is a renowned Lebanese-Egyptian poet. He is famous for deep rooted meaning poetry which mixes between Arabic and western concepts and structures. He had written many history tests and translated international books...
's translation of Othello
Othello
The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in approximately 1603, and based on the Italian short story "Un Capitano Moro" by Cinthio, a disciple of Boccaccio, first published in 1565...
s name to Ateel but changed insignificant errors such as the incorrect translation of the name Dedmona to Desdemona. Moreover, Jabra added notes explaining sentences that do not fit the general contest of the text such as Hamlet's mother's description of her son as a fat person. Jabra explained that during one of his plays, Hamlet took the role of a fat person who was Queen Elizabeth
Elizabeth I of England
Elizabeth I was queen regnant of England and Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death. Sometimes called The Virgin Queen, Gloriana, or Good Queen Bess, Elizabeth was the fifth and last monarch of the Tudor dynasty...
's favorite role.
Yet Jabra could not escape critics such as Gali Shukri, a well known critic in the Arab world
Arab world
The Arab world refers to Arabic-speaking states, territories and populations in North Africa, Western Asia and elsewhere.The standard definition of the Arab world comprises the 22 states and territories of the Arab League stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Arabian Sea in the...
, who implies that in some cases Jabra's translations were not so accurate. And Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus
Sargon Boulus
Sargon Boulus was an Iraqi-Assyrian poet and short story writer.He was born in Habbaniyah, Iraq. In 1967, he left for Beirut, where he worked as a journalist and a translator. He later emigrated to the United States, and from 1968 lived in San Francisco. He studied comparative literature at the...
criticizes Jabra for removing one of Othello's sentences “…the circumcised dog.” In Bolous's opinion, Jabra removed this line because it may provoke the Islamic community. In other cases, Boulus claims that Jabra can not present the Shakespearian spirit in the sonnets. The general reader may sense that Jabra's translation is closer to the English spirit when using parallel sentences whereas Boulus’ translation is closer to the Arabic Abbasite texts.
1. This text is translated from an Arabic text written by Palestinian poet Ahmad Dahbour. http://www.sis.gov.ps/arabic/roya/14/page10.html
Partial bibliography
Arabic:1. Tammūz fī al-Madīnah. 1959. (Tammuz in the City)
2. al-Ḥurrīyah wa-al-Tūfān. 1960.
3. al-Madār al-Mughlaq. 1964.
4. al-Riḥlah al-Thāminah. 1967. (The Eighth Journey)
5. al-Safīnah. 1970. (The Ship)
6. ‘Araq wa-Qiṣaṣ Ukhrā. 1974.
7. Ṣurākh fī Layl Ṭawīl. 1974. (A Cry in a Long Night)
8. Jawād Sālim wa-Nuṣb al-Ḥurrīyah. 1974.
9. al-Nār wa-al-Jawhar. 1975. (Fire and Essence)
10. Baḥth ‘an Walīd Mas‘ūd. 1978. (Searching for Walid Masud)
11. Yanābi‘ al-Ru’yā. 1979.
12. Law’at al-Shams. 1981.
13. ‘Ālam bi-lā kharā’iṭ. 1982. (A World without Maps) (with 'Abd al-Raḥmān Munīf)
14. al-Ghuraf al-Ukhrā. 1986. (The Other Rooms)
15. al-Bi'r al-ulā. 1987. (The First Well)
16. Malik al-Shams. 1988.
17. Yawmiyyat Sarāb ‘Affān: Riwāyah. 1992.
18. Shari‘ al-Amirāt : Fusūl min Sīrah Dhātiyyah. 1994.
English:
1. Hunters in a Narrow Street. 1960.
2. The Ship. Trans. by Adnan Haydar & Roger Allen. 1985.
3. The First Well: A Bethlehem Boyhood. Trans. by Issa Boullata. 1995.
4. In Search of Walid Masoud. Trans. by Adnan Haydar & Roger Allen. 2000.
5. Princesses' Street: Baghdad Memories. Trans. by Issa Boullata. 2005.
6. The Journals of Sarab Affan. Trans. by Ghassan Nasr. 2007.
Translations (English to Arabic):
1. Mas’at Hāmlit, Amīr al-Dānmārk. 1979. (Shakespeare's Hamlet)
2. Sūnītāt. 1983. (Shakespeare's Sonnets)