Abdelfattah Kilito is a well known Moroccan writer. He was born in Rabat in 1945. He is the author of several books in Arabic and in French. He has also written articles for magazines like Po茅tique and Studia Islamica. Some of the awards Kilito has won are the Great Moroccan Award (1989), the Atlas Award (1996), the French Academy Award (le prix du Rayonnement de la langue fran莽aise) (1996) and Sultan Al Owais Prize for Criticism and Literature Studies (2006).
Here I鈥檓 reading a critic on Arabic literature, thanks to a recommendation, having almost no acquaintance with it on its own. In the opening essay 鈥淚n the Mirror鈥�, Kilito quotes the French Arabist Charles Pellat who, after a lifetime of sacrificing himself to it, came to the conclusion that Arabic literature is boring. Kilito admires the honesty while seeing the tragedy in it. Kilito notes that written Arabic hasn鈥檛 changed in over a thousand years; the literature goes back to the desert, whereas European literature only goes back about five centuries, having arrived much later than civilization. In fact, to read earlier French or English writers (or Japanese ones too), translation within one鈥檚 language is required. Is this Arabic constancy something to be proud of, or an emblem of a larger problem?
Kilito makes an honest observation himself: he feels his language has been robbed from him when face to face with a foreigner who speaks it as well as, or even better than, a native like himself. Where did they learn that Moroccan nuance? An interesting thought when put up against the philosophy that we are just borrowing language when we use it, especially when it鈥檚 our own. I love thoughts like these that recognize the limits of language. Express yourself as much as you want; it鈥檒l only take you so far.
This book makes a fine companion piece to Japanese novelist Minae Mizumura鈥檚 book on the dominance of English language in the world literary marketplace. They are on two sides of the globe, but they are making similar, important arguments:
鈥淭he ancients examined, realized, and used all the rhetorical possibilities, and they even went so far as to belittle and dismiss literature. They talked at length about its falsity and inutility, but they did so within its own framework and discursive norms. It never once occurred to them to look at it from the outside, through the lens of another literature. They never thought that the question of translating it would one day be raised. But that happened in the middle of the nineteenth century. Al-Shidyaq represents a turning point toward the shock of a bitter discovery: that Arabic literature is untranslatable, and that on the whole it matters only to Arabs.鈥�
It looks like I've wandered into another world. Every other review on this site is in Arabic. Nice.