Youssef Aboulozero, “Sheikh of Arab Translators from Spanish,” Salih Alamani 1949-2019, that he went to translation by chance, as he was originally studying medicine at a Spanish university, but he turned to studying literature, and one day one of his friends advised him to read “One Hundred.” A Year of Solitude,” Marquez said, afterward, saying that he was shocked after reading the novel: “a miraculous language that pulled me violently to its pages.”
It was not a secular shock from the Spanish language, but rather from the novel written in Spanish, and from that shock the Arab culture will know a major translational phenomenon condensed in an individual who alone will be a solid bridge between the two cultures or literature: the Arabic and the Spanish.
Secular translation into Arabic from Spanish: Mario Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende, Jose Saramago "The Portuguese", Eduardo Galeano, Eduardo Mendoza, and other notables of Spanish and Latin American novelist literature.
The importance of Salih Lamani lies in two directions, first: his pure Arabic language, and secondly: his cultural and aesthetic mastery of the Spanish language, and in a second word he did not need an intermediary (third) language to convey from the Spanish, but, as they say, he drank directly from the head of the spring.
Salih AlamaniSalih Alamani published his translation of one of Marquez's novels "The Colonel Has No One to Correspond With Him" in 1979, and in 1981 he published, with the translator Asim Al-Basha, a joint translation of selections from the poetry of the great Spaniard "Raphael Alberti" for Dar Al-Farabi in Beirut, and so, The interest of the Arabs in translating the Spanish novel and Spanish poetry practically began more than forty years ago, and Salih Almani was not the only one who attracted the Spanish to translation. .
competitor
In the mid-seventies and mid-eighties, the phenomenon of translating from Spanish expanded in particular among European literatures. However, translation from Spanish is also a cultural competitor to French, so to speak. Then do not forget the rise of a critical literary current called “magical realism” associated with the Latin American novel in the seventies of the twentieth century, specifically after the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, which seemed as if this The novel in particular is the beginning and news of “magical realism” that attracted not only Arab translators to it, but also attracted to literature written in Spanish a broad base of Arab readers, critics, and writers.
Of course, we know that another “sheikh” of the figures of translation from Spanish into Arabic is Dr. Abd al-Rahman Badawi translated “Don Quixote” in more than a thousand pages of large pieces. This translation was published about 20 years ago, and it remains a landmark in the map of the translational landscape from Arabic into Spanish.
In the nineties of the twentieth century, many poets and novelists left Iraq for Europe in search of cultural and social environments far from the bitter political sequences in their countries, and although the experiences of alienation and exile are always of a dramatic or sometimes existential nature, the migration of these writers is from an angle Again, it was very positive for Arab culture in that some of these Arab immigrant writers learned different European languages, mastered them completely, and transferred the literature of these languages to Arabic. ».
Abd al-Hadi Saadoun obtained a doctorate degree in literature and philosophy from a Spanish university after he left for Spain in 1995. Who: Carlos Bosonio, José Abero, Ángel González, Jaime Khel Biedma, Agustín Goetzolo, José Ángel Balente, Carlos Parral and many other poets and poets from Spain. Abd al-Hadi Saadoun put, or translated into Arabic from Spanish, 66 poets in the form of an anthology, giving them the names: “A tenderness of water that dissipates between the fingers” and “A hundred poems and poems of new Spanish poetry.” In his transparent language, he was able to bring us closer to the spirit of contemporary Spanish poetry in a hundred years ago, and returns This leads to his being a poet. If translation is a form of authorship, as the Saudi critic Saad Al-Bazei believes, then Abdul Hadi Saadoun’s translations preserved what might be called the lyrical-poetic “author” in the spirit of authentic Spanish, and he deserved three honors for this translational specialization that benefited our Arab culture. Well-deserved Spanish: Machado Award for Literary Creativity, Salamanca City Award, and the Medal of Merit from the Arab-Spanish Forum.
One Hundred Years of SolitudeThe second translation experience from Spanish into Arabic was at the hands of the poet, writer and academic Muhsin al-Ramli, who left for Spain in 1995 and is currently working, according to his biography in the free encyclopedia, as a professor at the American University of Saint Louis in Madrid.
Mohsen Al-Ramli translated from Spanish into Arabic, and through his original cultural effort, we got acquainted with anthologies of Spanish poetry in the golden age, and similar anthologies of the Spanish short story.
Al-Ramli’s experience in translating is dual or dual. He also transferred from Arabic into Spanish a selection of poetry by Arab poets, and he transferred Arabic anthologies into Spanish. He also transmitted many literary texts for each of: Nujoom Al-Ghanim, Ibrahim Nasrallah, Abdel-Wahhab Al-Bayati, Muhammad Mahdi Al-Jawahiri Nazik Al-Malaika, Suad Al-Kuwari and many other Arab poets, novelists and storytellers.
In the Maghreb, too, there are those who are interested in translating from Spanish into Arabic, such as the Moroccan translator Omar Bouhashi, who has worked in this field since the eighties of the twentieth century.
left on line
We do not necessarily forget that the peak of the rise of translation into Spanish in its contemporary history, specifically in the seventies, and years before that, coincided with the rise of what was called the Arab cultural left, for which some poetic names were inspiring and serving as icons that the left attached to, such as: Rafael Alberti, Lorca, Neruda, and Machado are Spanish poets. In the Caribbean arc, such as the novelist Jorge Amado, and some poets of Cuba and the Caribbean arc, as well as the international emotional influences of attractive names such as Aragon, Guevara, Mao Zedong, and other names that were and may still constitute an emotional and cultural temptation for the medium of Arabic translation, and the Spanish language was at the heart of This global sentimental milieu is politically and culturally, in addition to what was called progressive realist literature, and much of it is based on Spanish, French, and Russian.
